Announcements (26 August 2019)

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe in Fairbanks

On September 9 in the Salisbury Theater, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe will give a talk on “Climate change: cutting-edge science to innovative solutions.” Hayhoe is the director of the Texas Tech Climate Science Center, and has served as the lead author on the National Climate Assessments under the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. She will give a second talk sponsored by the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition on September 10 at the Friends Church titled “Caring for people and creation: the roles of faith and science.”

Course Goals:

This course is designed to endow students with “climate-change literacy”: a basic understanding of the physical processes controlling Earth’s climate today and an appreciation of the varied climate states this planet has experienced in the past. Together, this knowledge strands will give students an appreciation for where Earth’s climate could be headed in the future, both over the short- and long-term.

To accomplish these goals, this class provides a synthetic survey of global climate changes over the course of Earth’s history in conjunction with an in-depth review of the most important physical processes driving these changes. Earth history provides numerous examples of strikingly different climate states, and disentangling the causes of these ancient climates relies on understanding physical processes that still operate in the ocean-atmosphere system. Given the rapid growth of climate-change research and its often controversial nature, an important element of this class is developing the ability to critically evaluate scientific reports and make judgements about their validity.

Upon completing this course, students will have a thorough understanding of climate dynamics in relation to Earth’s long and varied climate history. They will be able to intelligently discuss complex climate-change issues at a high standard of expertise. This synthesis course is intended both for undergraduates in the final two years of their degree programs and for graduate students seeking to broaden their perspectives on climate changes and their causes. It is a capstone course in the B.S. Geography Landscape Analysis and Climate-Change studies option.

Daily sea ice extent in square kilometers for the Bering Sea for each year since the beginning of the satellite record. 2018 and 2019 stand out as low area years while 2012 has extensive sea ice in the Bering Sea.