Introducing key theoretical and data analysis tools in computational physics via Earth's temperature and climate

This paper presents two thematically linked activities focused on temperature, climate, and climate change that can be used as engaging ways to introduce students to computational techniques. The first activity makes use of a non-equilibrium Earth undergoing climate change to introduce students to numerical solutions to differential equations via an ordinary first-order differential equation. This activity also introduces the concept of a toy model, and the important ideas of simulation validation and convergence. The second activity gives students several decades of local temperature data sampled hourly, introducing them to model fitting messy, real-world data, while also allowing them to see the effect of climate change. The amount of scaffolding for each activity is flexible, allowing instructors to adapt these activities to classes at advanced, intermediate, and even introductory levels.