Welcome to HC 441: The Data Driven Case for Climate Change
This is a self contained web site. Canvas only exists as a front end to this website.
For more information about the course, click on the About this Course link above.
Navigation of this web site is as
follows:
The Syllabus Link takes you to the course syllabus that might contain some useful information. More information
can also be found in the About This Course link
The Modules Link contains the table of contents for all of the course content. If at any time you get lost, simply click on the Modules to find your self again.
The Course Assignments Link will take you to where the assignments are posted.
The Resources page has links to various products that we will use through out the term including the
very important link to the Statistics tools that can be used to help with various data aspects of the class.
The links under that page will be frequently updated so visit it often.
Grading of assignment and tests will still make use of the grade center in Canvas
A brief course Introduction:
Climate change may be the defining environmental challenge facing our planet, yet there is considerable uncertainty regarding the overall social impact due to the limited capabilities of existing physics-based models of the Earth system. Most lay people do not appreciate our limited understanding of the physical nature of the climate system and how its components interact and the subsequent uncertainties in overall climate change impacts. Therefore important questions relating to food security, water resources, biodiversity, and other socio-economic issues remain unresolved. Data driven approaches that have been highly successful in other scientific disciplines hold significant potential for application in climate change impacts. This course then serves as an example of applying these discipline based data techniques to the overall nature of climate change. A particular goal is to introduce the students to the volatile nature of climate to begin with, and then to use the data to assess if that volatility is increasing (it is, by the way, and this is demonstrable now with data). The overall goal is to better inform the student of the complex nature of the Earth system and the mechanisms contributing to the potential adverse consequences of climate change as well as identifying, from the data, whether or not any of these adverse consequences is now emerging.
As a reminder that global imbalanced resource consumption which directly leads to climate change also lead to various stages of economic instablility, the following collection of widgets and graphs will serve as reminders of our current trajectory.
