Global Climate System

About this programme

Earth's changing climate is controlled by feedback mechanisms and changing boundary conditions such as insolation, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations or aerosol particles. In the course you will learn how the planetary energy balance is a useful starting point to the problem. You will then explore radiative forcing and feedback mechanisms, and how the oceans are key for the transient climate response such as historical and future warming. You will further explore global natural variability and various non-linearities that may cause catastrophic events, so called tipping points. The course will apply theory of global climate change acquired in seminars and lectures to popular problems in climate sciences. As a starting point, students will setup and run experiments with a state-of-the-art global climate model, changing atmospheric carbon dioxide or the insolation to probe the model's climate sensitivity. In the subsequent student-designed projects a hypothesis or a research question will be formulated, research planned and carried out. The course will be based primarily on seminars and project work, combined with topical lectures. Students are expected to prepare before the seminars. Grading criteria, course literature and other material and correspondence related to the course will be available on the course Athena-site once you have registered for the course. The course is graded based on the written project report. In addition, students must participate actively in the seminars, carry out homework, write a small lab-report, and present their project results to