Studying Climate Change: A Brief Introduction

 

Charles David Keeling measures CO2, creates a time series beginning in the 1950s
https://sustainability.illinois.edu/charles-david-keeling-1928-2005/

We might date the "modern" study of climate change to the 1950s, when Charles Keeling and colleagues began a careful series measuring atmospheric CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory.  He found startling regularities in the growth of CO2, now often referred to as the "Keeling Curve." After Keeling's death the work was carried out by his son, and others:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve#/media/File:Mauna_Loa_CO2_monthly_mean_concentration.svg

Keeling's paper is certainly one of the most influential climate papers within my lifetime, but as early as 1827 Joseph Fourier described the "greenhouse" mechanism that warms the earth, and in 1896 August Arrhenius predicted the greenhouse effect of doubling atmospheric CO2. These and other precursors such as Eunice Foote (1856), John Tyndall (1861) and later G.S. Callendar (1938) posited and provided some evidence of links between CO2 and climate; but after the work of Keeling and colleagues, the study took off.

This chart is one of dozens we could post to illustrate that there is an apparent empirical relationship between CO2 and global temperatures:

https://skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation-over-the-20th-Century.html

Of course everyone knows that correlation, per se, is not sufficient to demonstrate any causal link.

https://xkcd.com/552/

Side note: if you haven't been checking out the brilliant cartoon work of Randall Munroe, you should go to his website immediately after reading all my blog posts and downloading all my PowerPoint decks etc.

While correlation does not prove causality, neither does it disprove it.

As already noted, there have been solid scientific models that predict global warming if/as atmospheric carbon dioxide increases. These correlations support the theory, and the theory predicts such relationships.

So far, we are only scratching the surface of a subject on everyone's mind, including those involved in the real estate industry, students preparing for real estate careers, work in planning or education, those involved in any aspect of urban development -- in other words the target audience of this blog.

For some years I've been discussing climate change in courses and elsewhere, and if you are one of the three regular readers of this blog you know what's coming next: a PowerPoint deck that you can download.

A year and a half ago, I posted a blog entry and slide deck on "Urbanization and Climate Change: A First Look."  Now I've got something better.  Recently I gave some lectures on climate change to Professor Lu Han's course on urban economics at the Grasskamp Center for Real Estate at the  Wisconsin School of Business.

These lectures gave me an excuse to freshen up my teaching materials from 2020. In the interim I was fortunate to learn more about this subject from USC's Matt Kahn, and a number of presenters at conferences organized by Siqi Zheng, at MIT; and Harvard's Henry Pollakowski, for the Hoyt Institute. Doing justice to the material I've learned from the participants at these events, and comments from other colleagues would take more than a slide deck, and of course they are not responsible for my opinions, errors and omissions.

You can downoad the slides from my November 2023 lectures here.  There are about 300, organized as follows:

• Climate change in perspective
• Climate change basics
• Energy basics
• Some economics of climate change
• Option 1, climate mitigation: lessons from urban economics, roles of cities
• Option 2, climate adaptation: lessons from urban economics, roles of cities
• Option 3, if we cut corners on options 1 and 2 
• Policy prescriptions and research agenda
• Resources

I strongly recommend that you download the PowerPoint file and open it in PowerPoint, instead of just opening it in your browser.  Otherwise, the formatting of many slides is usually messed up. And you'll not see the notes, that have links, sources, and discussion.

Three hundred slides might sound like a lot, but it's a big subject and these slides only provide an introduction.  As always, colleagues, please feel free to select any of the slides that are useful in your own teaching and presentations.  Comments and corrections are welcome.