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pollen records’, copyright © 1989 Macmillan Magazines LimitedFigure 3.16: Brown, G. C, Hawkesworth, C .J. and Wilson, R. C. L. (1992) Understanding the Earth, 2ndedition Cambridge University Press.Figure 2.10: Parker, D. E. et. al. (1966) ‘A new daily Central England temperature series,1772–1991’, International Journal of Climatology, 12, Royal Meteorological Society.www.meto.gov.uk/climate/uk/2003/june.htmlvideo model of changes in the temperature of the Earth: © Crown Copyright. Reproduced with thepermission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.Unit image: Courtesy of kenyai / Tunde Pecsvari atFlickrEvery effort has been made to trace all the copyright owners, but if any has been inadvertently overlooked,the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
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Acknowledgements
The content contained within this document is sourced from an Open University OpenLearn projectlabspace unit - .
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Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0Licence.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ 
Overview
Introduction
This unit provides an introduction to global warming. We will be considering the history of global warming bylooking at the pattern of ice ages and analyisis of recorded temperatures. We will aim to gather meaningfulinformation from this data. We will briefly assess the impact and influence of humans on global warming and,finally, we will examine climate models and how to predict future changes.
Learning Outcomes
The learning outcomes for this unit are to:Develop an understanding of the current evidence for global warming.Model and apply the techniques of ?measuring? the Earth's temperature.Understand the current warming in relation to climate changes throughout the Earth's history.Explain factors forcing climate change, and the extent of anthropogenic influence.Assess the ?best predictions? of current climate models.
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1. Natural climate change?
The chart below shows a record of the global mean surface temperature of the Earth compiled forthe past 140 years. Clearly there is an upward trend, but what does a chart like this really show?
To understand what the chart shows, it is necessary to take the ?long view?, looking back through the wholehistory of the Earth.How can we know the temperature of the planet over time-scales of billions of years?Is this current warming part of the Earth's natural temperature variation?What factors affect and force changes to the global temperature, and to what extent are these being affectedby human activity?What are the best predictions for change over the next 100 years?
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2. A 4.6 billion-year history
Climate change is a natural process of warming and cooling that has occurred all through theEarth's history. Throughout geological time there have been ?hot-house? periods and ice ages. In
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AcknowledgementsAuthor
This unit was prepared by Tom Power with guidance from Dr Arlene Hunter.Tom Power is a lecturer in science education at The Open University. His research interests include teachereducation in the global south (www.open.ac.uk/deep) and the CASE intervention. He has been a teacher andan advisory teacher in East Sussex and a specialist adviser to the TTA teacher research panel.Dr Arlëne Hunter, Staff Tutor in Science in Ireland, The Open University, is responsible for the managementof the science programme across Ireland and contributes to various undergraduate earth and environmentalscience courses. Her research is divided between geochemistry and enhancing the learning and teachingexperience for students and staff.This unit draws upon many sources, but has been developed primarily from the Open University Scienceshort course (1998) S103 Discovering Science: 2 A Temperate Earth, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Further acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:Charts of: variation of the Earth’s surface temperature, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, naturalforcing, anthropogenic forcing, natural and anthropogenic forcing, carbon dioxide emissions, temperaturechange, rise in sea level: copyright © IPCC.Extracts from the Open University course S103 Block 2 ‘A temperate Earth?’Figures 3.3 and 3.5: courtesy of Tony Waltham;Figure 3.4: Landform Slides;Figure 3.6a: The British Geological Survey, copyright © NERC, all rights reservedFigure 3.7: John, B. S. (1977) The Ice Age, HarperCollins Publishers LtdFigure 3.10: courtesy of C. TurnerFigure 3.11: courtesy of C. J. HawksworthFigures 3.12 and 3.13: West, R. G. (1977) Pleistocene Geology and Biology, 2nd edition, p. 362, reprinted bypermission of Addison Wesley Longman LtdFigure 3.14: reprinted with permission from Nature, 281, 18 October 1979, p. 559, Woillard, G. (1979)‘Abrupt end of the last interglacial S.S. in North-East France’, copyright © 1979 MacmillanMagazines LimitedFigure 3.15: reprinted with permission from Nature, 338, 23 March 1989, p. 312, Guiot, J., Pons, A., deBeaulieu, J. L. and Reille, M. (1989) ‘A 140,000-year continental climate reconstruction from two European
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Closing thoughts
Of course, doing anything about this needs scientific evidence and understanding, but it alsorequires social, economic and technological changes, which can only be achieved through politicalwill. If you want to explore some of the broader context, a good place to start would be the
New Internationalist 
issue 357, ?The Big Switch: Climate Change Solutions? atNew Internationalist.
Faced with the sort of predictions climatologists are making, is it sufficient for science teachers to stop at the?science?, or should we be tackling some of these broader issues in schools?If you want to find out more, theHadley Centreis the UK's foremost climate research centre and provides alot of useful information, as does the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change atIPCC.If you wish to view tis simulation in a new window click on 'Launch in separate player'Launch in separate player 
Activity 4
To help you understand some of the key factors in climate modelling, click on the link above towork through a simplified simulation.In reality, climate modelling is extremely complex, because all the variables are not known. The ability todevelop mathematical models of climate change is constantly improving, but there are still many competingmodels, each making different predictions of how the climate will change. All models, currently, show asignificant increase in the global mean surface temperature attributable to human influences.
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References and Acknowledgements
References
Climatic Research Unit (2003)
Information Sheets 
at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk
New Internationalist 
(2003) ?The Big Switch: Climate Change Solutions?, June, issue number 357.The Open University (1998) S103
Discovering Science 
, Block 2 ?A Temperate Earth??, Milton Keynes, TheOpen University.
Acknowledgements
The content acknowledged below is Proprietary(see terms and conditions)and is used under licence.
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order to understand the current situation, it is necessary to have some sense of context andperspective, from historical and geological time-scales. The document below shows a chart showinga generalised temperature history of the Earth.
Click on 'View document' to see the chartView documentWe are currently enjoying an interglacial period of an ice age that began approximately two million years ago.(Ice ages are composed of colder ?glacial? and warmer ?interglacial? periods.) This is at least the seventhice age in the Earth's 4.6 billion-year history.During the Cretaceous (65?147 Ma) the whole Earth was up to +15 (C warmer than at present, with tropicalforests covering Antarctica, whereas during the Quaternary (?2 Ma) ice sheets spread across much ofEurope and the mean surface temperature was up to (5 (C colder than at present. The range of thesechanges is much greater than the observed increase in temperature over the past century (+0.6 ±0.2 (C) andpredictions for the next hundred years (+3 ±1.5 (C).Click on 'View document' to read ?Glaciers past and present?View documentClick on 'View document' to read ?Pollen diagrams and ancient climates?View document 
Activity 1 Past temperatures: before measurement, before people
Measuring temperature is a relativelyrecent affair. Galileo Galilei invented his thermometer in 1597, but the longest running record of surfacetemperature to the present day only dates from 1815. For periods prior to these measurements, ourunderstanding of the history of climate change is inferred from geological evidence, primarily: 
Glaciation
(showing that much of the northern hemisphere was covered in ice, some 18 000 years BP).
Fossilised pollen
(showing that over the past 140 000 years, the mean temperature has varied by almost 15°C).Prepare a brief (no more than five minutes) presentation on the information concerning climate changeprovided by either glaciation or the pollen record. The presentation should close with 3?7 key ideas toexplore. Two resources are provided to help you do this: ?Glaciers past and present? and ?Pollen diagramsand ancient climates?. To access these resources, click on the "view document" links above.
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