This course provides an introduction to Earth's climate system, including how climate has changed in the past, how it is changing now, and how it could change in the future. Topics include quantifying signal-to-noise ratio for detecting long-term change in climate variables; calculating Earth's energy balance; calculating sources and sinks of carbon; understanding the history of climate variations and changes over Earth's history; quantifying the contribution of different greenhouse gases and human activities to historical and future climate change; understanding extreme weather events in the past, present and future, and quantifying the time to different global warming thresholds given different socio-economic scenarios. Students will be asked to engage in analysis of climate datasets to understand climate processes and climate change. No prerequisites.
3 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
This course provides an introduction to Earth's climate system, including how climate has changed in the past, how it is changing now, and how it could change in the future. Topics include quantifying signal-to-noise ratio for detecting long-term change in climate variables; calculating Earth's energy balance; calculating sources and sinks of carbon; understanding the history of climate variations and changes over Earth's history; quantifying the contribution of different greenhouse gases and human activities to historical and future climate change; understanding extreme weather events in the past, present and future, and quantifying the time to different global warming thresholds given different socio-economic scenarios. Students will be asked to engage in analysis of climate datasets to understand climate processes and climate change. No prerequisites.