Course Details

Course offered Winter 2010

Honors 221 E: Climatic Extremes

Honors 221 E: Climatic Extremes

SLN 19576 (View UW registration info »)

Paul Johnson (Oceanography)
Office: 256 Marine Science Bldg, Box 357940
Phone: 206-543-8474
Email: paulj@uw.edu
Paul Quay (Oceanography)
Office: 417 Ocean Science Bldg, Box 355351
Phone: 206 685-8061
Email: pdquay@uw.edu

Credits: 5
Limit: 10 students

Honors Credit Type

Cross-listed with Ocean 450 (SLN 16489).
This course examines the earth’s past for evidence of extreme climate conditions in order to help understand possible future climate changes. For example, climate conditions that occurred during the Neo-Proterozoic (Snowball Earth: 750 to 550 million years ago), Cretaceous Hothouse (100 million years ago), Pleistocene Icehouse (1 million years ago) will be compared to the Present Greenhouse climate.

The climate impacts resulting from natural variations in solar insolation, changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, plate tectonics, evolution of vascular plants will be discussed.

One class period per week will be spent in an active class discussion of an important paper. There will be weekly take home problem sets that will demonstrate the quantitative application of climate concepts.

Honors students will be responsible for additional research on a climate-related topic, performed independently with guidance from the instructors. Students will present their research to the class and lead a class discussion on the topic.

LEARNING GOALS
– Learn about the major climate changes that occurred on earth in the past.
– Learn how preserved records climate ‘proxies’ are used to reconstruct past climate change.
– Understand key processes and feedbacks in the earth’s system that controlled past climate changes.
– Learn how human activity has perturbed current climate on earth.
– Examine predictions of likely future climate change.