Global Climate Change
Spring 2004
Course Goals:
Course overview
The climate and how/if it is changing is a topic of cocktail parties, scientific conferences and the popular press. Because of this, and the obvious importance, various governments and agencies have become involved trying to enact legislation. However, what is the best course of action? Who are the people who can advise about this? My claim is that it needs to be informed technical people who do not have a ÒstakeÓ in the research or economic aspects: good engineers!
The situation is that there are many measurements of temperature (i. e. weather) made in the past 100 years, there have been measurements in the ocean and people have inferred temperatures in years past from gas in ice cores, crop records, paintings (no kidding) and other means. All of the methods indicate that mean temperature changes significantly on many different time scales. Causes of the change seem to be changes in earth orbit, changes in the sun output, variations in the various Ògreen houseÓ gases in the atmosphere and differences in the snow cover.
The problem is first that even getting good values of the temperature, that reflect the climate, as opposed to the weather, is a very difficult problem. Second, because of the importance of the problem, there is immediate interest in modeling the climate in an effort to predict what will happen in the future. Third, if nothing interesting were found to be happening in the climate, then research funding would be reduced and the people who study it would need to do something else. Finally, climate change is the ultimate environmental problem and as such brings political ramifications which (as far as I can read) influence the interpretation, if not the actual results.
In this course we will read the texts and the scientific publications and hopefully gain enough background and develop sufficient understanding for students to be able to informed, thoughtful views about this subject.
The course will have lectures, discussions, group projects, literature review by groups or individuals and maybe some videos to watch. We are engineers so we will do some analytical and numerical analysis to strengthen our understanding. We will also look at the models that people use to predict the future of the climate, which are ÒtunedÓ from past experimental data and try to make judgments about if they are really valid. It is here that we find that there is considerable room for bias and overly-ambitious claims. Since these models are then used to predict the future, the potential error is very great.
A useful skill is to be able to read technical papers in a field you are not familiar with and make some judgmental sense about what you have read. We will practice this by reading the current climate literature.
Textbook: Climate Change 2001: Scientific Basis, Cambridge Press.
Week Topic/Assignment Reading
in text
1, 2 The Climate
System: An Overview Intro.
Energy Balance Model Chpt.
1
3 Observed
Climate Variability and Change Chpt.
2
4 Carbon
cycle and Atmospheric CO2 Chpt.
3
5 Carbon
cycle and Atmospheric CO2 Chpt.
3
Carbon Cycle Model
6 Atmospheric
Chemistry and Greenhouse
Gases; Aerosols Chpt.
4, 5
7 Radiative
forcing of climate change Chpt.
6
8 Physical
climate processes and feedbacks Chpt.
7
9-11 Model evaluations;
projections of future Chpt.
8, 9
climate change
MAGICC Model
12 Regional
climate change Chpt.
10
SCENGEN Model
13 Detection
of climate change;
Attribution of causes Chpt.
12
14 Advancing
our understanding Chpt.
14