Questions
for Climate Change discussion:
1a. If climate
change occurs as predicted, then much of the polar ice caps will melt. How much
is sea level projected to rise as a result of that melting?
b.
Now consider the social and political dislocation that will result from that
sea level rise. Choose 5 cities that you think are the most important in the
world. Use Google, an atlas, or some other source to find the elevation of
those cities/ What will the effect be on those cities?
c. Let’s concentrate on North
America for this part. Find a topographic map of North
America. How much of the continental margin will be submerged by
the projected sea level rise? Will any large areas disappear? Are any of these
areas of significant importance in commerce?
d. Now consider the distribution of the
human population in North America. If you can
find a map that presents population density in North
America, how much of the population will be dislocated by that sea
level rise?
2. There is an extended history of controversy
about the “hockey stick” model for earth’s surface temperatures during the last
millennium. What are the questions aimed at the model, which suggests most of
the temperature increase has occurred in the last century or so?
3. In the last few months a completely
different type of controversy has arisen. Climate scientists at East Anglia University
in England
emailed each other. Those emails were hacked, and reveal that those scientists
did a number of unethical things: they distributed only censored data that best
supported the arguments for climate warming and they, as editors of climate
journals, rejected and did not publish (in effect censored) articles critical
of climate warming hypotheses. How seriously do you think this weakens
arguments that climate is warming, and that the warming is (or should be) a
serious concern?
References
Question 2:
Mann, M.E.;
Zhang, Z., Hughes, M.K., Bradley, R.S., Miller, S.K., Rutherford,
S. and Ni, F. (2008). "Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric
and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia".
PNAS 105:
13252–13257. (available electronically from the
library)
Question 3:
Booker,
C. (2010) Climate change: this is the worst
scientific scandal of our generation. Telegraph, U.K.
Revkin, A.C. (2009) Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for
Climate Dispute. N.Y. Times