HC INTERNATIONAL CULTURES COLLOQUIUM The Physics and Politics of Global Climate Change The potential for significant Global Climate Change is likely the most severe and economically costly problem of this century. Effective solutions to mitigate its effects will require an unusually high level in international cooperation and thus this topic necessarily brings with it different cultural perspectives. For instance, China keeps posing the fairly logical argument that until they reach the same level of per capita energy consumption as the US, they are not going to cooperate much on reducing their carbon footprint. Unfortunately, the climate system can not withstand this potential perturbation by China. As awareness of this issue increases, so does the amount of miss-information, myth propagation and political agenda. It thus becomes important to focus on this issue in an objective, scientific manner so that the ambiguities are clearly revealed. I believe that a basic understanding of the Greenhouse effect is something that every college graduate should be able to articulate and therefore a proper class should be constructed to facilitate such articulation. Moreover, global climate change is an excellent example of a situation where you can build a very scientifically plausible and compelling case, but you can not yet scientifically prove that such climate change is human induced. As a result, this topic lends itself to an in depth exploration of the science/policy interface where decisions and future policy implementation necessarily will be made on incomplete data. Therefore, I think a comprehensive course on this topic will serve the HC students quite well in their overall academic preparation and will also immerse them in the noisy data that the science of Global Climate Change must necessarily deal with as well as the international nested conundrums that make the formulation of sensible policy difficult. Indeed, since 2003 the rate of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities has essentially doubled relative to the 1950-2000 baseline –we are therefore, losing ground on this issue at an increasingly rapid rate. A particular case study for this course will be the various forms of “The Carbon Tax� which have been proposed and whether or not there is really any accountability or verification or “fair trade� in these proposed systems. The first 2/3 of this course will focus on the data and science of Global Climate Change – its potential drivers and impacts as well as the various kinds of measurements which can be made to verify (or possibly refute) this phenomena. We will begin with simple models of our atmosphere to show how the burning of fossil fuels at a rapid pace naturally leads to the enhanced greenhouse effect. This beginning serves as the basic tie in to the Energy Footprints course. The latter 1/3 of the course will focus on the politics of Global Climate Change in terms of protocol implementation and resistance, the interactions between ambiguous scientific data and public policy, and the needs for new energy sources as one way to mitigate this problem. In this latter 1/3 of the course, we will also introduce the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) dynamic to show how the energy footprint of BRIC is the major driver in this century of our potential climate path and how this all potentially relates to international carbon trading, carbon caps and carbon taxation. This course has three principal objectives: * To introduce students to the science of climate change and the latest research that leads to the current grid models of climate change. * To emphasize the difficulty of accurately characterizing the nature of climate and therefore to determine a baseline from which climate change can be reliably measured. * To analyze potential social and political consequences of global climate change and the various efforts currently underway to lessen its overall impact.