Global Warming Assignment

Due: Wednesday, March 25th

Description: Traditionally, the class breaks up into two groups – “believers” and “non-believers” of anthropogenic global warming. The two groups debate one another, and then afterward students individually write up a summary of what they’ve learned and how their opinions have changed.

However, as it becomes more difficult to successfully argue against anthropogenic global warming, this becomes less sensible. Therefore, we’ll avoid the debate and instead individually choose a global warming or climate change related topic, and write a paper about a topic of your choosing. On the due date, rather than have a debate, we’ll simply have a discussion about some interesting things you’ve learned. It would be great if you chose a topic related to your major, if you have one (for example, if you’re an ecology major, an idea would be how global warming might affect the habitat of a particular species; if you’re an agriculture major, you could study how global warming could affect crop growth, etc.).

Requirements: Papers should be roughly 4 pages long, double-spaced, with 1” margins left and right, and with 12 point font. Please e-mail me your topic by next week’s class. I’ll try to give each of you some feedback and some helpful sources if I know of them. It’s alright if multiple people have a similar topic, but I’ll probably try to cut off one topic after three or four people or so, in order to have a good variety. Also, I’d like every paper to have at least one source from a hardcover book, from the library (if this becomes too difficult, then I may change this requirement). Please list all your sources, and attempt to have at least 4 sources, whether from online, book, textbook or journal articles, the IPCC report, or even documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth. Also, please have at least two of your sources come from non-internet sources (although any journal articles would count towards this).

Sources: Wikipedia is alright for initial fact-finding, or topic finding, but I would primarily use it for the references at the end. For example, there are at least 127 references (plus more suggested “further reading”) from the article on global warming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming), which is a good spot to begin. Also, if anyone wants to be ambitious, you could search through actual journal articles by looking for key words (http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=search-simple), but be warned that these may be difficult to interpret without a meteorology background. However, I would be more than happy to help anyone – just send me an e-mail telling me what article