Acerca de este curso: This class describes the science of global warming and the forecast for humans’ impact on Earth’s climate. Intended for an audience without much scientific background but a healthy sense of curiosity, the class brings together insights and perspectives from physics, chemistry, biology, earth and atmospheric sciences, and even some economics—all based on a foundation of simple mathematics (algebra).
Creada por: The University of Chicago
Enseñado por: David Archer, Professor
Geophysical Sciences
| Idioma | Inglés (English) |
| Cómo aprobar | Aprueba todas las tareas calificadas para completar el curso. |
| Calificaciones del usuario |
Programa
SEMANA 1
Overview
What you will find in this class.
1 videos, 4 lecturas
- Reading: Resources
- Reading: Debriefing Quizzes
- Reading: Explainer Assignments
- Reading: A Supplemental Class to This One
SEMANA 2
Heat, Light, and Energy
A primer on how to use units to describe numbers when describing temperature, energy, and light. Even if you don't plan on doing calculations yourself, understanding how units work will help to follow the rest of the lectures in the class. If you are interested in practicing your analysis skills, using units to guide calculations, there are some exercises in the Part II of this class.
6 videos, 2 cuestionarios de práctica
- Vídeo: Units of Energy
- Vídeo: Heat
- 練習測驗: Optional Problems: How Much Coal to Run a Light Bulb
- 練習測驗: Optional Problems: Comparing Energy Prices
- Vídeo: Units of Light
- Vídeo: Light
- Vídeo: Blackbody Radiation
Calificado: What is heat and how can you warm up something in space?
SEMANA 3
First Climate Model
The balance of energy flow, as incoming sunlight and outgoing infrared, allow us to create our first simple climate model, including a simple greenhouse effect. There are two extended exercises in Part II of this class, one an analytical (algebraic) model of the equilibrium temperature of a planet, the other a numerical model of how that temperature might evolve through time.
2 videos, 3 cuestionarios de práctica
- Vídeo: The Greenhouse Effect
- 練習測驗: Optional Layer Model Problem: How Hot is the Moon?
- 練習測驗: Optional Layer Model Problem 2: A Stronger Greenhouse Effect
- 練習測驗: Optional Layer Model Problem 3: Nuclear Winter
Calificado: Quiz 1
SEMANA 4
Greenhouse Gases and the Atmosphere
The Layer Model above assumes that the pane of glass representing the atmosphere absorbs all of the infrared radiation that hits it and that it radiates at all infrared wavelengths. In other words, the layer model atmosphere is an infrared blackbody, but transparent in the visible. In reality, greenhouse gases are not "black" at all; they are very choosy about which frequencies of light they absorb and emit. This selective absorption of infrared light by greenhouse gases leads to the band saturation effect, which makes rare, trace gases like methane disproportionally powerful relative to higher-concentration gases like CO₂.
2 videos
- Vídeo: The Band Saturation Effect
Calificado: Model Greenhouse Gases in the Atmosphere
SEMANA 5
The Structure of the Atmosphere
The greenhouse effect works because the air in the upper atmosphere is colder than the ground, so that absorption and re-emission of IR by greenhouse gases decreases the amount of energy leaving the planet to space. Here we explore the physics responsible for keeping the upper atmosphere cold.
4 videos
- Vídeo: Pressure in a Standing Fluid
- Vídeo: Water Vapor and Latent Heat
- Vídeo: Moist Convection
Calificado: Model the Lapse Rate and Greenhouse Effect
SEMANA 6
Weather and Climate
Another property of the real world, missing in our model so far, is that the real world is not everywhere the same temperature, and the heat fluxes to and from space do not necessarily balance at any given time or location. This is because the winds in the atmosphere and the currents in the ocean carry heat around, in general from the hot tropics up to the cold high latitudes.
4 videos
- Vídeo: Coriolis Acceleration
- Vídeo: Geostrophic Motion
- Vídeo: The Turbulent Cascade
Calificado: Quiz 2
SEMANA 7
Feedbacks
Feedbacks are loops of cause-and-effect that can either stabilize Earth's climate or amplify future climate changes. There is an exercise in Part II of this class where you solve for a planet's temperature by iteration, and in the process demonstrate a runaway ice albedo feedback that might have led to the Snowball Earth climate state 700 million years ago.
6 videos
- Vídeo: Ice Albedo Feedback
- Vídeo: Water Vapor Feedback
- Vídeo: Clouds
- Vídeo: Aerosols
- Vídeo: Climate Sensitivity
Calificado: Model Sunlight, Albedo, and Climate
Calificado: Extract the Water Vapor Feedback from Climate Model Results
Calificado: Model Clouds 1: IR
Calificado: Model Clouds 2: Full-spectrum
Calificado: Model Aerosols and Climate
Calificado: Calculate the Climate Sensitivity
Calificado: Quiz 3
Calificado: What are positive and negative feedbacks?
SEMANA 8
The Carbon Cycle
Now we shift gears in a major way — away from climate physics (you now have seen its main ingredients) to the emergent miracle that is the carbon cycle on Earth. Not only is carbon the chemical element of life, it is also the means of storing life's energy. We will look at how carbon cycles through the land, the oceans, and the deep earth, going in and out of the atmosphere -- and how that stabilizes the earth's climate.
9 videos
- Vídeo: The Goldilocks Planets
- Vídeo: The Oceans in the Carbon Cycle
- Vídeo: The Land Biosphere in the Carbon Cycle
- Vídeo: The Battery of the Biosphere
- Vídeo: Oxidation and Reduction of Carbon
- Vídeo: Coal
- Vídeo: Oil
- Vídeo: Natural Gas
Calificado: Model the Global Carbon Cycle
Calificado: Model Ocean/Land CO₂ Uptake with ISAM
Calificado: Model Intended vs. Greenhouse Yields
Calificado: Quiz 4
SEMANA 9
The Perturbed Carbon Cycle
On the carbon locked up in fossil fuels and what happens when we burn those fuels. In Part II of this class, you can create a simple but somewhat realistic model of Earth's temperature evolution in the coming decades, in response to the release of CO2 (or in the sudden stop of emissions in a scenario called "The world without us").
7 videos
- Vídeo: Where Our Carbon Is Going
- Vídeo: Ocean Buffer Chemistry
- Vídeo: The Perturbed Carbon Cycle
- Vídeo: Methane as a Greenhouse Gas
- Vídeo: The Long CO₂ Tail
- Vídeo: Why the CO₂ Tail Matters
Calificado: Model Hubbert's Peak
Calificado: Model Kaya Identity
Calificado: Fossilizing a Carbon Atom
Calificado: Model Methane and Slugulator
Calificado: Model the Long Tail
Calificado: Quiz 5
Calificado: Burning a Carbon Atom
SEMANA 10
Looking for a Human Impact on Climate
You have now seen the ideas behind the forecast for a human impact on Earth's climate. The next question is: Do we see it happening today? It turns out that the "smoking gun" for a human impact on climate is the global average temperature record since about the 1970's. In order to interpret that temperature change, we need to consider it within the context of natural climate changes in Earth's geologic past.
10 videos
- Vídeo: Sea Surface Temperature Records
- Vídeo: Satellite Temperature Records
- Vídeo: The Smoking Gun: Warming Since the 1970s
- Vídeo: Paleoclimate and Proxy Measurements
- Vídeo: Tree Rings
- Vídeo: Borehole Temperatures
- Vídeo: Oxygen Isotopes
- Vídeo: Solar Intensity and the Hockey Stick
- Vídeo: Glacial - Interglacial Cycles
Calificado: Make Maps of Climate Models Warming
Calificado: Look for the Smoking Gun
Calificado: Browse the Global Glacier Length Data
Calificado: Model Borehole Temperatures
Calificado: Analyze Recent Solar Intensity Changes
Calificado: Quiz 6
Calificado: Is it Warming? Is It Us? How Do We Know?
SEMANA 11
Potential Impacts
This unit we focus on the potential impacts of continued business-as-usual CO2 emissions. This is also the topic of the Working Group 2 volume of the IPCC reports (the Working Group 1 report is on the scientific basis, which is what we've been studying so far this course). You may find this material distressing, but hang on, because next week we'll go over "Mitigation", which is what it takes to avoid climate change (treated in the Working Group 3 report). Remember that most of the carbon we're worried about is still in the ground, so these impacts are inevitable only if we continue to decide to make them so. In Part II of this class, you can create a simple ice sheet model of your own.
12 videos
- Vídeo: Monsoons
- Vídeo: Vegetation
- Vídeo: Impacts of Sea Level
- Vídeo: Antarctic Ice Sheet
- Vídeo: Greenland Ice Sheet
- Vídeo: Paleo Sea Level Changes
- Vídeo: Water Vapor and Storminess
- Vídeo: Hurricanes
- Vídeo: Extreme Weather
- Vídeo: Ecosystem Impacts
- Vídeo: Human Impacts
Calificado: Water Stress in Climate Model Results
Calificado: Model Permafrost
Calificado: Model Changes in Sea Level
Calificado: Play with an Ice Sheet Model, ISM
Calificado: Short vs Long Term Sea Level Change
Calificado: Find the Increase in Low-Level Humidity in Models
Calificado: Extract AR5 Model Lapse Rates
Calificado: Model Hurricanes
Calificado: Quiz 7
Calificado: Global Weirding
SEMANA 12
Mitigation
The last unit of the class finds us considering the options for avoiding, or "mitigating," a human impact on Earth's climate. Bottom line: I think it would be a challenge that humankind could beat if we decided to. If there hypothetically were no more coal on Earth, our potential to alter the climate would be much less. Finding energy sources in that world would not be an existential threat would just be a business opportunity. The hard part, in my opinion, is making that decision.
8 videos, 1 lecturas
- Vídeo: Temperature Targets
- Vídeo: Slug Theory
- Vídeo: Geoengineering: CO₂ Capture and Sequestration
- Vídeo: Geoengineering: Solar Radiation Management
- Vídeo: Economics of Climate Change
- Vídeo: Mitigation: Short-Term
- Vídeo: Mitigation: Long-Term
- Reading: Survey on Attitudes toward MOOC technology
Calificado: Model Stabilization Scenarios
Calificado: Model Temperature Targets
Calificado: How well does Slugulator do at Slug Theory?
Calificado: Model CO2 Sequestration
Calificado: Model SRM Geoengineering
Calificado: How Many Wedges?
Calificado: How Much Carbon-Free Energy by 2100?
Calificado: Quiz 8
Calificado: Is there Hope for the 11-year-old?
Calificado: Term Project: Explore Climate Data and Models
Preguntas Frecuentes
Cómo funciona
課程作業
每門課程都像是一本互動的教科書，具有預先錄製的視頻、測驗和項目。
來自同學的幫助
與其他成千上萬的學生相聯繫，對想法進行辯論，討論課程材料，並尋求幫助來掌握概念。
證書
獲得正式認證的作業，並與朋友、同事和雇主分享您的成功。
Creadores
The University of Chicago
One of the world's premier academic and research institutions, the University of Chicago has driven new ways of thinking since our 1890 founding. Today, UChicago is an intellectual destination that draws inspired scholars to our Hyde Park and international campuses, keeping UChicago at the nexus of ideas that challenge and change the world.
Calificaciones y revisiones
Highly interesting, informative, challenging and time-consuming course, which has some frustrations when it comes to the exercises. I wish it was still maintained to iron out remaining quirks.
There appears to be no statement of accomplishment unless you buy the certificate.
Very good!
Great course content. Optional exercises seemed to have minor glitches with answers.
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CH
For a longer time I have wanted to know more about the scientific background of climate change and global warming, and I am glad that I finally found the time to do this course. I liked the interactive aspect and the variety of tasks including writing small reports and explanations and reading the ones of other students as well as getting feedback from them. This interaction and combination of learning forms is way more effective than just reading a book, I think.
What I do not understand is the grading system for the final task, the term project. There is a scale ranging from 1 to 10, but you can only give a 1,4,7 or 10. It seems that, if do not get a 10 from someone, you fail the whole course. I don't think that this is fair.