First Writing Assignment for Olson’s Core 6 section – Winter 2009 – Due February 24

Topic: Global warming – definitions, clarification, skepticism

This paper will be a combination of a short targeted research paper and an essay exam/study guide.

Technical specifications: At least three pages (excluding title page, which you should omit), 12-point Times New Roman font, double spaced, 1-inch margins all around. You will probably need more than three pages to answer all I’ve asked. You may use any accepted referencing style – MLA, APA, Chicago Manual of Style, etc. I’ll give you several references for Part B, but you may use others if you need or like.

Part A. In the first part of the paper you will give definitions of the following terms and concepts using complete sentences. You do not need citations for these, since I should know if they are correct or not.

Global Warming (GW)

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)

Greenhouse Gas

Albedo

Temperature Proxy

Climate Forcings

U.S. Historical Climate Network (USHCN)

Ice Age (or “Glacial”)

Interglacial & Stadial

Total Solar Irradiance

Sunspots

“Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period”

Part B. Why are some scientists skeptical about AGW and some even of GW? Write a few pages using standard paragraphs and proper writing technique, including citations, to address this question. Here are some sources for your consideration.

• Olson’s PowerPoint for ESS 126, “Weather and Climate”, Fall 2008. These are the lecture notes for the unit on climate change. I included some information from GW and AGW skeptics, and this information was partially responsible for getting me interested in this topic, but my intention was to give some balance to this issue and not necessarily blow the skeptics’ horn. http://www.saintjoe.edu/~dept14/environment/rogero/Fall08/ess126/change.ppt
• Science and Public Policy Institute: “35 Inconvenient Truths - The errors in Al Gore’s movie”: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html

· Here’s a website that rates the quality of temperature measurements in the USHCN. They argue that many U.S. surface stations are poorly sited and tend to record erroneously higher temperatures. http://www.surfacestations.org/