Global Warming A flipped course

Global Warming A flipped course Dorian S. Abbot Contents 1 Why You Should Care 1 1.1 Introduction and Overview 2 1.2 Heat Stress Death . 7 1.3 Units 13 1.4 Glo ...

Global Warming A flipped course Dorian S. Abbot Contents 1 Why You Should Care 1 1.1 Introduction and Overview 2 1.2 Heat Stress Death . 7 1.3 Units 13 1.4 Global Warming and Security . 18 1.5 Mass Extinction 21 2 Climate Records 27 2.1 Weather and Climate . 28 2.2 The Temperature Record . 31 2.3 The Carbon Dioxide Record . 34 3 Radiative Physics Overview 40 3.1 Electromagnetic Radiation 41 3.2 Sunlight and Seasons . 46 3.3 Albedo . 51 3.4 Blackbody Radiation . 55 3.5 Greenhouse Gasses 59 4 Simple Climate Model for Understanding 64 4.1 One-Layer Model . 65 4.2 Ice-Albedo Feedback . 68 4.3 Water-Vapor Feedback 73 4.4 Clouds . 77 4.5 Cloud Feedbacks . 79 5 Fancy Climate Models 85 5.1 Global Climate Models 86 5.2 Climate Sensitivity 91 5.3 Estimating the Climate Sensitivity 94 6 What We Can Do 98 6.1 CO2 Emissions 99 6.2 What We Can Do . 102 7 References 105 1 Why You Should Care 1 1.1 Introduction and Overview Notes Critical points you need to know by the end of class: 1. This is a flipped class. You need to read the notes before each class and you will do work in groups of 3-4 during class time (as long as we can get this working on Zoom). 2. Your grade will be based on five tests during the quarter, a short video project, and a cumulative final. Coronavirus: We all have to make adjustments to remote learning. I hope that if we all do our best you guys will learn something and enjoy the course material. We will be flexible and ready to adjust the class as necessary based on how it is going. I’m hopeful that this will work! One major adjustment we will have to make is that we can’t do the labs in person. In fact, I can’t even go to campus to make videos using the lab equipment. Instead I found videos showing similar equipment and experiments. We are going to watch these and answer questions based on them. It is a sub-optimal solution, but it’s the best we can do this quarter. If you are interested in playing with the actual equipment, contact me when the crises is over and we can set that up. Flipped class: Most science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses are taught in lecture format, yet this format has been proven to be extremely ineffective at helping students learn material. This has led Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman to write [1] If a new antibiotic is being tested for effectiveness, its effectiveness at curing patients is compared with the best current antibiotics and not with treatment by bloodletting. However, in undergraduate STEM education, we have the curious situation that, although more effective teaching methods have been overwhelmingly demonstrated, most STEM courses are still taught by lectures – the pedagogical equivalent of bloodletting. This course will be taught in the “flipped” format, where you will read some short notes at home, then come in and work in small groups on problems to learn the material. The goal is to constantly put you in low-risk situations where you have to actively demonstrate knowledge. This will help you make sure you actually know what we’re learning. If you find out that you don’t know something as well as you thought you did, your fellow students and section leader will be right there to help you. Format: Before each class meeting I expect you to read a few pages of notes that introduce new material. There will be a list of the most important points for that day at the top of the notes. Use active reading techniques like underlining important points and taking notes in the margins. Make sure to make a note of anything you don’t understand. You can do this on the pdf or on paper if you want to print these notes out. When you come into class your section leader will give a 10 minuteslong mini-lecture that will introduce the material for that day based on notes that I’ve prepared for 2 them. Then you should ask any questions that came up when you read the day’s material. After this you will form groups of 3–4 students and work on the day’s problems (using Zoom breakout groups). Wieman told me that this is the best group size for encouraging participation. Please talk and interact freely as you work on the problems. Write your answers on the pdf, on paper in a notebook, or start a google document with your group where you record all of your answers. In the last 10 minutes your section leader will give the solutions to the day’s problems and you can ask questions about anything you still find confusing. Make sure to write down the solutions and understand them because we will not be distributing solutions. The reason for this is to encourage you to come and participate in class. The reason for this is to maximize your learning. Learning objectives: As a physical science core, this class will emphasize helping you develop the folowing skills: 1. Extracting information from complicated, quantitative plots 2. Scientific notation 3. Units of different quantities 4. Unit analysis 5. Order of magnitude 6. Percentage change The specific topic of this course is global warming. I hope that by the end of the course you will be able to give a brief summary of the case that global warming is occuring and that humans are causing it. See the table of contents for a list of the topics we will cover. Evaluation: Your evaluation in this class will be based on the following: 1. Attendance (25%): Attendance will be taken each day. If you need to miss a class for religious reasons, sickness, a family emergency, or a sports event, notify your section learder in advance and you will not be penalized. If you have an extended sickness or family emergency that will last for more than two classes, you need to speak with me about it, not your section leader. 2. Quizzes (25%): There will be five quizzes throughout the quarter, which you will take during the normal class time. The quizzes will be on the first 5 sections of these notes. The quizzes will be designed to test the material you learned in class, but will not require as much mathematical manipulation. The point of the quizzes is to give you a chance to practice your quantitative skills and global warming knowledge before the final. 3. Final Project (25%): The final project will be to record a 60 second video argument to convince a scientifically literate skeptic that global warming is happening and is caused by humans. You will need to use what you have learned in the course to do this. 4. Final Exam (25%): There will be a final exam that will cover all of the material in the course. It will be in a similar format to the tests, but about twice as long. 3 Grades: Grades will be assigned in this class based on the following grading scheme: A: [93- 100]; A-: [90-93); B+: [87-90); B: [83:87); B-: [80:83); C+: [77-80); C: [73:77); C-: [70:73); D: [60:70); F: [0:60). “[87-90)” means including exactly 87 and not including exactly 90. The scheme will be built into Canvas and I will use the grades that it automatically determines. I will not round up your grade for any reason. The reasons for this are: 1. Fairness: Rounding introduces the potential for favoritism and implicit bias. If a student comes to office hours and I like her, I may be more likely to round her grade up. If I have an implicit bias against another student, I may be more likely not to round his grade up. 2. Recursion: Suppose the threshold for an A is a 93 and I give a student an A because he had a 92.5, which is within only 0.5 points of an A. To be fair I have to do this for all students, so I’ve now effectively just shifted the threshold for an A from 93 to 92.5. Now another student comes to me who has a 92 and very reasonably says that she is within 0.5 of the threshold for an A, so she should get one too. I have no good response to this, since I’m already in the business of shifting grade thresholds, so I have to give her an A and shift the threshold again. This process will continue recursively until every student gets an A in the course. Personally I don’t think grades are very important and wouldn’t care very much about that, but my experience has been that grades do motivate students to learn, and after all the effort I’ve put into this course, I hope you guys are actually going to learn something. So we’re not going to shift the grade thresholds. My role: My primary responsibility in this course is to help you learn the material. I prepared the notes, lectures, problems, and tests with this in mind. I will hold office hours twice per week that I encourage you to attend. I am also responsible for providing the graduate student section leaders an environment where they can learn teaching skills that will help them in their future career. I organized a training session for them at the beginning of the quarter and we are in weekly communication to go over what is working, what isn’t, and to help prepare them for the next week. Finally, it’s my job to take care of all of the administrative aspects of the course. Notes: These notes are a work in progress. If you find any errors, think something could be explained better, or find the wording of any of the problems confusing, please let me know via e-mail or in my office hours. 4 Problems [2] describes a controlled experiment on flipped classrooms and active learning. The course was an introductory physics course with two sections, each with 270 students. One was taught by an experienced professor and the other by a postdoc. Both were taught in normal lecture format for the first 11 weeks of the course, then in the 12th week the postdoc switched to teaching using a flipped class with active learning (experiment) while the experienced professor continued to teach in lecture format (control). At the end of the week the students were given a test of the material that the teachers had created before the experiment. The students in both groups had performed similarly in the course up to the start of the experiment. Below is a figure displaying histograms of the scores (out of 12) of the two groups on the test. their answer using clickers. When the s complete, the instructor showed the d gave feedback. The small-group tasks tions that required a written response. worked in the same groups but submitted answers at the end of each class for on credit. Instructor A observed each of ses before teaching his own class and se most of the clicker questions develhe experimental class. However, Instrucd these only for summative evaluation, ed above. nd E.S. together designed the clicker and small-group tasks. L.D. and E.S. performan