- General Assessment The Next 5 Questions Are Intended To Capture A Summary Of Your Learning Over The Semester In The Co 1 (287.45 KiB) Viewed 22 times
General Assessment. The next 5
questions are intended to capture a summary of your learning over the semester, in the context of how you would apply scientific principles you learned in class to study an Earth science
question. This section is required and will be included in your final grade, but it must be posed as a stand-alone item. The other exam
questions should be able to help you answer those in this section. I tried to make it fun and creative, and therefore is no unique correct answer. Please provide a brief explanation of the reasoning behind your answers, and try to have some fun with it. Imagine you are given a very large research budget and 10 years to investigate the suitability of the climate of Earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe for possible human habitation. Assume that we have sufficient technologies to both investigate planets and solar systems from afar, and to eventually travel to the chosen planet. 46. Identify a few of what you would consider to be the most important variables of climate for human habitation, and describe why those are important. 47. What would you need to know about a planet's physical characteristics (e.g. solar system, atmosphere and surface) to estimate its potential suitability from afar? Are there some simple physical/mathematical relationships you could use to make some reasonable first guesses about the planet's climate? 48. What recently developed tool could you use to investigate various elements of the new planet's climate, including regional climate distributions within it, internal modes of variability, etc. in more detail? 49. Suppose the chosen planet is rich in fossil fuels. How might you estimate how much fossil energy could be burned while remaining within habitation limits? What tool(s) could you use, and what characteristics of the planet and/or atmosphere would you alter to investigate this
question? 50. Suppose the energy demands required to build a new civilization there are so great that there is a need to burn more fossil fuels than the climate can safely accommodate. What technologies could you propose the keep the planet habitable, and how might you investigate the impacts of those interventions?
They're like weather predictors for ocean and ice temperatures (42-44) There are three broad categories of response to the climate crisis. Name each category, provide an example or two, and describe why it is both necessary, but also insufficient by itself. 42. Category 1 43. Category 2 44. Category 3 4 45. From a purely selfish economic point of view, addressing climate change will be expensive for the US. In addition, the US is not among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Given this, what do you think should be the role of the US in fixing the climate crisis? You may provide arguments from ethical, economic, and survival perspectives (hopefully all 3).
Extra Credit. 4 points. Optional. How will global temperature change if we instantly stop all fossil fuel combustion today, and why? For the four timescales of consideration below, choose the correct response from among the following 5 rapidly warm slowly warm slowly cool and provide a brief justification. Think about the different substances emitted by fossil fuel combustion, how those affect temperature, how their lifetimes in the atmosphere differ, and the effects of feedbacks relative to other processes (eg, Milankovitch cycles) and their timescales. 1. Days to Weeks: 2. Years to Decades: 3. Decades to Centuries: 4. Centuries to Millenia: