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Home Syllabus Schedule Assignments/Quizzes Reading Material Extra Credit Seminars Projects Web Links Dept. Homepage	ATM S 211: Spring Quarter 2008 Climate and Climate Change
	Project Suggested Topics
	(updated 4/14/08 11:00 pm)
	`Suggested Topics` `Climate of the Present` `Climate of the Past` `Climate Change/Climate of the Future` `Getting Started` `Books` `Sign up for a topicThis link will take you to a Catalyst peer review page. Choose ‘View and comment on a document’. The document ‘Project Sign Up’ will be listed on the left bar. Choose that one. Sign up by clicking on the topic you are interested in and insert your name. Show all sign ups thus far by clicking on the ‘view comments from’ ‘select all’ at the bottom.` `Suggested Topics` `Climate of the` `Present` `1)` `Describe the climate of some state or country using data from the web()` `2)` `Describe some aspects of year-to-year climate variations using data from the web or other sources. ()` `3)` `Describe the record high and/or record low temperatures in some region using data from the web or other sources. ()` `4)` `Describe climate trends during the 20th century` `5)` `Evaluate the Gaia hypothesis (read the book by Lovelock). Also look at ‘Gaia’s revenge’.` `6)` `Describe the economic impacts of El Nino.` `7)` `Seasonal climate forecasting: how is it done? who uses it?` `8)` `Compare climates of the east coast and west coast at the same latitude.` `9)` `How successful are El Nino predictions?` `10)` `Have hurricanes become more frequent in the last 50 years?` `11)` `Compare climates of the east coast of North America and the west coast of Europe` `12)` `Compare climates of the west coast of North America and the east coast of Asia (China and Japan)` `13)` `What does traditional knowledge (knowledge of native peoples) tell us about climate?` `14)` `Describe the economic influence of the Indian or Asian monsoon ()` `15)` `How is climate data used to manage natural resources?` `16)` `Describe the climate conditions associated with dust storms in Africa or China` `17)` `Describe the influence of land use changes on climate` `18)` `Investigate the role of volcanic eruptions on climate` `19)` `Contrast the role of sulfur aerosol and carbon aerosol in its effect on climate` `20)` `Describe how either satellites or surface measurements are used to monitor climate and climate change` `21)` `Describe the United States Climate Change Science Program focusing on the important scientific issues that it identifies` `22)` `Describe the activities in an international research program (past experiment: TOGA-COARE; future experiment: AMMA) and how they relate to climate` `23)` `Desertification: is it due to climate change or human activity (use either the Sahal in Africa or the Rajasthan desert of India as case studies)` `24)` `Northwest snowpack: Is it increasing or decreasing or not changing?` `25)` `Arctic Sea Ice: How is the system changing, and what are the feedbacks that concern scientists?` `Climate of the Past` `1)` `What role did climate play in the demise of the Anasazi, Thule, or other civilizations? ()` `2)` `How do historical accounts of climate contribute to our knowledge of climate (e.g., Little Ice Age or Medieval Warm Period) ()` `3)` `Describe the climate of the Permian/Triassic Boundary and the massive extinction` `4)` `Describe the climate dynamics of the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth` `5)` `Was the Little Ice Age global?` `6)` `Was the Younger Dryas global?` `7)` `Investigate the extinction event at the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction; was it due to a meteorite impact?` `8)` `Investigate the problem of biology and its survival through the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth` `9)` `Effect of climate on the settling of the New World` `10)` `Effect of the Little Ice Age on 19th century civilization` `11)` `The American Dust Bowl` `12)` `Make some simple calculations to show that it is hard for Mars to ever have had liquid water on its surface, in spite of the geological evidence` `13)` `Describe the climate-related thesis in the book by Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel The Fates of Human Societies. (This is a tough one!)` `Climate Change / Climate of the Future` `1)` `What is the expected impact of global climate change on water resources, ecosystems, coastal zones, human settlements, insurance, or human health? (each of these is covered in one chapter of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC 2007) ()` `2)` `Discuss the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change` `3)` `What are the prospects for renewable energy? You could focus on either natural or technical solution ()` `4)` `Techno-fixes: technological solutions for sequestering carbon dioxide` `5)` `Are trends in weather-related insurance claims related to climate change?` `6)` `Shrinking tropical glaciers.` `7)` `Effect of global warming on high latitude climate.` `8)` `Investigate the issue of uncertainty in climate prediction; use the IPCC 2001 as a guide. Relate this uncertainty to climate models` `9)` `Explain why predicting future cloud distributions and cloud feedbacks is challenging? Use the IPCC 2001 as a starting point` `10)` `What are the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC 2001? How could the IPCC be better? (Choose either book on climate physics or climate impacts) (*)` `11)` `Investigate how climate change is harder to predict on smaller spatial scales and how this translates into high uncertainty in climate impacts` `12)` `The Freedom Car: how does a hydrogen car work (in theory) and how will it impact fossil fuel use` `Getting Started` `Your textbook has a lot of relevant information scattered throughout the various chapters, especially Chapter 8, Chapter 11 and Chapter 12. You can also refer to the links below, and do your own searches in the literature or on the web. Let us know if you have any trouble finding relevant references.` `Links` `Review article by Thomas Crowley in "Consequences, the nature and implications of environmental change" http://www.gcrio.org/CONSEQUENCES/winter96/geoclimate.html` `Another starting point: NOAA paleoclimatology program (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/)` `Ice age climate reconstructions` `(http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html)` `Reference list for ice age climate` `(http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/refs.html)` `African Climate and Human Evolution` `(http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~peter/Resources/Climate_evol.html)` `Cultural responses to climate change during the late Holocene` `http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/%7Epeter/Resources/CultureClimate.html` `Books` `Floods, famines and emperors: El Niño and the fate of civilizations, Brian Fagan, Basic Books, New York, 1999.` `The Little Ice Age: How climate made history1300-1850 Brian Fagan, Basic Books, New York, 2000.` `Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate, William Ruddiman, Princeton Univ. Press, 2005.` `The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future, Richard Alley, Princeton Univ. Press, 2002.` `Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond, Norton, 1999.` `The Secret Life of Dust, Hannah Holmes, Wiley, 2001.` `Snowball Earth: The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe that Spawned Life as We Know it, Gabrielle Walker, Crown Publishers, 2003.` `˜`
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