Objectives:

• become better acquainted with aspects of climate change through critical reading of the literature, supported by student-led discussions

• Close reading of articles from the recent scientific literature about planetary climate change. For this part of the assignment, you will respond briefly in writing to sets of "reading questions" written to guide you through the articles. For one set of articles you will write your own reading questions, to guide other students through the articles.
  
  
• Participation in round-table, student-led discussion of the articles. For one set of articles, you will lead the discussion yourself, along with one or two partners (assigned by the instructors).
  
  
• Researching and writing a paper on the aspect of planetary climate change covered by the articles about which you led a discussion. The paper should be based on those articles, plus others that complement them.
  

• Glacial eras, plate tectonics, mountain building and erosion, and the long-term carbon cycle: "Snowball" earth, Himalayan uplift, feedbacks between erosion and mountain building, and climate change on a grand scale.
  
  
• Oceans and climate: Past, recent, and future El Ninos and climate: the role of ocean circulations and air-sea interactions in climate change.
  
  
• Arctic and Antarctic climate change: Ice caps, sea ice, sea level rise, and climate instability in the high latitudes, where climate is changing at breakneck speed.
  
  
• Global warming and hurricanes: will hurricanes become stronger and perhaps more frequent, and have they already?
  
  
• Aerosols and climate change: volcanic eruptions, asteroid collisions, and human-caused fires, industrial emissions, and land-use changes inject aerosols into the atmosphere—how do they change climate?
  
  
• Evolution of the climates of Earth, Venus, and Mars: The Goldilocks problem: what lessons do Mars and Venus offer Earth?
  
  
• Predicting Climate Change: Global warming and modeling of future climate change; the roles of human vs. natural influences.

We request that you select your first, second, and third choices among these topics. We can't guarantee that you'll get any of your choices, though we'll do our best. The first student-led discussion will take place on Tues, Nov. 27, and the last one will be on Thurs, Dec. 6. Each group of two or three students that leads a discussion will need to make available a set of "reading questions" for the other students as far in advance as possible (but at least two days in advance), which will be posted on iLearn. (The group will receive a common grade for the reading questions it writes.) All other students will turn in evidence of responses to those reading questions on the day of the discussion.

The reading questions that you write for the benefit of the rest of the class will be worth 5% of your course grade. Your responses to reading questions written by others will be worth 10%. Your co-leadership of one discussion will be worth 5%. Your written paper will be worth 20% and will be due during finals week (see "Final Writing Assignment" for guidance).

Final Writing Assignment

You will soon co-lead a class discussion of the topics addressed by one of these sets of articles:

1. Glacial eras, plate tectonics, mountain building and erosion, and the long-term carbon cycle
   • "Snowball Earth", Hoffman and Schrag, January 2000, Scientific American.
   • "Plateau Uplift and Climate Change", Ruddiman and Kutzbach, March 1991, Scientific American.
   • "Climate and the Evolution of Mountains", Hodges, August 2006, Scientific American
     
     
2. Arctic and Antarctic climate change
   • "Meltdown in the North", Sturm, Perovich, and Serreze, October 2003, Scientific American
   • "Perspectives on the Arctic's Shrinking Sea-Ice Cover", Serreze, Holland, and Stroeve, 16 March 2007, Science
   • "On Thin Ice", Bindshadler and Bentley, December 2002, Scientific American
   • "Rethinking Ice Sheet Time Scales", Truffer and Fahnestock, 16 March 2007, Science
   • "Why Is It Hard to Predict the Future of Ice Sheets?", Vaughan and Arthern, 16 March 2007, Science
     
     
3. Global warming and hurricanes
   • "Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones over the Past 30 Years", Emanuel, 4 August 2005, Nature
   • "Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment", Webster, Holland, Curry, and Chang, 12 May 2005, Science
   • "Hurricane Climate Science", Kerr, 5 May 2006, Science
   • "Hurricanes and Global Warming—Potential Linkages and Consequences", Anthes, Corell, Holland, Hurell, MacCracken, and Trenberth, May 2006, Bulletin of the Americian Meteorological Society
   • "Reply to 'Hurricanes and Global Warming—Potential Linkages and Consequences'", Pielke, Landsea, Mayfield, Laver, and Pasch, May 2006, Bulletin of the Americian Meteorological Society
   • "Warmer Oceans, Stronger Hurricanes", Trenberth, July 2007, Scientific American
     
     
4. Oceans and climate
   • "The Evolution of El Niño, Past and Future", Cane, January 2005, Earth and Planetary Science Letters
   • "Is El Nino Sporadic or Cyclic?", Philander and Fedorov, March 2003, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science
   • "Evidence for El Nino-like Conditions during the Pliocene", Ravelo, Dekens, and McCarthy, March 2006, GSA Today
     
     
5. Predicting climate change
   • "Climate Modeling", Schneider, May 1987, Scientific American.
   • Chapter 16, "Global Warming", of The Earth System, 2nd Ed., 2004, Kump, Kasting, and Crane
   • "The Physical Science behind Climate Change", Collins, Colman, Haywood, Manning, and Mote, August 2007, Scientific American
   • "How Urgent Is Climate Change?", Kerr, 23 November 2007, Science

Additional material relevant to these topics has been (or will be) provided in class in the form of lab activities, lecture, and reading assignments from our text, The Earth System, 2nd Ed.

Following your in-class discussion, you should:

1. locate two or more significant additional articles that relate closely to the articles on on which you based the discussion that you led; and
   
   
2. write a 8-12 page (typed, double spaced) overview of the history and current state of our scientific understanding about the topic(s) covered by your set of articles, based on the articles themselves plus relevant material presented in class or in assigned reading. In particular, wherever justified by your source material, you should try to include in your narrative:

1. initial observations/evidence;
   
2. initial hypotheses posed to account for initial observations/evidence (including external forcings and feedbacks);
   
3. subsequent observations/evidence that have confirmed or disproved earlier hypotheses;
   
4. technology that made making observations/gathering evidence possible and led to breakthroughs in understanding;
   
5. scientific controversies and how they played out historically or are currently playing out;
   
6. current understanding and remaining uncertainties.

Evaluation Criteria

This assignment is worth 20% of your course grade. (The reading questions that you write in preparation for the discussion that you lead are worth 5% of your course grade, and leading the discussion is worth another 5% of your course grade. Your responses to reading questions written by others for their discussions are worth 10% of your course grade.)

We are looking for clear, concise, logical, smoothly written, accessible narratives. Of the total value of this assignment, 30% will depend on the quality of your prose. Clear use of words (defining unfamiliar ones); choice of simpler words over complex words of equivalent meaning; well constructed, grammatical sentences; and spelling, are all important. The more active voice that you use (as opposed to passive voice—that is, the use of forms of the verb "to be": "is", "are", "was", "were", etc. to hide the subject of the sentence), the happier we will probably be.

You should document your narrative thoroughly by citing your sources of information within your narrative, based on the author, year of publication, and wherever possible, page number(s). For example: "(Ruddiman and Kutzbach [hereafter RK]1991, p. 68)"; and subsequently "(RK 1991, pp. 70, 72)". (See Chapter 8 of the Council of Biology Editors style guide at http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite8.html for additional guidance about the "name-year" citation system and for guidance about citing Web documents, or consult us for additional guidance.) List your sources in a section entitled "References" at the end of your paper.

Your prose should be your own except when you quote a source directly, in which case you of course must cite the source in your narrative or via footnotes. Extended paraphrasing will not suffice.

The remaining 70% of the value of this assignment will depend on the organization of your narrative, how well it integrates its sources, and (within the limited sources you're asked to use) how well the narrative addresses the items listed above.

If you would like to see samples of past student papers in GEOL/METR/OCN 405 on topics different from the ones listed above, we can provide you with copies.