Global Warming
Professor Dennis L. Hartmann
Department of Atmospheric Sciences
TAs: Felipe Lopez-Hilfiker and Chen Zhang
Human-induced climate change - popularly known as
"global warming" - is one of the great challenges facing society in
the 21st century.
If we ignore the problem, and continue on our current
course, by the end of this century the climate changes due to increased
greenhouse gases will be large enough to have significant consequences on the
environment and on civilization. Those changes are essentially irreversible,
since once the carbon dioxide reaches those high values in the atmosphere, it
is likely to remain high for several more centuries, during which Earth’s
surface will continue to warm.
To avoid these changes will require either (i) a wholesale change in the sources of energy used by
humans, (ii) yet to be developed methods to sequester carbon on an
unprecedented scale, or (iii) intentional human modification of the earth’s
energy budget to partially cancel the warming that will result from the
increased greenhouse gases due to human activity (so-called geoengineering
solutions to global warming).
At stake are deeply felt values as well as entrenched
economic interests. When these are combined with scientific uncertainty, it is
not surprising that global warming has sparked a raging, often passionate
debate.