Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast
Over at my Facebook group, GeoClimate, we've started working through all the literature (or as much as we can) on current thoughts in Anthropogenic Global Warming, "Climate Change" and etc. I thought, especially for the non-scientists in the audience, it would be good to find a source for education about the basics of the greenhouse effect, global warming, radiation, atmosphere, etc.,
Well, I've found a good, FREE online course covering these topics, and we are going to be going through every lecture, making notes, and - hopefully - getting some discussion going so we can really dig in and understand these topics. Here is the course:
Prof. David Archer - Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast
It's from the University of Chicago, and it is an entire, full-semester length course Dr. Archer teaches there. He has videotaped all of his lectures, and provided us with models to work with and other relevant files here:
Prof. David Archer - Global Warming Models
Now, I just got started on this late last year when I got pulled away to some other activities, but here are notes to the lectures I've been through so far:
U Chicago PhysSci 134 - Global Warming Lecture 1, Intro
U Chicago PhysSci 134 - Global Warming Lecture 2, Heat and Light
U Chicago PhysSci 134 - Global Warming Lecture 3, Blackbody Radiation and Quantum Mechanics
U Chicago PhysSci 134 - Global Warming Lecture 4, Our First Climate Model
OK so we are going to continue in this vein, and work through all the lectures and models, with accompanying notes, links, and discussions, until we get this entire course under our belt. That should give everyone who is interested to learn about the issue, a good basic understanding of the science involved.
Next article, I'm going to go through Lecture 5 for everyone, and we'll continue from there.
I believe I will be moving most of my material here, to my own website, and off of my Facebook group for the future, so that I have more control over the content and how it is presented. We can still have all the discussions and everything else that FB has, right here.
On a more advanced level, I plan on downloading and reading the entire IPCC report, "Climate Change 2007" which is the most recent full report out of the UN climate panel. It's the one that won the Nobel prize. This is broken into a number of sections, papers and sub-reports here:
IPCC Publications and Data Reports
For the lay person, I feel it may be best to complete Dr. Archer's class before digging into the reading of IPCC technical papers. For my fellow scientists, I think we should be able to start discussing the meat of the IPCC reports immediately and so I will start a separate thread of articles and discussions about the IPCC reports themselves on this website.
