Climate Change and Science

"Global Warming" is a cause celebre, but how much do we really know about the science involved in studying the earth's climate? Moving beyond the social and political opinions espoused in the current debate on climate change, this course delves into the chemical and physical forces at play in the arena. This course covers scientific processes used in measuring climate dynamics, among them ozone chemistry, carbon and oxygen cycles, and heat and water budgets. It explores scales and methods for detecting climate change, including analyzing ice cores, instrumental records, and time series. Some attention will be dedicated to "climate forcing" caused by such things as orbital variations, volcanism, plate tectonics, and solar variability.