Search: Course, Climate Change

SPRING 2008 Environmental Health Sciences Division The Health Implications of Climate Change and Society's Response Fridays 2-4pm - 332 Giannini PH 298.38 - CC#76642 (2 units P/NP) "Climate change is a significant and emerging threat to public health, and changes the way we must look at protecting vulnerable populations." - WHO, 2007. How and why is the global climate changing? What are the health implications of these changes and society's responses to them? What roles do health scientists have in addressing the risks created by climate change? This course will begin by providing a basic foundation in the physical and societal basis of climate change, including atmospheric structure and feedbacks, carbon cycling, and the sources and trends of human and natural greenhouse pollutant emissions. Forecasts of future climate, and their uncertainties, will be discussed, emphasizing parameters of potential relevance to human health. We will explore epidemiologic, risk assessment, and statistical methods appropriate for understanding the impact of climate on health in different populations, including reviews of current burden of disease estimates of avoidable and attributable risk. The public health implications, positive and negative, of society's efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change will be elaborated, including discussions of ethical, political and economic aspects. Each student's performance will be evaluated based on a term paper and participation in student-led sessions on selected aspects of the subject matter. The material will be presented with minimal expectation of a background in physical science, although some additional reading may be needed for students with no university science courses. Prerequisite: PH150A, PH250A/B or other introductory course in epidemiology. Grading will be pass/not pass, although individual requests for a grading option will be considered. Instructors: Justin Remais, Research Scientist, Center for Occupational and Environmental Health Kirk R. Smith, Professor of Global Environmental Health Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health For more information, contact Justin Remais <mailto:jvr@berkeley.edu><jvr@berkeley.edu> or Kirk R. Smith <mailto:krksmith@berkeley.edu><krksmith@berkeley.edu> in the Environmental Health Sciences Division.

Drawing on the tools of economics and finance, we study the business and public policy issues that these changes have raised in energy markets. Topics include the development and effect of organized spot, futures, and derivative markets in energy; the political economy of deregulation; climate change, environmental impacts and policies related to energy production and use; privatization of publicly owned energy assets; market power and antitrust; and the transportation and storage of energy commodities. We examine the economic determinants of industry structure and evolution of competition among firms in these industries; investigate successful and unsuccessful strategies for entering new markets and competing in existing markets; and analyze the rationale for and effects of public policies in energy markets.

An overview of the processes that control water supply to natural ecosystems and human civilization. Hydrologic cycle, floods, droughts, groundwater. Patterns of water use, threats to water quality, effects of global climate change on future water supplies. Water issues facing California.

The geology, physics, chemistry, and biology of the world oceans. The application of oceanographic sciences to human problems will be explored through special topics such as energy from the sea, marine pollution, food from the sea, and climate change.

Collecting, analyzing, and presenting stratigraphic data; dating and correlating sedimentary rocks; recognizing ancient environments and reconstructing Earth history; seismic and sequence stratigraphy; event stratigraphy and neocatastrophism; applications of stratigraphy to climate change, petroleum geology, and archaeology

The natural environment and technology are inextricably linked. The natural environment provides both the initial inputs as well as the ultimate disposal locations for the technologies that drive today's economy. As a result of the close relationship between the environment and human technology, technology has at times been cast as both the ultimate villain and the ultimate hero in environmental policy circles. This class introduces students to many features of the relationship between technology and the natural environment over time. It explores past (for the most part) environmental policy issues, such as acid rain and ozone depletion, through the lens of specific technologies that were important to both policy and business interests. It introduces some of the environmental strategies that are being used by both policy-makers and business to affect technology development and adoption today (e.g., Energy Star, TQEM). And it delves into the climate change debate, an ongoing issue on the environmental policy agenda in which harnessing the forces of technological innovation will be crucial to environmental progress.

Introduction to the economics of natural resources. Land and the concept of economic rent. Models of optimal depletion of nonrenewable resources and optimal use of renewable resources. Application to energy, forests, fisheries, water, and climate change. Resources, growth, and sustainability.

With the approval of the Cal Climate Action Partnership (CalCAP - <http://calcap.berkeley.edu/> http://calcap.berkeley.edu) proposal this past spring, Chancellor Birgeneau committed UC Berkeley to reduce campus greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2014. The proposal was written by a team of authors guided by a steering committee composed of faculty, administrators, staff, and students and chaired by Vice Provost Cathy Koshland. It was built upon and extended a campus wide sustainability assessment completed in 2005 under the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Sustainability (CACS) that represented the first attempt to inventory campus wide greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption and make specific recommendations for reducing the ecological impact of campus activities. This Climate Action Course will bring together interested students to study the projects currently being considered for implementation under CalCAP, identify new projects the campus might undertake, and to move them forward through action-oriented research. This course will provide motivated students an opportunity to contribute to significant reductions in campus greenhouse gas emissions and the realization of longer term sustainability goals. Course sessions will engage CalCAP contributors, facilities management, research faculty, outside experts, and the UC administration in conversation on specific CalCAP projects and additional opportunities for emissions reductions on campus. Readings will include the 2005 Sustainability Assessment, the recently adopted CalCAP Proposal, documentation on similar commitments from campuses around the country, and peer reviewed literature on emissions reductions, behavior change, energy economics, building resource use, etc.

Earth's climatic changes have been substantial throughout geologic history, and these changes constitute fascinating natural experiments that reveal much about the earth's climate systems and their capacity for change. In this course we will review important methods for past climate reconstruction and also current knowledge of past climate changes throughout earth's history, with an emphasis on those of the Quaternary. Methods to be explored include analyses of physical, geochemical, and paleontologic characteristics of marine sediments, coral reefs, coastal sediments, lake sediments, tree rings, and ice cores.