Global Climate Change

Course goals

• understand global biogeochemical cycles and energy exchange (radiation balance) between land, atmosphere & ocean with respect to global climate change;
• Discuss the major drivers of global climate change and the feedback loops involved;
• Research a topic regarding global climate change, and present your findings;
• apply models concerning global climate change;
• understand the policy implications of climate change science.

Content

Global climate change is an extremely complicated system to study, and one of the major challenges facing the intellectual and scientific community. Therefore it requires in depth knowledge from many disciplines and their interaction.

This course will focus on the ‘hard science’ of climate change, dealing with the physical and biological sciences rather than the social science components related to global climate change. Examples of such components include the radiation balance of the atmosphere, atmospheric chemistry, ocean acidification, sea level rise and global biogeochemical cycles. We also focus on how anthropogenic action affects the processes of the Earth system, with special focus to those actions that affect the climate directly or indirectly.

• Comprehensive introduction to global climate change;
• Relationship between weather, climate and environmental change;
• Description of the major Earth system components, both natural and anthropogenic, driving environmental change;
• Development of models and assessment of  their predictions for current and future change;
• Discuss how global change is affected by and affects human activity.

• Bachelor's thesis GSS, tracks WC&E and E&R (GEO3-2422).