EARTH SCIENCES AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change is a complex, challenging and contentious issue, perhaps the defining environmental issue of the 21st century. In 2015, the annual average atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (CO2) surpassed the 400 parts per million (ppm). Crossing this level attracted widespread concern among the scientific community because it was the first time in three million years that such a level was reached, highlighting the extent of humanity’s impact. Despite there is a scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is caused by human activity, it is still very difficult for many people not working directly on the subject to understand the basics of climate change.

The “Earth Sciences and Climate change” course is designed to give the students a fundamental understanding of the scientific basis of climate change, considering that these changes are permanent and will necessarily intensify in the short- and medium-term. The history of climate change on Earth will be at the core of the classes, but the course will expose the students to multiple facets of a very interdisciplinary and encompassing field, by exploring climate change from multiple perspectives: paleoclimatic change, recent historical variability, as well as future climate projections.
The scientific basis that will be laid down in this course will allow the students to acquire an appreciation of climate in the fourth dimension – i.e., time - and to gain the skills to critically evaluate the causes of climate change, using rigorous scientific reasoning. They will also be able to understand and interpret recent data and information generated by organizations working on climate adaptation and mitigation.

Course objectives:
• To provide an overview of global climate change, a key issue in the society and science today.
• To focus on the causes (forcing) of climate change.
• To evaluate the natural response times of the many components of Earth’s climate system.
• To identify the interaction and feedbacks among these numerous components.
• To compare the scale and rapidity of climate variations during the geological time with those since the Industrial Revolution.
• To introduce students from diverse background knowledge and skills to active research questions and areas of scientific controversy on climate change topics.

Having successfully completed this course the students will be able to:
• Understand the role of climate change in affecting past, present and future variability in environmental conditions.
• Have knowledge of the history of the earth’s climate, and how paleoclimate studies can help us learn more about the workings of the climate system.
• Understand the nature of long-term change in the climate system and the ways this can be inferred.
• Understand how physical and human processes interact to affect the state of the climate system.
• Interpret and apply scientific literature on Earth climate evolution and climate change.
• Be able to critically discuss the key climatic events in Earth history that have molded the Earth’s climate as documented in the geological record.
• Be informed and competent in discussions about future climate change and natural climate variability and be critical in examining the different explanations of climate change.

The course requires the general knowledge acquired during the first-year courses of the Bachelor's degree program in Environmental Sciences, such as Earth Sciences: Principles and laboratory, Inorganic chemistry and laboratory, and Physics.

This course will study earth’s climate and the way it has changed throughout our planet’s history. The course consists of six main strands:
PART I: Primer on the Earth’s climate system: this section covers the nature and basic physics of global climate and climate change
PART II: Climate Archives: The Climate Record of the Distant Past. We will consider evidence for past climate change on million-year to interannual timescales from a variety of natural climate archives
PART III: Natural climate drivers (i.e. forcings) and the origin of pre-industrial climate: An overview of what controls climate over various timescales
PART IV: Climate response in the geological past: A look at climate variability over Earth history (how we reconstruct what happened, and why?)
PART V: Anthropogenic forcing: human influence on the climate system
PART VI: Climate response in the ‘modern’ world (since 1850).

1. Earth’s climate: past and future by William Ruddiman. Macmillan Leaning, 3rd Edition, 2014

2. Introduction to modern climate change by Andrew E. Dressler. Cambridge University Press, 3rd Edition, 2022

3. IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, In press, doi:10.1017/9781009157896.

Assessment strategy will be carried out through written examinations (closed-book exams). Questions will be drawn from the topics and concepts that were covered during the course. Exams will consist of open answer and multiple choice questions.

Formal Lectures and potential seminars on specific topics.
Required readings will be made available during the semester on the course webpage.

Teaching and learning strategies:
• Problem solving
• Case study
• Use of teaching technologies (moodle, video, etc.)

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This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Climate change and energy" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development