Professor Paul Olsen, the Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, will lead a course on climate change on Fridays, September 4, 11, 18, and 25 from 2:00-3:30 pm via Zoom.
If you have not yet enrolled, please contact Fran Kelly.
See course details below:
Lecture I: “The Synergism between Climate and Life”: what is climate and what controls it in the big picture; why are we not like Venus or Mars?
Lecture II: “4.5 Billion Years of Climate”: history of climate and life on Earth; major trends in climate and their origins; the age of dinosaurs; sea-level change; mass extinctions as natural experiments.
Lecture III: “Climate Change in the Anthropocene”: humans as agents of climate change; 60,000 years of human intervention; the 6th extinction; how we know what we do.
Lecture IV: “Prognosis: Prediction, Risk Assessment and Mitigation”: what the future holds; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; climate and rising sea levels; risks, mitigation and resiliency.