Chap 1 Climate Change

GEOL6338: Paleoclimate and Global Change

GEOL1302: Introduction to Global Climate ChangeWill WallaceUniversity of HoustonMonday, 24 August 2015Course Syllabus&Chapter 1: The Climate Problem1This course is focused on the problem of modern climate change. It is different from most other climate change classes in that it combines an introduction of the science with an introduction to the non-science issues such as the economic and policy options.

Unlike more purely descriptive courses, it contains the quantitative depth that is necessary for an adequate understanding of the science of climate change.

The goal of the course is to:

Provide students with an overview of recent climate change science, economics and policy Cover climate science in depth. Be suitable for both science and non-science majorsCourse Description2You are strongly encouraged to ask questions and participate constructively in class.

Course lectures, syllabus, grades, and news about class cancellations posted on: Blackboardhttp://www.uh.edu/blackboardLectures3COURSE TITLE: GEOL1302 Introduction to Global Climate Change

CLASS NUMBER: 17046

CLASS TIME:M/W 02:30 PM 03:50 PM

CLASS LOCATION: Fleming (Room 160)

FACULTY:Dr. Will WallaceOffice: to be determined, Science & Research Bldg 1Office Hours: M/W 4:00 5:30 or arranged via email E-mail: [email protected] Phone: 713-348-3036Course Syllabus: http://www.uh.edu/blackboardCourse Info4Textbook

Introduction to Modern Climate Change

Andrew Dessler

PaperbackeBook

ISBN: 9780521173155

Publication Year: 2012252pages

Required Materials

5GEOS climate change

https://www.facebook.com/groups/266153916758531/

Facebook Group with Professor Dessler6Note: Exam dates may change, please consult Blackboard calendar and announcements in class.

Exam #1 18% Monday 28 September 201502:30 03:50 PMExam #2 18% Monday 26 October 201502:30 03:50 PMExam #3 18% Monday 23 November 201502:30 03:50 PMQuiz & Homework 16% TBD Final Exam** 30% Wednesday16 December 2015 02:00 04:50 PM*All exams are mandatory**Final Exam is cumulative and mandatory.Evaluation7The distribution of accumulated scores will assist me in assigning grades at the end of the course, so grades may be curved.

You can see your grades by checking the Grades page on the Blackboard site. The following is the grade system I use:

A93 100%A-90 93%B+87 90%B83 87%B-80 83%C+77 79%C73 77%C-70 73%D+67 69%D63 67%D-60 63%FBelow 60%Grading8You are expected to uphold the University of Houston Honor Code as it relates to all work for this course. I take the honor code very seriously. In no case are you allowed to submit work copied electronically or otherwise from other students or any web sites. Nor are you allowed to help other students on exams or quizzes.Honor Code9There will be no make-ups or late work accepted. Under exceptional circumstances (medical emergency, official university business, etc.) arrangements can by made to take exams at an alternative time or location. Please contact me via email in advance so that alternate arrangements can be made.Make-up Work10Office hours with Professor Wallace [email protected] M/W 4:00 5:30 PMOr by appointment.2) Visit Geosciences Learning Center (GLC)

3) Tutoring with Course TAs:

Abbie Corbett [email protected] Ruixue Lei [email protected] Help11The Department of Geosciences operates a Geosciences Learning Center (GLC) in Fleming 136.

The GLC is staffed by faculty and by graduate students who are available to help students in their studies in the geosciences,

The purpose of the Learning Center is to provide a second approach to the study of the Earth, outside of the classroom-led instruction. We are aware that the study of the Geosciences can cover a vast amount of material, and that the time spent in formal classes is limited.

While available to answer queries on a wide variety of Earth science topics, the major activities of the GLC are aimed at providing assistance to students registered in the introductory classes. The ultimate goal of the GLC is to make learning easier and more enjoyable by allowing a more personal encounter.Geosciences Learning Center12WhatThe Geoscience Learning Center (GLC)Room 9 - Old Science BuildingWhereWhenM 8:00 am - 7:30 pmT 8:00 am - 7:30 pmW 8:00 am - 7:30 pm Th 8:00 am - 7:30 pmF 8:00 am - 3:30 pmWhyWho One-on-one tutoring Computers Interactive learning resources Geology DVDs Minerals, rocks, maps, models, etc. Texts, lab manuals, learning guides Small group tutorial sessions

A chance to understand and learn moreDr. Wendy NelsonDr. Jinny SissonGraduate Instructors

How to Contact Ushttp://www.geosc.uh.edu/undergraduate/learning-center/[email protected] Room 13613Any student with a documented disability needing academic adjustments or accommodations must speak with Dr. Lefer during the first two weeks of class. All discussions will remain confidential. Whenever possible, and in accordance with 504/ADA guidelines, the University of Houston will attempt to provide reasonable academic accommodations to students who request and require them. Please call 713-743-5400 for more assistance.Academic accommodations14Intro. to the Climate Problem What is climate? What is climate change? What is the Earths coordinate system? Why should you believe your textbook?15Climate vs. WeatherWeatherClimateShorter-term fluctuationsLonger-Term Changes

in atmospheric environmentbroad composite of average (or mean) (e.g., temp, press, ws, wdir, condition of a region (e.g., temp, rainfall, rainfall amount, etc) snowfall, ice cover, winds)

Hours, Days, WeeksYears (and longer)

Specific location for specific timeMean state of a specific region(e.g., continent, ocean, or entire planet)16Climate vs. WeatherClimate is what we expect, weather is what we get. Mark Twain

17August High and Low TemperaturesFairbanks, AK

Fig. 1.1: Frequency of occurrence of daily high and low temperatures in August in Fairbanks, AK between 1975 and 2009. Data from National Climatic Data Center.182015 Temperature and Rainhttp://www.srh.weather.gov/rtimages/hgx/KIAH2015plot.png

192014 Temperature and Rainhttp://www.srh.weather.gov/rtimages/hgx/KIAH2014plot.png



222011 Hot and Dryhttp://www.srh.weather.gov/rtimages/hgx/KIAH2011plot.png

232014 Drought

242014 Drought

252013 Drought

262011 Drought

27Temperature Scales

Gabriel FahrenheitAnders CelsiusWilliam Thomson

Ave Temp = 15C = 59FTypical Range = 0 - 30C = 32 - 86F

C = (F 32) x (5/9)F = (C x 9/5) + 3228What is climate change?Seasonal Cycle Most familiar is seasonal temperature or precipitation changes.

Concern of this book is with Longterm Climate Change

American Meteorological Society defines climate change as:

any systematic change in the long-term statistics of climate elements (such as temperature, pressure, or winds) sustained over several decades or longer.

If when we compare climate for one period against the climate for another period, and the statistics have changed, then we can say that the climate has changed.

29Frequency of daily August low temperaturesFairbanks, AK

1945-1975: Mean 7.6C1975-2009: Mean 8.5CWarmer Low Temperatures more frequent, cooler lows less.How important is an increase in daily low temperature of 0.9C?

30Climate System Response

31Earths Coordinate SystemLatitude (North South Location)

Equator: Location halfway between N and S pole.

Latitude: Angle (position) N or S of the equator.

Tropics 23.5 North and South of equator. Approximately 50% of Earths surface.

Mid-latitudes: 30-60 N or S of Eq. ~ 33% of Earths surface.

Polar Regions: 66.5 - 90N or S of Equator. ~ 15% Earths surface.Why is less area between 0-30 and 60-90?32Earths Coordinate SystemLongitude (East West Location)

Prime Meridian : a line that runs from N-pole to S-pole through Greenwich, England.

Longitude: Angle (position) E or W of the Prime Meridian.

Tropics 23.5 North and South of equator. Approximately 50% of Earths surface.

Eastern Hemisphere meets Western at 180.

Why are lines of Longitude closer together in further away from equator?

33Should you believe your textbook?

- Students in most classes accept without question that the textbook is correct. Author is an authority on the subject, the publisher has reviewed material for accuracy, instructor of class (someone with knowledge in the field) selected the textbook.

- However, climate change is not like every other subject. Internet search will likely find a page that disputes almost any claim made in textbook. Your friends and family may not believe that climate change is a serious problem or even think it is a hoax.

- You may even agree with them. This book will challenge many skeptical viewpoints and you may face the dilemma of whom to believe.34Should you believe your textbook?

- Interesting question: How do you determine whether or not to believe a scientific claim?

- If you happen to know a lot about an issue, you can reach your own conclusions. However, no one can be an expert on every subject; for the majority of these issues you will need to find another way.35Should you believe your textbook?

1) Often times people rely on first hand experience about how the world works. Claims that fit your own experience are easy to accept.

- Consider a claim that the Earths climate is stable. In your lifetime climate has changed very little, so seems plausible. However, a geologist who knows that dramatic shifts in climate are responsible for variety of rocks and fossil deposits found on Earth will likely regard the idea of a stable climate as ludicrous.

- In turn, the geologist might be less likely to accept a human origin for climate change.

- A problem with relying on first hand experience about the climate is that our present situation is unique people have never changed the global atmosphere as much or as fast as is currently occurring.- Consequently, whatever the climate response, it may likely be outside the realm of human experience.


2) Rely on your values: You can accept the claims that fit with your overall world view while rejecting claims that do not.- For example, consider the scientific claim that second-hand cigarette smoke has negative health consequences.

- If you are a believer in unfettered freedom, you might choose to simply reject this claim out of hand because it implies that governments should regulate smoking in public places to protect health.


3) Rely on an opinion leader:- Opinion leaders are people you trust, because they appear authoritative or because you agree with them on other issues. They might include a family member or influential friend, a media figure (such as a talk show host), or an influential politician.

- In the absence of a strong opinion of your own, you can simply adopt the view of your opinion leaders.- The problem this approach is that there is no guarantee that the opinion leaders have a firm grasp of the science.


3) Rely on the opinion of experts:- When the relevant experts on some subject have high confidence that a scientific claim is true, that is the best indication we have that the claim is actually true. - This is a commonly accepted view. For example, if a friend tells you that she think she may be sick, what would you recommend?

- Your recommendation is likely to be that she should go see a doctor not just any doctor, but one who is an expert in that particular ailment.

- This is also the view of the U.S. legal system. Many court cases involve questions of science (e.g., cause of death, if chemical causes cancer, does DNA sample match the defendant). To settle those cases, the court will frequently turn to expert witnesses.


3) Rely on the opinion of experts:-To be an expert witness, one must demonstrate expertise in a particular subject. It should be emphasized that one must demonstrate specific, recent expertise in the exact area under consideration to be an expert witness. Showing expertise in general technical matters or in a related field is not sufficient.

- For example, one might consider anyone with a Ph.D. in physics to have a credible opinion about the science of climate change. This is not so. Similarly, someone that is a weather forecaster may be a expert about meteorology and forecasting, but not necessarily about climate. Climate and weather are different things.

- The reverse is also true, a climate expert is not qualified to be a weather expert.40Should you believe your textbook?

3) Rely on the opinion of experts:- Not all experts are equal. Think of a recommendation for a doctor. Dont just pick the first one you find in a Google search.

- For important medical decisions, even finding a doctor you trust is not enough, after all even the most trusted expert can make a mistake or some people may have biases they are unaware of. On way to gain confidence in a particular diagnosis is to get a second opinion. Sometimes even more than two opinions are needed. 41Should you believe your textbook?

3) Rely on the opinion of experts:- Climate change is no different. One approach would be to ask all of the worlds climate scientists what they think and if the vast majority agree on a particular point, then we can have high confidence that point of view is correct.

- In fact this is what has already been done. In 1988, as nations began to acknowledge the seriousness of the climate problem, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed.

- The IPCC assembles large writing teams of scientific experts and has them write, as a group, a report detailing what they know about climate change and how confidently they know it. Having many authors is like getting multiple medical opinions.

- After being written by experts, the IPCCs reports are then reviewed by other expert scientists.42Should you believe your textbook?

3) Rely on the opinion of experts:- To further minimize the possibility that the group of scientists writing the report are not biased is some direction, the scientists chosen to help write the reports are not chosen by a single person or group, but rather nominated by the worlds governments.

- IPCC reports are available from http://www.ipcc.ch

- In addition to IPCC reports, you can also examine reports from other assessment organizations, such as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.43Chapter Summary - Weather refers to the exact state of the atmosphere at a point in time, climate refers to the statistics of the atmosphere over a period time, usually several decades in length or longer.- Climate change refers to a change in the statistics of the atmosphere over decades. Such statistics include not just the averages but also the measures of the extremes how much the atmosphere can depart from average.- Temperatures express in the book are in degrees Celsius; conversion from Fahrenheit can be done with this equation: C = (F 32) x 5/9- Any position on the surface of the Earth can be described by a latitude and longitude; the tropics cover 30N to 30S; mid-latitudes from 30- 60: polar regions from 60 to 90.44Chapter Summary - In our society, we frequently rely on experts for advice on highly specialized or technical fields. For climate change, the IPCC reports represent the opinion of the worlds experts, and the science described in this course reflects the IPCCs scientific views.45HomeworkPurchase Textbook (in bookstore or Online) ASAP.Register/Logon to Blackboard, download powerpoints.Read Chapters 1 and 2.Visit the Geoscience Learning Center and sign Intro. Climate Change Log Book (Before Wednesday September 3rd, 2014).46Numerous methane leaks found on Atlantic sea floor

47Numerous methane leaks found on Atlantic sea floor

By Eric Hand 24 August 2014 1:00 pm

And up through the ground came a bubbling greenhouse gas. Researchers have discovered 570 plumes of methane percolating up from the sea floor off the eastern coast of the United States, a surprisingly high number of seeps in a relatively quiescent part of the ocean. The seeps suggest that methanes contribution to climate change has been underestimated in some models. And because most of the seeps lie at depths where small changes in temperature could be releasing the methane, it is possible that climate change itself could be playing a role in turning some of them on.

Most of the seeps are thought to be fed by methane stored in hydrates, crystal lattices of water ice that form under low temperatures and high pressures. Harvesting methane from hydrates in the sea floor has already aroused commercial interests; both Japan and the United States have embarked on pilot extraction projects. But the hydrates are also significant for climate scientists: This immense reservoir is thought to contain 10 times as much carbon as the atmosphere. The gas, if it reaches the atmosphere, is far more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat trapper. Even in the more likely event that aerobic microbes devour the methane while still in the ocean, it is converted to carbon dioxide, which leads to ocean acidification. Some scientists have implicated runaway methane hydrate releases in the catastrophic extinctions of marine life at the Permian-Triassic boundary, 252 million years ago.48The present study, published online today in Nature Geoscience, is based on data collected in a survey from 2011 to 2013 by the research vessel Okeanos Explorer. Equipped with a multibeam sonar along its hull, the vessel not only mapped the sea floor along a swath off the coast of North Carolina to Massachusetts, but also recorded reflections in the water column. Gas bubbles of methane stood out as a distinctive signature. Most of the seeps were found at depths of 180 to 600 meters along the upper slope of the continental margin. This is the area where the continental shelf rapidly falls to the 5000-meter-deep abyssal plain of the ocean.

So far everybody has been looking at small spots. This is the first time anyone has systematically mapped an entire margin, says Christian Berndt, a marine geophysicist at GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany, who was not involved in the study. It was also a surprise because seeps are typically found above known methane reservoirs, or above regions of active tectonic activity. The continental margin was thought to be virtually devoid of seepsuntil scientists studied the sonar data. They found that there was much more methane coming out than was suspected beforehand, Berndt says.

For a handful of the seeps, the researchers were able to take pictures with a remotely operated submersible. They found carbonate rocks associated with the seeps that would have taken several thousand years to form. But some of the seeps are shallowand are at the critical depth where hydrates fall apartso they could be sensitive to rising ocean temperatures on much shorter time scales, says Carolyn Ruppel, a co-author of the new study and chief of the gas hydrates project at the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. There are reasons to believe that some of the present seepage has been triggered by changes in oceanographic conditions, she says.49Proving that climate change is directly responsible could be difficult, Berndt says. In January, he and colleagues published a study in Science on methane seeps in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of the island of Svalbard, where temperature changes are occurring more rapidly. Berndt found evidence that the seeps there had existed for at least 3000 years and saw no evidence that the ocean sediments had been heating upand releasing methaneon the decadeslong timescales associated with climate change. At the very least, though, he says, the Atlantic Ocean study shows that ocean and climate modelers should start to incorporate methane inputs from many more types of seafloor terrains around the world. We have this extra source here, he says. Not much attention has been paid to it.

Jens Greinert, who heads the deep-sea monitoring unit at GEOMAR, downplays the effect of the new seeps on the atmosphere or ocean chemistry because the magnitude of the releases is dwarfed by human-associated inputs, such as livestock, or even other marine sites. These little bits of bubbling here or there will not make a memorable impact, Greinert says. He is more interested in what will happen as the world warms. It becomes interesting only if you have a catastrophic release, he says.50Deep-sea warming slows down global warming

Global warming seems to have paused over the past 15 years while the deep ocean takes the heat instead. The thermal capacity of the oceans far exceeds that of the atmosphere, so the oceans can store up to 90% of the heat buildup caused by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Chen and Tung used observational data to trace the pathways of recent ocean heating. They conclude that the deep Atlantic and Southern Oceans, but not the Pacific, have absorbed the excess heat that would otherwise have fueled continued warming.

Science, this issue p. 89751Deep-sea warming slows down global warming

52Ice Loss from Greenland and Antarctica Accelerating

On August 20, The Cryosphere journal published a new study finding the volume of ice loss in West Antarctica over the last three years was three times greater than ice loss from 2003 to 2009; in Greenland, recent ice loss was 2.5 times greater than earlier in the 2000s. Study authors estimated the current total volume loss from both ice sheets to be 507 cubic kilometers a year. The contribution of both ice sheets together to sea level rise has doubled since 2009, commented Angela Humbert, study author and scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. To us, thats an incredible number. The scientists arrived at their conclusions by comparing data from the European Space Agencys CryoSat satellite from the period from January 2011 to January 2014 against data from the U.S. National Atmospheric and Aeronautics Administration (NASA) IceSat satellite from 2003 to 2009.

For additional information see:BBC,Study53

Documents

Chap 1 Climate Change