This quick video shows an animated bar graph of the top ten carbon-emitting countries through time and their various emissions from the year 1851 to 2021.
It demonstrates the historic and cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide, allowing students to observe clear trends in emissions over the years by different nations.
Teaching Tips
Positives
Students can practice their graph analysis skills by describing the trends they notice in carbon emissions, over time by country.
This video could be a great introduction to discussing human impact on climate and having students generate observations and questions.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should be familiar with reading bar graphs.
The data does not begin at the start of industrialization, but the earlier data can be found using Our World in Data resources.
Differentiation
To dig deeper into this resource, students can review the article about the analysis on Carbon Brief's website.
History classes could incorporate this video into lessons about the Industrial Revolution or world history topics from the 1700s to the present day.
In an English language arts or science class, have students generate a list of questions as they watch the video (watching a few times through or on a slower speed may be helpful). Then have students work in pairs to research and answer one of the questions they have.
This video from Carbon Brief illustrates which countries have been the most responsible for emitting carbon dioxide since 1850 and is up-to-date as of 2021. This resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
This resource addresses the listed standards. To fully meet standards, search for more related resources.
Science
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-4. Construct an argument supported by evidence for how increases in human population and per-capita consumption of natural resources impact Earth’s systems.
