Earth's Changing Climate

Catalog description

Offered autumn and/or summer. Restricted to students with at least junior standing. The future of our climate from the perspective of climate system dynamics. The course has three five-week modules. The first covers the processes and time scales governing Earth’s heat balance, the basic rules of changing climate. The second module explores climate variability stemming from internal dynamics of the climate system. The final module examines the grand challenge in climate science: constraining projections of future change with regards to feedbacks and uncertainties in climate system processes. Emerging research is highlighted throughout the course on unsettled scientific problems in climate science and the approaches taken by scientists to solve them.