{"id":74,"date":"2012-04-01T04:43:21","date_gmt":"2012-04-01T04:43:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mesas\/?page_id=74"},"modified":"2026-07-18T09:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T14:12:09","slug":"global-environmental-change","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/teaching\/global-environmental-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Environmental Change (ESCI 3101)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I created this course back in 2012, and my colleague <a href=\"https:\/\/geoearth.charlotte.edu\/jacob-jack-scheff\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Professor Jack Scheff<\/a> has taken it over for now. The main focus of Global Environmental Change has not really changed though. Specifically, I built the course to present an overview of modern-day climate change, and, more fundamentally, how the Earth&#8217;s carbon cycle is the core component involved in climate changes both present and past. We also spend time discussing solution strategies that are helping to stabilize modern-day climate. Sesame Street once sang, &#8220;We are all earthlings spinning around together, on a planet of the sun.&#8221; and this helped me think about why the course could be important, but I leaned heavily on the science in the content starting with an important data set collected from Hawaii.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/scripps.ucsd.edu\/bluemoon\/co2_400\/mlo_full_record.png\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\"><br \/>\nHuman activities are causing our planet to warm, and this increasingly warmer climate leads to widespread environmental changes that are forcing us to re-think how we live on our planet. Above is <a href=\"https:\/\/scripps.ucsd.edu\/programs\/keelingcurve\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the Keeling Curve<\/a> that shows not only how human activities have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, but also how the rate of the carbon dioxide concentration increase is itself increasing. Our activities emit carbon dioxide faster than the carbon cycle can process, so that&#8217;s why the concentration is increasing. We have more human activities now than we did in the past, so that&#8217;s why the rate is increasing. <\/p>\n<p>Increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide increases the infrared opacity of the atmosphere, which means that the Earth must radiate more energy to cool off when the amount of sunlight doesn&#8217;t change. Physics tells us that the an object at a higher temperature radiates more energy than an object at a lower temperature. Below is a graphic from a NASA research group showing <a href=\"https:\/\/data.giss.nasa.gov\/gistemp\/graphs_v4\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">how globally-averaged temperature has increased since the late 1800s<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/data.giss.nasa.gov\/gistemp\/graphs_v4\/graph_data\/Temperature_Anomalies_over_Land_and_over_Ocean\/graph.png\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I created this course back in 2012, and my colleague Professor Jack Scheff has taken it over for now. The main focus of Global Environmental Change has not really changed though. Specifically, I built the course to present an overview of modern-day climate change, and, more fundamentally, how the Earth&#8217;s carbon cycle is the core [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":490,"featured_media":0,"parent":40,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-74","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P2kjqv-1c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/490"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":70,"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2483,"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74\/revisions\/2483"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}