Announcements

• Fri, Feb 17, 2012:We decided yesterday to extend the deadline for assignment 2. It's now due on Tuesday morning (21st Feb).
• Fri, Feb 10, 2012: Good news: We have the seminar room BA5256 on Tuesday next week after all, and also for the rest of the term.
• Fri Jan 27, 2012: You can now add photos of yourselves (avatars) to the blog.
• Wed Jan 25, 2012: Thursday's class will also be held in BA5256
• Monday Jan 23, 2012: As I mentioned in class, Accessibility services are looking for volunteer note takers for this course - please consider volunteering. Also, feel free to post your class notes to the blog!
• Friday Jan 20, 2012: Our Tuesday Seminars will be moving to a different room from next week: BA5256.
• Monday Jan 9, 2012: Draft course outline posted. Comments welcome!.

About the Course

This course will examine the role of computers and software in understanding climate change. We will explore the use of computer models to build simulations of the global climate, including a historical view of the use of computer models to understand weather and climate, and a detailed look at the current state of computer modelling, especially how global climate models are tested, what kinds of experiments are performed with them, how scientists know they can trust the models, and how they deal with uncertainty. The course will also explore the role of computer models in helping to shape society’s responses to climate change, in particular, what they can (and can’t) tell us about how to make effective decisions about government policy, international treaties, community action and the choices we make as individuals.

The course will take a cross-disciplinary approach to these questions, looking at the role of computer models in the physical sciences, environmental science, politics, philosophy, sociology and economics of climate change. However, students are not expected to have any specialist knowledge in any of these fields prior to the course.

General Course Resources

• Course Information Sheet
• Our Course blog (and a direct link to the login screen)
• Steve's blog
• General info on 199 courses from Arts and Science
• The A&S Communication Cafes might be useful for anyone needing to practice their communication skills
• How to avoid plagiarism (a computer science perspective)
• How to avoid plagiarism (a faculty of arts and science perspective)
• Old versions of the course from previous years: 2011.

Seminar Notes & Weekly Readings

All teaching materials on this website are available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, except where noted otherwise. Links to journal articles should work from anywhere on campus, via the U of T institutional subscription - let me know if they don't. Please respect the copyrights on all material on this site.

As a seminar course, we can be very flexible in what we cover. I've planned a set of core topics that focus on climate models and how they are used, but we can explore much more widely than this if we like.

Core topics:

Part 1: Background & History

• Week 1: Climate Science BC (Before Computers)
  • Jan 10: Climate science in the 19th Century: Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius, and The Discovery of Global Warming
• Week 2: Taming Chaos
  • Jan 17: The early weather forecasters: Bjerknes, Lorenz, and the basic equations for modeling the atmosphere, with a gentle introduction to Chaos theory.
• Week 3: The Giant Brain
  • Jan 24: The first digital computers: von Neumann, Charney, ENIAC and the first general circulation model

Part 2: What do we know, and how do we know it?

• Week 4: Any Questions?
  • Jan 31: What kinds of questions can we answer with the models? Plus a broader look at the role of science and politics in resolving key questions about climate change.
• Week 5: Planetary Boundaries
  • Feb 7: How are we affecting various planetary systems, and how do we figure out what a safe operating space is for humanity? How do policymakers decide on suitable targets for climate policy?
• Week 6: Misinformation and how to spot it
  • Feb 14: Why is there such a mix of opinions about climate change?

(Break for reading week)

Part 3: Choosing and Using Models

• Week 8: Experiments, Models, and Modeling Experiments
  • Feb 28: Experiments with CO2, and Experiments with simulation models
• Week 9: Try this at home
  • Mar 6: How to run a model, plus a look at some different types of model and what they are used for
• Week 10: How good are the models?
  • Mar 13: testing, validation, and doing science

Part 4: What we can know, and what we can do

• Week 11: Knowledge and Uncertainty
  • Mar 20: Can we trust the models? Can we predict the future?
• Week 12: Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
  • Mar 27: What policymakers need, and what they get.
• Week 13: Enough talk, time for action!
  • Apr 3: Managing the Earth's systems - what should we be doing about climate change, and what other tools do we need to be successful?

Additional Topics:

We can include any of these based on interest and enthusiasm (but probably not all of them!). Some of these stray away from the "computing" them of the course, so we might need to agree on some criteria for which ones to include. In no particular order:

• Carbon calculators (and other software for personal/community decision support);
• Data Collection for weather and climate: how the global observing system works;
• Supercomputers and the path to exascale computing;
• Media potrayals of climate models and their projections;
• The role of Free/Open source software in climate science;
• The carbon footprint of computing
• Other sources of evidence about climate change: paleoclimate, observational data, measurable impacts
• Controversy and disinformation - how do you know who to trust? Is there really a debate, and if so, what about?
• How bad will it get?
• Climate Change and other global issues: over-population, peak oil, conservation of ecosystems, international conflict, food security, renewable energy, etc.
• Geo-engineering
• Climate Ethics: inter-nation and inter-generational issues

Assignments

There are four assignments for the course:

1. Research a topic related to the course and write a blog post about it. Due Jan 28th. Worth 15%
• The blog is here
• See detailed criteria for your blog posts.
2. Prepare a 10-minute power point presentation (in teams of 2). Due Feb 17th Feb 21st. Worth 20%
• See detailed instructions on the class blog
3. Design an experiment. Due March 16th. Worth 15%
• See detailed instructions on the class blog
• pointers to example models
4. Final Essay. Due April 5th. Worth 40%
   • Detailed instructions coming soon

Plus 10% of the course mark is for showing up for seminars and tutorials, and participating in the class blog.