Final Exam: Monday, April 20th, 10:15am – 12:15pm

The final exam will be on Monday, and it will start at 10:15 am. The final will be held in the same room in which we always meet.

To answer some common questions:

1. Yes, it’s possible to lower your grade if you choose to take the final, but no one has ever done so in my experience. I’ve been offering optional final exams like this one for about 10 years.

2. If you take the final, it counts as if it were a fourth regular exam. All three of your lecture exams are averaged with the final to arrive at your score for the course.

3. If you don’t take the final, your course score is the average of your three in-class exams.

4. The final exam will be cumulative, it will test on information from the previous exams, but the questions won’t necessarily be verbatim or in the same order.

5. The final exam format will be multiple choice.

6. Don’t email me to ask what your grade is. I won’t reply with an answer. As soon as I get the graded finals back, I’ll input the data, assign grades, and post the grades. No, the grades won’t be posted to the blog, they’ll be posted to the WMU course grading system just like every other course.

ENVS 2150 – Lecture slides – Fossil fuel energy

Lecture slides focusing on fossil fuel energy sources.

ENVS 2150 – Lecture slides – Renewable energy

Lecture slides focusing on renewable sources and forms of energy.

ENVS 2150 – Lecture slides – Climate modelling and predictions

Lecture slides focusing on IPCC model geopolitical scenarios for the future, and how future climate change is highly contingent on assumptions regarding future political and economic events.

ENVS 2150 – Lecture slides – Climate

This series covers lectures slides for the greenhouse effect, radiative forcing, anthropogenic greenhouse gas additions, the record of past climate, and anthropogenic climate change.

ENVS 2150 – Third Exam: April 15th

The third in-class exam will be on Wednesday, April 15th. Format will be the same as the last two exams.

ENVS 2150 – Lecture slides: Carbon cycle

Lecture slides describing the carbon cycle.

ENVS 2150 – Climate change – IPCC Report, Working Group I: Summary for Policymakers

The IPCC hosts a wide range of documents that provide basic to advanced information about climate science, the historical record of climate change, current human activities that affect climate, predictions regarding the effects of future climate change, and estimations of the long term influences climate change may bring to human civilization. If you want to know about climate change, study the IPCC reports.

I’m including one of their reports here, which I’d like to assign as a reading for this section of the course. The linked Working Group I: Summary for Policymakers is pretty much what it sounds like; a summary of the relevant data and conclusions that are presently available on the subject, intended as a fairly quick read for policymakers (i.e. international government officials). The document assumes basic science literacy but otherwise avoids technical language as much as possible.

Snowball Earth video

Below are some YouTube clips of the video I showed in class: Snowball Earth. The entire video is divided into five clips, which I link sequentially below.

ENVS 2150 – Lecture slides – Stratospheric ozone depletion

Lecture slides focusing on UV radiation, sensitivity of organic compounds to UV, and stratospheric ozone depletion.