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所在平台: Coursera |
课程主页: https://www.coursera.org/learn/global-warming
课程评论：没有评论
课程名称：全球变暖I：气候变化的科学与建模 课程概述：本课程旨在介绍全球变暖的科学原理及人类对地球气候的影响预警。针对没有太多科学背景但富有好奇心的听众，本课程将结合物理、化学、生物、地球和大气科学乃至经济学的见解和视角，基础为简单的数学（代数）。 课程大纲： 1. **概述**：介绍本课程的内容。 2. **热、光与能量**：介绍如何使用单位描述温度、能量和光的数字，帮助学员理解后续讲座。 3. **第一个气候模型**：通过光照和红外线的能量流动，构建简单的气候模型，包括温室效应的基础。 4. **温室气体与大气**：探讨温室气体的选择性吸收与辐射特性，以及其对气候的影响。 5. **大气结构**：分析温室效应工作原理，特别是上层大气的低温对地球辐射的影响。 6. **天气与气候**：讨论气候的不均匀性与大气和海洋中的热传输。 7. **反馈机制**：研究气候反馈循环如何稳定或加剧气候变化，并进行相关练习。 8. **碳循环**：深入研究碳在地球上的循环过程及其对于气候稳定的重要性。 9. **扰动的碳循环**：分析化石燃料的碳释放对未来气温的影响，并进行模型模拟。 10. **寻找人类对气候的影响**：探讨自1970年以来的全球平均温度变化，检视其是否反映出人类活动的影响。 11. **潜在影响**：聚焦继续增加CO₂排放的潜在影响，并将其与IPCC相关报告进行比较。 12. **减缓措施**：讨论如何减轻人类活动对气候的影响，强调做出积极决策的重要性。 本课程希望通过科学的角度，增强对气候变化的理解，并促使学生思考解决方案。
Name:Overview
Description:What you will find in this class.
Name:Heat, Light, and Energy
Description:A primer on how to use units to describe numbers when describing temperature, energy, and light. Even if you don't plan on doing calculations yourself, understanding how units work will help to follow the rest of the lectures in the class. If you are interested in practicing your analysis skills, using units to guide calculations, there are some exercises in the Part II of this class.
Name:First Climate Model
Description:The balance of energy flow, as incoming sunlight and outgoing infrared, allow us to create our first simple climate model, including a simple greenhouse effect. There are two extended exercises in Part II of this class, one an analytical (algebraic) model of the equilibrium temperature of a planet, the other a numerical model of how that temperature might evolve through time.
Name:Greenhouse Gases and the Atmosphere
Description:The Layer Model above assumes that the pane of glass representing the atmosphere absorbs all of the infrared radiation that hits it and that it radiates at all infrared wavelengths. In other words, the layer model atmosphere is an infrared blackbody, but transparent in the visible. In reality, greenhouse gases are not "black" at all; they are very choosy about which frequencies of light they absorb and emit. This selective absorption of infrared light by greenhouse gases leads to the band saturation effect, which makes rare, trace gases like methane disproportionally powerful relative to higher-concentration gases like CO₂.
Name:The Structure of the Atmosphere
Description:The greenhouse effect works because the air in the upper atmosphere is colder than the ground, so that absorption and re-emission of IR by greenhouse gases decreases the amount of energy leaving the planet to space. Here we explore the physics responsible for keeping the upper atmosphere cold.
Name:Weather and Climate
Description:Another property of the real world, missing in our model so far, is that the real world is not everywhere the same temperature, and the heat fluxes to and from space do not necessarily balance at any given time or location. This is because the winds in the atmosphere and the currents in the ocean carry heat around, in general from the hot tropics up to the cold high latitudes.
Name:Feedbacks
Description:Feedbacks are loops of cause-and-effect that can either stabilize Earth's climate or amplify future climate changes. There is an exercise in Part II of this class where you solve for a planet's temperature by iteration, and in the process demonstrate a runaway ice albedo feedback that might have led to the Snowball Earth climate state 700 million years ago.
Name:The Carbon Cycle
Description:Now we shift gears in a major way — away from climate physics (you now have seen its main ingredients) to the emergent miracle that is the carbon cycle on Earth. Not only is carbon the chemical element of life, it is also the means of storing life's energy. We will look at how carbon cycles through the land, the oceans, and the deep earth, going in and out of the atmosphere -- and how that stabilizes the earth's climate.
Name:The Perturbed Carbon Cycle
Description:On the carbon locked up in fossil fuels and what happens when we burn those fuels. In Part II of this class, you can create a simple but somewhat realistic model of Earth's temperature evolution in the coming decades, in response to the release of CO2 (or in the sudden stop of emissions in a scenario called "The world without us").
Name:Looking for a Human Impact on Climate
Description:You have now seen the ideas behind the forecast for a human impact on Earth's climate. The next question is: Do we see it happening today? It turns out that the "smoking gun" for a human impact on climate is the global average temperature record since about the 1970's. In order to interpret that temperature change, we need to consider it within the context of natural climate changes in Earth's geologic past.
Name:Potential Impacts
Description:This unit we focus on the potential impacts of continued business-as-usual CO2 emissions. This is also the topic of the Working Group 2 volume of the IPCC reports (the Working Group 1 report is on the scientific basis, which is what we've been studying so far this course). You may find this material distressing, but hang on, because next week we'll go over "Mitigation", which is what it takes to avoid climate change (treated in the Working Group 3 report). Remember that most of the carbon we're worried about is still in the ground, so these impacts are inevitable only if we continue to decide to make them so. In Part II of this class, you can create a simple ice sheet model of your own.
Name:Mitigation
Description:The last unit of the class finds us considering the options for avoiding, or "mitigating," a human impact on Earth's climate. Bottom line: I think it would be a challenge that humankind could beat if we decided to. If there hypothetically were no more coal on Earth, our potential to alter the climate would be much less. Finding energy sources in that world would not be an existential threat would just be a business opportunity. The hard part, in my opinion, is making that decision.
This class describes the science of global warming and the forecast for humans’ impact on Earth’s climate. Intended for an audience without much scientific background but a healthy sense of curiosity, the class brings together insights and perspectives from physics, chemistry, biology, earth and atmospheric sciences, and even some economics—all based on a foundation of simple mathematics (algebra).
