Of MOOCs and Global Warming: David Archer Harper Lecture

[00:00:00] Katie Skeen: everyone well welcome University of Chicago alumni parents friends this is the 2013 Philadelphia Harper lecture we do this every year usually in the fall my name is Katie Skeen and as president of the Alumni Club of Philadelphia and on behalf of our leadership team I'd like to thank you for participating in tonight's lecture the Harper lecture series is a key component of a tradition of lifelong learning with faculty members traveling from campus to engage the UChicago community around the world tonight's lecture is just one example of the many programs and events that are offered in our region ranging from happy hours and quiz nights to conversations with distinguished alumni and outings to local attractions and cultural spaces we hope you find this network to be a meaningful resource and an enduring connection to the University I'd also like to take a moment to extend a special thank you to members of the Alumni Board of Governors regional board officers and alumni volunteers who have helped make this event possible your commitment to the advancement of the University is vital and it's continued success and I want to invite all of you to come up to me or Mary or Vivian after the lecture if you like to find out how you can get more involved with the volunteer network whether by helping with alumni club events interviewing prospective students we always need we import need more people for that sponsoring a Metcalf internship or joining one of the universities committees and affinity groups and now I'm very pleased to introduce professor David Archer David Archer is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and has been a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago for 20 years he teaches classes on global warming environmental chemistry and global biogeochemical cycles and has published on Earth's carbon cycle and its interaction with global climate he also blogs at the site realclimate.org whose subtitle is climate science from climate scientists as his talk will I'm sure bring to your attention his MOOC or a massive open online course global warming the science of climate change begins this Monday October 21st and runs for eight weeks it is free to register and you can find it at Coursera org and professor Archer will also field questions at the end of his talk so I welcome professor David Archer [00:02:42] David Archer: Thank you. Thank you. So I have done a couple of different alumni talks before. This is the third. I went to New York and Denver. And it's always really energizing for me to talk to people who are really excited about the University of Chicago who aren't there anymore. You know, because you guys are really, you know, remembering it fondly with stars in your eyes. And it's always really good thing for me to come and talk to you. So I have been this last, these last months, I have been working on this, this class, this, this MOOC. And like you just heard, it opened, it starts on Monday. So I was frantically getting the last details ready to go and then, you know, hopped on the airplane to come here. So I'm sort of in the thick of it. There are people who are involved in these massive classes for whom this is their primary professional passion, teaching the world. And then, you know, the people at Stanford who put together Coursera, you know, this is what they're doing. They're trying to figure out how to hack a computer and hack the student brain to be able to build a classroom experience that can be sort of given away for free on the internet. My professional passion is I'm a climate scientist. And I'm concerned about what we're doing to the atmosphere. And I'm trying to help out by doing sort of scientific outreach. So I've written books, I've worked on this blog, Real Climate. Real Climate. I do a lot of speaking at libraries and, you know, church groups and things like that. And the Coursera MOOC is kind of just my latest ride, basically. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. I can speak to why I'm in it. But why, you know, somebody would put together a MOOC to teach freshman chemistry, you'd have to ask them because, you know, theirs is a different world than mine. So rather than sort of show you, you know, a history of MOOCs, I wanted to show you a history of my class, because it's now ended up in Coursera, but I've been doing it for a long time. And so I just want to show you where this comes from and a little bit about what's in it and stuff. Those of you who have taken Coursera classes, I have never actually taken a Coursera class. So, you know, how this all fits together is kind of, you know, pretty amazing to me. Those of you who have taken Coursera classes, maybe, you know, won't be quite as amazed, or, you know, maybe you won't even be impressed when you because you, but, you know, so I'll just show you how it looks to me. So the class, this is actually a flyer that was stuck on a door in the geology building, when Ray Pierre Humbert, my colleague in the department, who is, he's actually an atmospheric dynamicist, I'm an ocean chemist, so I'm interested in the carbon cycle in the oceans and how CO2 works and things like that. And so we sort of knew different parts of this. And we put our heads together and tried to figure out how to teach about the climate issue to non-science majors. And it was just a revelation, you know, for myself anyway, I assume for Ray also. And so this first one was in 1996. This flyer was saved by the TA, who was a professor at Northwestern by the time she said, Oh, yeah, I still have this from, you know, 10 years ago, and gave me a scanned copy. We both learned a lot. I had finished my PhD in ocean CO2, which is all about climate, and I didn't really understand the greenhouse effect, honestly, until I prepped to do this class. And the foundation of the class hasn't changed in, you know, since we first did it in 1996. We figured out, you know, how to explain the world to each other, Ray and I, and it just fit. And the class really hasn't changed much since then. So a little bit about kind of just to give you a flavor of what the class is like. It starts out with a kind of an algebra story problem, that you have this planet, and it's getting sunlight at a certain rate, which is determined by how bright the sun is and how far away it is from the earth, and how much of the sunlight gets reflected back out to space by clouds and shiny things like ice. And snow. So that's the energy coming in. And then the rate at which energy leaves the planet is a function of the temperature of the planet. This is the Stefan Boltzmann relation, it talks about how much energy an object will shine off into space. So, you know, if you turn on an electric burner and let it get really hot, you'll see it glowing red hot. You can turn out the lights and see it's actually making light. But even if you turn off the burner and let it just be room temperature, it's still making light, but we can't see it because we don't see in the infrared. But how much light it is generating is given by this formula. These are constants, this is the temperature raised to the fourth power. So it's a very, very sensitive function of temperature. The hotter you make it, the faster you shed energy. So what I tell the students is that it's like a kitchen sink where you turn on the faucet and the water starts going into the sink, and then the water level kind of builds up in the sink. And the higher the water level in the sink goes, the more pressure there is pushing it down the drain. So the water level rises until it reaches the point where the water is in balance, it's going down the drain as quickly as it's coming in from the faucet. You know, if you were to go up to it and dump a bucket of water in, it would be too high, but then it would sink until it got to that equilibrium water level where the budget balanced. Or if you start from nothing, it will grow to that. And that's the way energy is here. The energy, the thermal energy of the earth is, you know, just passing through, just like the water in the sink is just kind of, you know, passing through. So the thing that really kicked me in the head when I was prepping to do this class, and I didn't really understand the greenhouse effect, was this. This is called the layer model. So the idea of this goes back to Fourier, who was a mathematician in Napoleon's army in Egypt. As they were blowing the nose off the Sphinx, he was thinking about heat. And he came up with this, how the atmosphere could make the earth warmer than it would be without it. So what's going on is that this atmosphere, which we're kind of thinking about as like a pane of glass, it's selective in that the visible light that comes in from the sun goes through it no problem. But then the infrared light that comes up from the ground gets absorbed by this pane of glass. And then the pane of glass itself is going to shine light up and down according to its temperature. So it's the same Stefan Boltzmann equation that determines, you know, this coming from the ground, the function of the temperature of the ground here from the atmosphere, temperature of the atmosphere. And so now this is kind of a nastier algebra story problem from the point of view of, you know, some sort of math phobic English major types who, you know, sweat blood getting this done, but they do it. University of Chicago students will follow you anywhere if you explain to them what you're doing and every rung of the ladder, they will just climb right up. It's really fabulous. I've had people tell me that at their universities, they could never teach this stuff to non science majors. But at Chicago, it's not a problem as long as you're clear. So the bottom line is that this pane of glass, the atmosphere and the earth, they have different temperatures. And each one has to have a temperature such that its energy budget balances. So the energy flowing into the ground from the sun or down from the atmosphere combined has to balance the energy leaving the ground. And then the same has to be true for the atmosphere. And if you do the, if you do it, if you solve it, you find out that the atmosphere is the same temperature as the naked planet was before, because that's the one that has to shine light to space. And it has to balance the sunlight, but the earth is warmer than it was before. So the pane of glass doesn't bring energy, it just helps trap it. In the kitchen sink analogy, it's as though a little piece of cucumber or something got stuck on the drain and kind of impeded the flow down the drain. You know, the piece of cucumber doesn't bring any water with it, but if it sits there long enough and it makes it harder for water to go down the drain, it'll raise the water level in the sink. And so that's what this atmosphere is doing is it's just making it harder for the energy to leave the planet. And so it makes the standing stock of the energy as it's flowing through be higher in the earth, in the earth system. So this goes back to the 1700s or something. Fourier didn't really know what in the atmosphere would interact with infrared light. It was another, a guy named John Tyndall who figured out that, so Fourier was interested in why there were ice ages. Because they had just discovered, you know, that these beautiful, you know, mountains in the Alps that gentlemen, scientists would go hiking in, in Switzerland or whatever, used to be covered with ice. It used to look like Greenland. It must have been really frightening to think, you know, how could the weather have been so different, you know, at some time in the distant past. And so the sort of gentleman geologists of the day were all trying to figure out about the ice ages. So Fourier thought, well, to make it colder, you got to get rid of half of the atmosphere or something like that, which is kind of a tall order. But then Tyndall figured out that most of the atmosphere doesn't do this trick of absorbing infrared at all. It's only just trace gases, just a tiny fraction of the air is responsible for this trick. So you don't have to change the whole mass of the atmosphere to change the climate of the earth. You just have to change these little trace components. And it comes down to whether the vibrations of the molecules create an imbalance in the electric field. So most of the gases in the atmosphere are like oxygen or nitrogen. So oxygen is two oxygen atoms. And they're totally the same. And they're, you know, they're connected together by this chemical bond. And they can kind of vibrate like this. But no matter how you vibrate it, it's always symmetric. There's not a difference between one side and the other. And so oxygen and nitrogen are not greenhouse gases because the way the gas can absorb the light is the light coming through is sort of changing the electric field. Light is made of electric field and magnetic field. And so for the molecule to be sort of an antenna that can absorb that energy, when it vibrates, you have to make a positive charge on one side and negative on the other and then switch it back and forth. So this is what CO2 looks like. And in its resting state, it's totally symmetric. So, you know, on first glance, you might not think that would be a greenhouse gas either. But because it's got three atoms in it, when it vibrates, it has to vibrate in different sort of modes. So there are these three different modes of vibration. There is a symmetric stretch, which is kind of like this. And that's totally symmetric. So there's no difference in the electric field, you know, from one side to the other. So this mode doesn't do anything with infrared. The one that really does is the band, which is like this. So the oxygens are a little bit negative and the carbon is a little bit positive. So when it's bent down this way, there's sort of a negative charge on this side and a positive charge on that side. And then when it swings the other way, it's the other way. And so a beam of light can come in and it can make this vibrate more quickly. So it's like the CO2 is a good antenna for absorbing the light because it has this asymmetry in the electric charge of the molecule. And then there's this asymmetric stretch, which is like this. Everybody always loves that. And that one also can absorb and emit infrared light because it breaks the symmetry here. Although this one, there isn't as much light in the frequency range of this vibration. And so this one is not as important to climate as this one. This is the one that makes CO2 a climate issue. So this will be the last of the sort of technical stuff, I think, for a while. This is a graph of what the light looks like leaving the Earth. So we're standing on a satellite 70 kilometers up and looking down at the ground with infrared eyes. These smooth curves, those are called black body curves. And they, the different ones, are at different temperatures. So this smooth curve here is the spectrum of light that an object at a fairly cold temperature would be emitting. And then as you dial up the temperature, the whole thing gets bigger. Remember, it's got to get bigger as the temperature raised to the fourth power. So it's a very strong function of the temperature, how it gets bigger. And then the other thing that you can sort of see going on here is that as the temperature goes up, the peak, the wavelength where the light is the most intense, is changing. And that's why the stove in your kitchen just shines infrared at room temperature, which we can't see. But then if it gets hot, you can start to see red because it's pushing over and it kind of encroaches into the red part of the spectrum. And then if it gets really hot, it goes all through the visible spectrum. So that's white hot. You know, any kid on the playground knows that white hot is hotter than red hot. And that's why it's because this peak, you know, gets over into the visible part. So if the earth was just, had no atmosphere, if it was just a naked planet like that first slide, its spectrum would be one of these smooth curves, depending on what the temperature of the earth is. But as it is, there are some parts of the spectrum where nothing in the atmosphere really absorbs light. So this is the main such region. This is called the atmospheric window. So you can kind of view, this is the spectrum that the sort of virtual satellite really sees. You can kind of view this as like scale of a thermometer. And you're using this satellite sort of as a thermometer. And so the temperature of the ground is sort of in between these two, these two, I guess, would be about 270 Kelvin probably. So it's like those ear thermometers that measure, you know, the temperature of your kid when he's got the fever or something. That's just how they do it, is they measure the intensity of light at some wavelength in the infrared and then compare it with a scale and get the temperature from it. But then there are other parts of the spectrum where the greenhouse gases absorb and emit light. And this is the big one. This is from the bending vibration of the CO2. So the frequency of that, that oscillation, which is, you know, determined by the, how heavy the atoms are and how springy the springs of the chemical bonds are, says that the frequency will be here. And so looking down from the sky, what you see, the light that you see coming up, isn't coming up all the way from the ground because that light gets absorbed by the CO2. It's coming from fairly high up in the atmosphere where the, where the air is colder. So looking down from space, it looks like the atmosphere is very cold in this range. And that's because you're seeing the top of the atmosphere. And that's because the, the, the, the air is, is, is opaque in that frequency because CO2 is a greenhouse gas. If we could see light in this frequency, it would be foggy all the time. You could see, you know, a couple hundred yards or something and that's it because the CO2, you know, absorbs and then re-emits that light. So, one more technical slide. This, this business of the, the, the peak leads to an interesting phenomenon you may have heard of, or maybe not, called the band saturation effect. Which is, if you put, so here's what the Earth would like if there was no CO2 in it. So that big bite out of the spectrum is not there. And so it looks more like the atmospheric window kind of all through here. This, this hairy stuff here is because of water vapor, which is another greenhouse gas. And, and this one is because of ozone. And then methane is kind of here, but we've zeroed out the CO2 here. So, so, so it's gone. And then we add a little more, a little bit of CO2, just 10 parts per million. So the, the natural value for CO2 was 280 parts per million back in sort of the year 1750. And just last year it crossed 400 PPM. So this is only 10 PPM. That's like, you know, 2% of, of where we are today. But just that tiny amount of CO2 makes a fairly visible looking little peak there. And then you go up by a factor of 10 and the peak has gotten bigger and, and deeper here. And then another factor of 10, you see it's gotten fatter, but it doesn't really get any deeper. Because when you're looking down, what you see is the coldest air in the atmosphere. And, uh, putting more CO2 doesn't really change that very much. It's kind of like if you're standing on a pier and looking down into some, uh, uh, murky kind of, uh, pond water. Say if the water was very clear, maybe you could see all the way to the bottom, you know, the, to the old tire that's down there. I live in Chicago, it's how I see things, right? Uh, but if you put some suspended stuff in there, maybe you can only see a few feet into the water. And then you put more suspended stuff and maybe you can see a few inches and then more, maybe, you know, just a few, uh, you know, just, just a, just a few millimeters or something. It's sort of asymptotes, you know, how, how deep the, the light comes from that you can see in this water. You know, it can only get sort of so shallow before it runs out of water. And that's kind of what's happening here. So, uh, starting really early on in the class, uh, I, uh, we had these online models. And, uh, we had these online models that the students can play with. And so this is, this is a model that generates these spectra. And this is pretty much how it looked, uh, way back ten years ago when I first, uh, put this together. Actually, when I first did it, this part that had the controls was on one window of a browser. And my then sort of 12 year old son, and, and this part was in another window of a browser. And then my, my, my son who was 12 or 13 at the time told me how to put them together into one browser window using, uh, frames. So, you know, that was pretty cool. I was very appreciative of that. And, and he will appear later in the story actually is why I bring it up now. Um, but so the, the, the, these, these online models have always been available to people from outside to use. You know, all the way from the beginning that was sort of part of the outreach of this class is to have these models on a server. And, you know, hope that people will find them and use them to teach their classes. So another, um, piece of the class is, um, something has, uh, the, the, the, the, you know, so the whole question of global warming, there's thousands of people who, you know, can do, have done research on that and, and, and talk about that. Um, the, this is sort of my own personal, uh, obsession is the long time implications of releasing CO2. So this is, uh, a plot with a very long time scale of, of 40,000 years. And even here, this is only sort of getting going. And what we're looking at is, uh, the fraction of some CO2 that's released to the atmosphere that is still in the atmosphere as a function of time. So this is the fossil fuel era. We are here and the CO2 is rising. Uh, of course, if we dumped all the CO2 in the atmosphere all at once, the next instant, 100% of it would be in the atmosphere. But we're, we're putting it in, you know, at a rate which allows it to be absorbed by the oceans and by the land to some extent. So actually today, something like half of the CO2 that we've ever emitted is in the atmosphere. And, uh, so if we were to go cold turkey on CO2 today, we would be there. Or, you know, in a hundred years, if we stop cold turkey then, it would still be the same roughly proportion, about half would be in the atmosphere at that time. And then, uh, it initially goes down pretty quickly as, as the, the, the carbon is dissolving in the oceans. Uh, it doesn't, I mean, you look at a globe, you would think that the, the oceans would absorb CO2 immediately because they cover 70% of the Earth's surface and there's a lot more carbon in the ocean than there is in the atmosphere. And so, you know, the early people thinking about this didn't think that people could really change the atmospheric CO2 because it seemed like the atmosphere, the atmosphere is just this thin layer and the ocean is kind of calling the shots. Um, but it turns out that the way the water circulates in the ocean, it takes a long time for CO2 to get down into the deep part of the ocean, which is where most of the water is. The overturning time scale of the water in the ocean is about a thousand years. I've been out at sea in the equatorial Pacific. I remember, uh, and, and, uh, you know, it was hot out on deck. I was wearing Tevas and, and we had these water samplers that, uh, we were taking water samples and, uh, some of it splashed on my feet. It was really cold, really amazing to think how cold this water was in this blazing hot sun. And to also think that the last time this water saw the atmosphere was, you know, in the time of Julius Caesar or something like that. Really incredible. So that kind of limits how quickly the ocean can take up the CO2, this slow circulation time. But it's still, you know, a couple of hundred years or something, maybe a thousand to, to, uh, and it takes up most of the carbon, but it doesn't take up all of it. If the oceans were infinitely big or if they were, you know, uh, very, uh, alkaline, like, uh, you know, they use, uh, uh, water with, with, uh, with base in it, a chemical base to scrub CO2 out of, you know, like the air and submarines or, uh, spaceships or something like that. Um, so if the ocean was like that, maybe it could take up all of the carbon, but it doesn't. It takes up about three quarters of it or something and then leaves, uh, the rest that has to, um, well, the extra CO2 sort of, uh, acidifies the ocean. And then reactions with calcium carbonate can kind of neutralize that acid. So calcium carbonate is what Tums are made out of. If you have an acid stomach from eating the wrong dinner, you can take a Tums and it will neutralize, uh, your stomach. Same thing is happening here. And that allows the ocean to take up a bit more CO2, but then there's this last sort of 10% that, uh, takes hundreds of thousands of years to go away. And, uh, so that's, that's what we call the long tail of the CO2. So I wrote this other book as a sort of outreach thing. I wrote this one. Uh, I tried to write it so that my parents could read it. You know, non, non scientists. And I think they eventually, my dad was trapped in an airport or something and got through it. Uh, but it's about, cause, cause when you hear about global warming, you hear about it as sort of a hundred year kind of an issue. You never hear about the longer, the longer impacts. Um, so, uh, I can show you, uh, another one of these models. Uh, so, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the greenhouse gases, uh, methane and CO2. So we are releasing, uh, a certain amount of, of each gas. It's the same amount for each gas. And, uh, the concentrations sort of go up and then, and then, uh, for methane, it comes down fairly quickly. Cause methane degrades in, in about a decade in the atmosphere. Whereas the CO2 sort of accumulates. Methane is not as band saturated as CO2 because there's not as much methane in the atmosphere. So that absorption band, you know, taking a bite out of the spectrum, uh, is, is, it doesn't reach all the way to the bottom for methane. So a molecule of methane is, is worth like 40 molecules of CO2 in terms of how much light it absorbs right after you release it. But the methane goes away within a sort of a decade. Well, so because the, the methane is, um, uh, is, is a more powerful greenhouse gas. You get more warming initially from the methane than you do from the CO2. But if you look on a long enough time scale. So we're going to go out to a thousand years now. You see that the CO2 sticks around for a really long time. And it takes a thousand years to warm up the ocean. The, which is basically what, you know, it takes to warm up the planet. So the methane kind of like flashes and kind of warms things up a bit while it exists, but then it's gone. Whereas the CO2 just kind of keeps pushing and it, you know, over a long enough period of time, it, it, uh, has a much more profound impact on the climate because it's got an attention span, which is long compared to how long it takes to change the climate of the earth. So, um, this is a plot of, uh, reconstructed sea level through, uh, time in the geologic past. So here's today sea level is by, by definition zero. And the average temperature of the planet is about 15 degrees. Here is the last glacial maximum, which is about 20,000 years ago. And it was astonishingly only about six, five or six degrees colder. Uh, the ice age, you know, looked like a different planet from space. Uh, but, but it was only five or six degrees, uh, colder than, than today. The average temperature, it's like a fever. It makes a big difference that you wouldn't really get. Uh, but then the point is that the, the sea level was about 120 meters lower during the last ice age because of all the ice that was piled up in Chicago and, and, uh, and here probably, uh, and in, in Europe. So the Laurentide ice sheet and the Phenoscandian ice sheet, uh, removed 120 meters worth of the ocean, out of the ocean. Uh, and then there are other climate times, uh, further back in time. The Pliocene was a time when there wasn't much of any ice in Greenland. Sea level was maybe 20 meters higher then, and the temperature a few degrees warmer. And then this is what an ice free planet kind of looks like. Most of Earth history has been ice free. Uh, we're kind of in an unusual interval in that there's any ice on the planet at all. So there's these sort of 150 million year cycles, uh, with, with, you know, short sort of ice ages like we are in, and then longer hothouse kinds of climate climates. So if you go to the Natural History Museum and look at the dinosaur dioramas, you know, they're always tropical looking because they lived in a tropical kind of a world. So, you know, there's a whole world of complexity in this, but you can also just kind of connect the dots, and it, you know, it's, it's sort of, and then for comparison, this is what the forecast that you get from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is this body, uh, the United Nations sponsors, but, you know, it's university people and national lab people and scientists like me who do all the work, uh, uh, of writing these reports, uh, they forecast, you know, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's in the offing for the future. So the forecast for the end of the century is about three degrees warming and maybe a meter of sea level change. And the reason, which is, you know, basically nothing compared to this scale, you know, it looks like it's right, right there at zero. And the reason why this is not on this line is because the ice sheets don't have time to get where they're going by the year 2100. It takes maybe a thousand years or a few thousand years for the ice sheets to respond. So by the year 2100, it's just not there yet. It's, it's, it's a time scale that's appropriate to us as, you know, mortal beings, but it's not the appropriate time scale for the physics of the problem. So, uh, what this means is that the sea level that we are, the sea level change that we are, you know, uh, inflicting on the planet is like a hundred times worse than what you have heard from the IPCC. Because in the fullness of time, there's, there's time for those ice sheets to change and, and, uh, have a much bigger impact than will happen hopefully within, you know, the life's times of our grandchildren or whatever. So, uh, I wrote a textbook for the class in, uh, 1996. This is what the cover looked like. And then, uh, second edition came out a few years ago. Uh, the first edition demonstrated to me how bad I was at proofreading. So there was an error page I had on my computer. It was like my, you know, document of shame of all the errors. And so, uh, this one is, was a lot cleaner. And, uh, this is how the enrollment in our class has gone. It started out with 40 students that first year. And then Ray and I sort of traded it off for a while. And then after the first textbook came out and also that, uh, that, uh, Al Gore movie, whatever it was, was around then. Maybe some of them saw that, but, but, uh, it has sort of blown up into now it's the most popular class at the University of Chicago. So it's, it's, it's part of the core, the, the core, uh, curriculum. So this is intended for non science majors. You know, everybody has to take a couple of science classes. Although there are a lot of science classes that want to take it too. So we have a variant where a science major can, can do some extra work and, and get science level credit for it too. Uh, and then a few years after that, uh, I had my department chair buy me a little video camera. Uh, and, uh, I set it up in the front of the, the classroom, uh, to videotape all of my lectures. And, uh, so this is, uh, this is all of the lectures for the class. And so, you know, you saw the, the naked earth climate model and the greenhouse effect. And you saw about what makes the greenhouse gas. And then the, the, the business with the spectrum that was here. And then there's more stuff about how the atmosphere works, you know, feedbacks. And then at this point, we kind of take a break from climate physics and start talking about, uh, chemistry. The carbon cycle and, and the long tail of the CO2 and things like that. Where the fossil fuels come from, uh, what's, you know, what's happening. And then kind of what the, how things are going for the future. So a lot of people seemed to appreciate the lectures. Uh, and then, uh, a little after that, I, I, I, uh, I read about, uh, these MOOCs. You know, this, this was right about the time that the first, uh, Coursera MOOC came out. Uh, it was, uh, uh, an artificial intelligence class. And actually my, that same son did that. He got an A minus or something in it. They had that class had 150,000 students in it. So, uh, uh, uh, I, um, put up a system on a computer in my department, uh, called Moodle, which is a content management thing that lets you, uh, so here are those lectures you just saw. And then I took all of the, the exercises that students were doing in their lab sections with those online models or solving the story problem or whatever. And I, I wrote them up and, and they're there. And, you know, a couple thousand people, uh, signed up for it. And, and, you know, a fraction of those actually went through it. And people seem to, you know, be really into it. But, uh, Coursera is where the, uh, where the action is. And so I, I sort of took the effort to, to, to move it there. And at this, so at this time, my, my son Jeremy got a job working for this guy in the law school named David Weissbach, who's interested in, in climate issues, a great guy. And he, uh, so Jeremy put together this model, online model that, uh, you know, had these sliders and things. It was really cool. I figured, you know, if he can do it, I can do it, right? And so I got him to show me how to do it. Uh, and, um, here is what the new, uh, the new, uh, infrared model is. Uh, infrared model looks like. You know, it's much snazzier, uses these Google chart tools. Um, and, uh, basically, I redid all these models. Uh, and this is, I'll confess to you, what I've been doing since January. Is redoing these models and making them so that they are, so that they are efficient enough computationally that I could have, you know, a hundred times the traffic that I had before and, and have them still work and make them, you know, look nice and everything. Uh, and I was able to do, um, things that, uh, I would never have been able to do before. Uh, so this is a, a, uh, a browser for all of the, uh, meteorological station data in the world. So there are 7,000, uh, weather stations around the world. All these little gray points, those are weather stations. The blue dots there are, uh, glaciers. And so there are, like, 400 glaciers around the world. So you can see, here's how the, how the length of this particular glacier has changed over time. Um, here is one that lets you make, uh, maps. These are, uh, climate model results. So there's this massive repository of data from all of these climate models. My understanding is this is one of the three or four biggest databases in the world. Uh, after the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and, uh, Google. Presumably the National Science Agency has, uh, NSA probably has big data sets anyway also. So you can, uh, you know, make these maps. So we're looking at, uh, surface temperatures from a particular model here. And then, uh, make, uh, sort of a slide show or even a movie. Watch temperatures change. We can, uh, calculate the anomalies, which is how much it's warmed up since 2100 or since, since 2000. It takes a second to, to buffer sometimes. And there is, of course, the well-known demo effect. So, uh, we, uh, Coursera wanted us to re-record all of the videos. So the videos before were in this 45-minute format from, you know, a classroom. I once, I, I had a, I have a, a time-lapse camera that I use to take pictures of sunsets and things like that. And I surreptitiously put it up in the front of the classroom before one of my lectures once. And it was funny. You'd see the students kind of doing like this. And then toward the end of the, they, they, they wilted like flowers. It was the funniest thing. So redoing these, uh, these, um, videos in, in a short format. You know, sort of five minutes, two to, two to ten minutes is how long they want these videos to be. And it was really cool because they, they seem very punchy. Like you can say something and you don't have to repeat it a bunch of times because it's just, you're not saying that much. And, and if they want to look at it again, they can look at it again. So the amazing thing is that recording these videos in this shorter format, anybody want to guess if it took fewer or more minutes to convey the material? It took fewer. You want to guess how much fewer? It took one third, one third of the number of minutes. So the 45 minute lectures, uh, there are 23 of them. So that's like 18 hours of video. Who would want to sit through that? These, it comes to about six hours. And it's the same material. Incredible. [00:44:05] Speaker 3: What is that reflecting though? That in a lecture, traditional lecture format, you're, you're just repeating yourself naturally. Whereas when it's focused like that, it gets edited out? [00:44:16] David Archer: Uh, well, I, I start with a blackboard that's already got stuff written on it. So there's no time spent watching me write. You know, in a classroom, it's good to have time writing. I don't teach from PowerPoint because you have to have time to write. You have to have time to write your notes. Students have to have time to write. So I like to do blackboard, but it does take time. And doing that in advancement, I didn't have to do that. And there's less repetition. Uh, but I was astonished. I still am not sure. You know, it's amazing to me that it's so different. Yeah. [00:44:47] Speaker 4: Does that mean you could just simply triple your lecture material? It's not as much. [00:44:53] David Archer: Well, I, I talk about everything that's interesting. There's no need. So, uh, this is, this is one of the, the videos. This is a short one. I thought you might want to see just a couple of minutes of, of how this looks. Um, so the first one, I just set up a camera in front of the classroom and, and did it. And nobody, you know, seemed to mind that I was giving away, you know, what these students had paid tuition to see. But they didn't, they didn't, you know, they didn't bother me. They just kind of let me do it and didn't worry about it. But for this, these classes are very, very polished. There are these, you can see these intro videos on the Coursera site and they're professionally done. And I think what's happening is the schools are viewing this as marketing. So, uh, this is what one of these things looks like. There's all these, they call this B-roll. This is like, it's beautiful. You know, it makes me want to go to impacts in the climate system. It's called the ice albedo feedback. Albedo is a word that, uh, is, it is. I don't know. You want to watch this whole thing or just? Fraction of light that gets reflected back out to space. So when visible light comes in and gets reflected back to space, uh, it doesn't deposit energy as heat to the planet. We saw the albedo in the layer model. So the higher the albedo of the planet, the colder the planet is because it doesn't use that energy. Uh, that, that, that light to, uh, fuel its own, uh, thermal energy. It just loses it off the top. So that's boring. So at the end of these clips, there are, this is one of the Coursera bits of wizardry. They, they, they, they give you the capacity to, uh, have these little questions. So, uh, the ice albedo feedback, is it a positive or a negative feedback? It's a positive feedback. I know that. [00:46:53] Speaker 3: Uh, so, um. [00:46:56] David Archer: So this is part of what we'll start on Monday? Yes. Yes. How do we access that? Uh, you can go to Coursera.org and, and, uh, create an account on there, which is free. And then there are hundreds of classes and you can sign up for any of them. They, they, they start at particular times. This is something I learned from the, the Coursera people. My class, the first one that I just did myself, is just open. So you can create an account and watch them anytime you want. But this one, of course, is that the Coursera people said you have to have deadlines or else nobody will do anything. So, you know, once it starts, it runs like clockwork. And they don't need me anymore once it's built. But, um, it, uh, it, it has these deadlines. Yeah. Okay. [00:47:53] Speaker 5: So I just noticed, um, just that clip itself, it looked, that didn't look like video. That was like film calls. What were you filming that? [00:47:59] David Archer: They, they, they, they just had a couple of video cameras. It is video. I mean, you know, on a computer there. What else? [00:48:07] Speaker 5: It definitely looks better than when I did it myself in the classroom. [00:48:15] David Archer: I'll definitely acknowledge that. Yeah. So how, how long did it take you to film the entire course? Uh, probably, uh, four or five afternoons. Yeah. We just lined them up and did them. [00:48:29] Speaker ?: Wow. [00:48:30] David Archer: So, uh, somewhere here is, I'm, I have trouble finding the, uh, the rest of the tabs here. Well, what, what feedback have you gotten from people out in Virginia? [00:48:45] Speaker ?: Yeah. Yeah. [00:48:47] David Archer: Well, not a lot. I've given sort of, uh, access to the site to people that I know, former graduate students and things saying, you know, if you find any errors, let me know or whatever. But, you know, I mean, it's hard for people to find time for, for stuff. [00:49:02] Speaker ?: Uh, let's see. [00:49:03] David Archer: So, this is what the class looks like to me as the creator. It's divided up into these, uh, weeks. There are eight weeks. Um, the, uh, you know, the, the video things are fairly short and they all have, uh, questions at the end and there are some of some homework sort of problems that happen. Uh, so yeah, there it is. We're, we're, we're sort of new at this. We've hired a couple of undergrads to, to help out, monitor discussion forums and things like that, but we don't know how busy they're going to be or what they're going to have to do because this is a new thing for everybody. There have been this, there are two MOOCs that have been made from UC so far. The first one is already running. It's about, uh, pricing assets or something like that in the economics department. Very, very high level. The guys that were filming it were like, I have no idea what's going on. Your class, I can understand that class. I don't understand, but it's a lot of, you know, it's getting a lot of positive, uh, feedback and everything. Uh, and then there's more that are, that are sort of coming. Yeah. Yeah. [00:50:12] Speaker ?: What I want to know is what role the University of Chicago play? [00:50:14] Speaker 4: Did you set this whole thing up? [00:50:19] David Archer: Uh, for the first of the two MOOCs, the one that I set up myself, that was just me. But Coursera, well then I sent an email to Coursera saying, "Hey, you got a lot of classes. Why don't you look at mine?" And they never even responded to me because they do business with whole universities. So then I was on a committee to talk about whether the university should sign up with Coursera, in which case we were obligated as an institution to supply two classes. And then there's also one that we joined, uh, which is a little later in its, you know, it hasn't gotten as far along, uh, which comes out of MIT and Harvard called EdX. And the difference there is, and both of them, they need an institutional, you know, it's the institution that joins, not individual faculty. Um, EdX, I think they do more of the, this sort of stuff for you, but they charge you money for it. Whereas Coursera, you sort of do it yourself. Um, and there's also, uh, one called Udacity, which I guess is a commercial enterprise. And that one is individual faculty kind of hooking up with, with, with the things. Yeah. [00:51:28] Speaker 4: What is the business, what is the business model at the moment for Coursera with regard to the professors that do courses and the undergraduates that support it and so forth? And what is the anticipated business model for the, for Coursera? [00:51:47] David Archer: Well, those are very different questions. So yeah, the, the business model for Coursera now is that they have a lot, a bunch of sort of money that has been donated. They do make some money by selling the names of their graduates of technical classes to companies who might want to hire them. But, you know, they're not going to make much money off of, uh, my class here. But it seems like in the larger scheme of things, you know, college tuition is so expensive that, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's really interesting to wonder what's going to happen in 10, 20 years. If this will become a viable alternative to actually, you know, going to college. It's not yet because there's no security. You don't, a person could sign up for the same class with six different email addresses. And, you know, use the first five as practice and then get an A on the fifth, the sixth one. And you would never know. But, um, they're working on ways of validating. Uh, so they could give an exam that would be proctored, like in the same place where, you know, kids take the SAT or something like that. Or they could have the camera on the computer watching you as you take the exam and then it records a video and then some guy, some person in a proctor farm in the third world or something is watching, you know, half a dozen people at once in fast motion to make sure that you're not looking at your cell phone while you're doing it. You know, it seems like it will eventually be a credible, you know, uh, accreditation. I mean, uh, something that will actually mean something if you're trying to go get a job. Look, I did this, these classes through Coursera. And, uh, you know, to me, it seems like a person, a student who had done that would have demonstrated a lot more initiative than, you know, a kid who goes to college because everybody goes to college and, you know, it's fun. And I guess there are classes you have to keep up with, but you know, life has its drawbacks, you know, sitting in your parents' basement and doing these classes online. That's, that's a really impressive thing. And I've heard there was a story on the New York Times about some kid from the middle of nowhere. I don't remember where, who is now, you know, in the math department in the graduate program at MIT or something because of these online classes. And there's schools that are, you know, in, in other countries that are using these as, uh, you know, their primary material. So, you know, where this goes in 10, 20 years is, is anybody's guess. I don't think it'll put the University of Chicago out of business. But, you know, maybe community colleges are gonna, of course, they're also doing classes like this for their own students too. Yeah. [00:54:27] Speaker 6: So that brings to mind the problem of intellectual property more than anything. Like, is that, is intellectual property an issue? It, it, it, it, I mean, you're very much interested in teaching the whole world, but in terms of the university, it's like, you're, you're our property in some senses. [00:54:45] David Archer: Well, so this is all based on my own textbook, which I don't have the copyright for. And we did actually have a few minutes of, you gotta be kidding me, about a week ago, when my editor at Wiley said, I'm not sure I want to give you permission to use these. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? You don't want me to show pictures that I drew in my own book to tens of thousands of people maybe, and you think it's gonna hurt sales? And so he backed off on that, but it is definitely, you know, an issue. I can't show things that I don't have permission to show. Interesting. [00:55:23] Speaker ?: Yes. [00:55:24] David Archer: You know what? [00:55:25] Speaker ?: This is, this is-- [00:55:26] David Archer: There's a microphone here that, that they're using to, they're recording. This is, this is back history. [00:55:33] Speaker 7: When, when I was at Chicago a long time ago, back in 1948, I was taking organic chemistry. And the guy who was our lab instructor went on to teach in University of California. But his background was geochemistry. And I can't remember the guy's name, I'm embarrassed. Because what he did was, you have a sort of a crusade about climate change and I'm going for, I'm hurry for that. His thing was population. Here was a guy whose background was geochemistry. And that's what he was teaching in California. But he actually took a year off in 19, wait a minute, 1958. Because he felt so strongly that population was such a major problem worldwide. That he took a leave of absence to go traveling all around the country. Talking about the population explosion. And you know, I'm embarrassed because I don't remember the guy's name. Does this ring any bells to you? I don't know. Because he was, he did get his doctorate at University of Chicago. And it was in geochemistry. [00:56:51] David Archer: There's a book I read a few years back called The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Which sounds a little dry, but for me, I don't know why, but I just couldn't put it down. A very thick, thick book. And the amazing thing was that a lot of geochemistry actually, so those guys after they got done making the bomb, they started doing geochemistry, dating the earth by measuring isotopes of lead and things like that. And the University of Chicago was, I mean, it's really where geochemistry was born actually. Yeah, you get that impression from reading that book. [00:57:24] Speaker 7: Well, I'm interested to remember the last name behind the virus, because I don't remember it. And I remember because he was an absolutely fantastic lap guy. And of course, but I didn't work my buns off and didn't do that well. [00:57:40] David Archer: Organic chemistry. I saw a bumper sticker once, honk if you passed ochem. Yeah. Yes. [00:57:46] Speaker 3: From a mission perspective, it sounds as if -- sorry. From a mission perspective, it sounds as if you are relatively confident that a student taking your MOOC will, you know, with diligence come -- exit the course with the same level of knowledge, as if he or she were sitting in your classroom? Question mark? [00:58:09] David Archer: It's hard to know what people will get out of an online class. I mean, I don't have -- I haven't talked to people who have done that and tried to figure out, you know, giving them an exam or something like that. I guess I don't really know. Find out? [00:58:25] Speaker ?: Yeah. [00:58:26] David Archer: Yeah, sir. [00:58:27] Speaker 8: Could you say something about the methane effect? Why is that so broad? And what are the vibrations of the CH4? Is it? [00:58:37] David Archer: Well, CH4 is a tetrahedron. The carbon is in the middle and then there's four hydrogen and a tetrahedron. And the vibrational modes for that are too complicated. I can't visualize them or -- it's a much more complicated, you know, spectrum of how it can vibrate. But any molecule that has more than two atoms, there's ways to vibrate it that will break the symmetry. And so any atom with -- any molecule with more than two atoms will be a greenhouse gas. [00:59:06] Speaker 8: So why is that spectrum so spread out? [00:59:08] David Archer: Well, it was probably the water one that you're thinking of that was really spread out. And that one is -- let's see, let's see if we can find it. That one is spread out because -- so water is sort of all through here. Methane is there. So it's sort of spread out. [00:59:26] Speaker 8: Much wider than CO2. [00:59:27] David Archer: Yeah. I can't answer your question, honestly. I don't know the answer. Okay. [00:59:32] Speaker 8: So it's like multiple loads of vibration that make methane so dangerous, huh? [00:59:36] David Archer: And the fact that the methane isn't saturated. So to make CO2 saturated, we put in, you know, 400 parts per million. And this, you know, reaches down to the cold part. And so putting in more, it just makes it get fatter. Oops. Makes it just get fatter but not any deeper. The methane isn't saturated. It doesn't reach that yellow line. So we could make -- we could put 1,000 parts per million of methane in. So I'm adding methane now, make it much higher. And you'll see it reach that yellow line. It would become saturated. So if we had that much methane in the atmosphere to start with, adding more would have a much smaller effect. Or conversely, just think how, you know, narrowly we dodged this bullet. So what if the atmosphere, the real atmosphere, had had very little CO2 in it to start with before we did anything? And then the fossil fuel era, what would happen would be a much bigger climate impact than if the CO2 already existed. The way it works is you get a huge amount of warming from the first bit of greenhouse gas, but then you get less and less the more you have. So we were just really lucky that there was already CO2 in the air before we discovered coal. Or else we would have just totally torched the planet. Much, much, much worse. [01:01:08] Speaker 8: So the fracking business is what people are worried about with methane, escaping from fracking. Right. [01:01:14] David Archer: So, yeah, there's a conversation going on. In fact, I got to give a talk at this MIT retreat tomorrow about this topic, about CO2 versus methane. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas because it's not saturated, but it has a short lifetime. And so it doesn't have the same traction, you know, in the long run as carbon dioxide has. So there are some climate scientists who are saying we've got to fix methane right away because it's so powerful. Me, I'm kind of a CO2 purist. I sort of feel like we've got to keep our eye on the ball, which is CO2. Methane, if we release methane, it'll warm the planet mostly for us. And then for our grandchildren, it'll be recovering. Whereas CO2, we release CO2, it'll be worse for our grandchildren than it is for us. And then worse for our great-great-grandchildren. It just gets worse and worse and worse through time. So it's this horrible trap, this sort of ethical trap that people are in. It's very easy for us to do this because it doesn't affect us. It only affects the distant future. Whereas methane mostly affects the people who do it. So, you know, if we want to cook ourselves, that doesn't bother me as much as cooking the world for everybody else, you know, for thousands of years into the future. I feel like what if the ancient Greeks had known, you know, had some, what if the ancient Greeks had ruined the planet for us? And they knew they were doing it. You know, we'd still be kind of irritated at them. You know, what if hurricanes wouldn't have existed unless the ancient Greeks, you know, had done this lucrative business thing that, you know, made them very happy for a few years. But then it left things messed up to this day. You know, we wouldn't want to be, I don't want to be the source of that. Yeah. [01:02:59] Speaker 9: We all know any discussion about climate change greenhouse becomes political eventually, at least in this country. Yes. So outside of doing the course, teaching courses and writing books, have you found yourself involved or engaged in public debate, climate change? And if so, what's that experience like? [01:03:29] David Archer: Well, I do a lot of public speaking, but usually the people, the segment of the population who think that I am a fraud, don't come to my talks. So I don't often, you know, get into discussions with people who are trying to, you know, convince everybody that I'm lying to them. It just doesn't sort of come up that much. It happens more, you know, electronically, like on blog sites and things like that, that there's sort of contact between sort of the two sides. I did have a freedom of information request filed to the National Science Foundation to inquire about my activities, mine and everybody else that works on this climate science blog site. You know, but I don't know what they would have gotten, and I don't, you know, there's nothing, I didn't have to deal with that. It was actually sponsored by a not-for-profit constitutional law firm that is mostly, I guess, bankrolled by a guy, the guy, I think, the guy that owns the newspaper in Pittsburgh. Scaifee, does this make? Scaifee. Yeah, that guy. That guy. Richard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, so I showed it to my students, and we all had a good laugh, and that's the last I ever heard of it. But I do have colleagues. This climate blog site that I work on, Real Climate, is one of the people who is a principal in that is Mike Mann, who is kind of a lightning rod. He's, you know, under congressional investigations and has subpoenas, and this guy Cuccinelli has been after him for years. And he's more confrontational than I am. I tend to stick to the science, and I don't get too much mud thrown at me. Yeah, sir. [01:05:26] Speaker 10: So I wanted to ask you about, there's a lot of things in the news you read about the accuracy of these climate change models. And I guess the accuracy, you can sort of think about it along a couple of dimensions. Like, you might be very good at telling me if CO2 goes double what it is now, 10,000 years from now, we're going to have this temperature. But the path of getting there, you may be pretty uncertain about. Or are you pretty certain that your models deliver, you know, 50 years from now, where we're going to be? [01:05:59] David Archer: Let's see, there's a figure from the IPCC that showed from 1990 what the temperature forecast was. And then here's the data. I could bring this up if I looked around for a few minutes. [01:06:18] Speaker 5: You can see if I do that. [01:06:21] David Archer: You know, so they seem to be pretty good. But the, let's see, maybe I showed it here. There it is, first shot. So, the black line is sort of smoothed through the temperatures. This is from the last IPCC report, which is 2007, so it's a little out of date. But the first assessment report predicted it would do that. The second assessment report was a little lower. And the third assessment report is here. You know, it's right on. But the strongest reason why I think that the models have credibility is looking sort of in the deeper geologic past. We know what the CO2 level was during the last ice age. And to explain the temperatures of the last ice age, there's the shininess of the ice, but there's also the fact that there was less greenhouse gas. And so you can sort of back out what, I mean, the thing that you really want to know is what's called the climate sensitivity. If you change the CO2, how much does the climate of the earth eventually change? And the answer you get from, you know, digging it out of the past is the same as what we get from looking at the temperature evolution of the last few decades, which is kind of the smoking gun for a human impact on climate, which is also the same as you get from the climate models. But the climate models are very complicated and there are parts of the climate system that are just devilishly hard to have any confidence that you can predict anything. Clouds are the real thing. The main difference between the different climate models in terms of their climate sensitivity boils down to how they deal with clouds. And it's hard because the processes that control clouds happen on spatial scales of gusts of wind and little tiny droplets and things like that that you can never include in a global model. But one thing that you learn from looking at the past is that there are these abrupt climate changes and we're still trying to figure out what caused them. And we can't, you know, you can't predict something if you only dimly sort of understand it. And, you know, these forecasts, I mean, this is just for a couple of decades here, but the forecasts going to 2100, they're always very smooth because that's what the models tend to do. But by looking at these past climate changes, these abrupt changes and comparing them with how models do when you try to make the models make those abrupt changes, you get the impression that the models are, if anything, too sluggish. And that's certainly true also for the ice sheet models because the, you know, the models of how the ice flows in an ice sheet, you know, say it should sit there for a long, long time. But you go to Greenland today and you can measure, you know, ice quakes, like earthquakes, but from ice happening in the summer, not in the winter, which means that it's responding to climate, you know, just on a seasonal time scale. It doesn't take a thousand years. It's by because of water going through their tricks that the real world knows that we are just sort of figuring out. So my intuition is that if anything, the models are probably a best guess, I mean, a best, best case because they don't have any surprises in them. Yeah. [01:09:51] Speaker 11: I have a farm at stake where fracking is very common and, you know, there are probably, I don't know how many thousands of wells, fracking wells, that are going up all the time. And given that each well spews about, you know, somehow seven to 9% of the methane escapes from each well, and there's so many wells, not just in Pennsylvania, but all over the country. And then you've got the Keystone pipeline. There's so much going on. It seems that one, like myself, who's very concerned about climate change, cannot not be political about what's going on in our world in terms of how fast things are changing. So how do you deal with the rapid changes that are going on in our country, just in terms of all the fracking and the Keystone pipeline that's destroying so many trees and hurting the environment? [01:10:49] David Archer: So actually, with regard to methane, the world is inexplicably not changing all that quickly, and it's not clear why. This is from a guy at NOAA who is just getting back from his vacation of the last 17 days. So you're saying methane doesn't make a difference? Well, this is the methane concentration through time. So there's 1985, 2005. It's a little out of date. But so for the very first IPCC report published in 1990, they said, yeah, methane's going up. It's going to keep going up. Because everything else that's associated with the human footprint is getting stronger. You know, the CO2 is going up, you know, everything. And so it's actually kind of a head-scratcher why the methane kind of stopped rising. It's just sort of plateaued. It has a short lifetime. So if you're releasing at a constant rate, you do expect a plateau like this as opposed to CO2 where you release it at a constant rate. And it's like, you know, getting a constant rate of old magazines and throwing them on the floor in your living room. They accumulate, whereas methane goes away. But why is it not? There's the theory that it stopped growing because leaky industrial infrastructure in the Eastern Bloc was sort of shut down and redone. Theory that it stopped going up because the Earth is sort of drier, you know, sort of since the '80s, it's been sort of drier than it was previously. And a lot of the methane to the atmosphere comes naturally from freshwater swamps. That's where -- [01:12:37] Speaker ?: This ends in 2005. [01:12:40] David Archer: Yeah. And there's a little bit of an uptick here that is not clear where that's coming from. And I'm not -- I don't know, you know, the latest on this. Most of the fracking, I think, has gotten really heavy in the last year. Yeah. But I don't think the methane concentration is rising. Okay. [01:12:56] Speaker ?: I don't know. [01:12:57] David Archer: You know, even to today, I haven't heard about it rising. And there are also people who are very worried about the Arctic, all the methane in the permafrost and in these methane hydrates on the Siberian shelf of the Arctic Ocean. But it just isn't happening. And let me show you another one of these cool models. So here is all of them. And here's this methane one. So it's got kind of -- this model has kind of a natural period when there's just natural sources of methane coming from freshwater swamps, mostly. And then you add to that a chronic human source. And here the model is sort of relaxing to a new equilibrium here. And then they talk about releasing a giant slug of methane that would be, you know, like equal to some sizable fraction of all the fossil fuels that we have that would just all come out all at once. And I have these battles on these blog sites. Well, where exactly do you think this is going to come from? It's kind of vague. But if you look at the radiative forcing, which is how many watts per square meter of energy the methane is trapping, this is what you get from that methane. It sort of goes up and then kind of, you know, relaxes back down because the methane degrades. And then this is the radiative forcing from the business as usual CO2. So these people are saying, well, how do you know it won't happen that the Arctic will burp 50 gigatons of methane? Well, it's a real long shot. This is business as usual. This is not a long shot. This is, you know, a long shot to avoid this one. So why be afraid of this one when, you know, when this one's just getting worse and worse and worse? So I'm just, I'm like, George Bush, I'm like, bring it on. You know, I just, I feel like warming that hits us in our lifetimes and causes us to say, okay, let's be careful about CO2. Probably do more good than harm is my personal thing. I'm sort of a CO2 absolutist, but I'm totally on one end of the spectrum. And there are others who point out that avoiding climate change. Let's see, I'll show you this also. There's a great plot that I'm going to show at the MIT talk. Here, this one. This is from a guy at NASA. And he's showing these are forecasts for future temperatures. So here, the green one is business as usual. And then cutting CO2 only and not worrying about methane. It still gets us above this two degrees C limit that people use as kind of a benchmark. The European Union says we should keep it to less than two degrees C. Actually, two degrees C is warmer than the earth has been in millions of years. And so, you know, that doesn't sound like any picnic to me. But the point of this paper is if you control CO2 and then also control methane and black carbon and other sort of short term things, you can keep it down within, you know, sort of our lifetimes or some of our lifetimes below that two degrees C thing. My perspective is that, you know, time doesn't stop here. It keeps going. So, you know, cutting it off there is kind of deceptive to me. But yes. [01:16:43] Speaker 5: Okay. Okay. So actually moving back to the general topic of MOOCs. Yes. I think you sort of alluded to this, but I'm just curious. Is there ever a concern like say maybe a school that isn't perhaps as interested in intellectual pursuit could say like, oh, we can save a lot of money, but we're just going to put, you know, Professor Archer's MOOCs and say that's your course. And people will give credit for it and will graduate students based on this. And we'll say, well, a ton of money not having to pay for a professor to actually teach these courses. I guess. [01:17:12] David Archer: Well, they could do that. Yeah. Seems like most professors are too proud to do that. Make them watch, make you watch, make a student watch, you know, somebody else's lectures. [01:17:21] Speaker 5: Because you were saying that you felt, you said that some classes were already doing it. [01:17:27] David Archer: Yeah. They're not taking Coursera MOOCs that they didn't. You know, so at the larger state schools, I was talking to a colleague of mine at Penn State, and he's big into this. He's got a Coursera MOOC. His name is Richard Alley. He's a glaciologist. Really brilliant guy. But he's also making online classes for students at Penn State that are, they're not open to anybody else, but it's the same basic technology and everything. So, you know, it does seem like it could be used for that. And in fact, there's one of my colleagues is using the short little video clips of my MOOC to teach global warming this quarter. He has the students watch them before they come in, and then he can kind of build on it interactively in the classroom, which it takes a special kind of person to have an interactive, intimate conversation with, you know, 200 students. But, you know, Doug is that kind of guy. He can pull it off. This is called flipping the classroom. It's like all the buzz is, you know, making these videos and having them, having the students watch them before they come in, and then you use the time in the class for something more interactive. Let's see. You in the back. [01:18:44] Speaker ?: Yeah, please. [01:18:45] David Archer: Yeah. [01:18:46] Speaker 12: On the business model. You spoke of someone using different e-mail addresses and taking the course six times until . Yes. Okay. I don't know that that's a problem. When I was in Chicago, the old . Your grade for a course for the whole year was one final exam, six to nine hours. Yikes. If you didn't do well, you could pay $10 and three months later take the exam over again. Did you have to pay the professor? No. How is this work? I think it was the registrar because bookkeeping was involved. But, as a matter of fact, in humanities 2, I took the final when I had the flu. I got a D. Okay. I took it over three months later. Not exactly the same test. Same material. Different test. And I got an A. So, on my transcript, there's a D and a line through it, and then an A. Okay? For $10. Now, when these -- That's a good deal. Why do these people need subterfuge and different e-mail tests to take the course over again as many times as it takes to get through their thick skull? If they want to take it 50 times, the point is for them to learn the material. That's absolutely true. [01:20:15] David Archer: And, actually, the quizzes that we're putting up, there's a quiz every week. I try to be cute and call it a debriefing, but it's a quiz. And so, here's the quiz for week one. I think the way it works is that you can take it many, many times, and each question has multiple variants. And so, if you take it a second time, you see the same material, but it's a different set of questions, probably. And Coursera is very big on that, giving the students the opportunity to do that over and over and sort of learn by doing it. It's not just, you know, for grading. It's for a learning thing. So, I think Mary is... One last question. One last. Okay. But we can also, we can stick around and chat. You know, if you want to talk about something and they kick us out of here, we can, you know, talk. [01:21:30] Speaker 13: Thank you. I'm very struck by sort of the political conversation around climate change. You know, my impression is that you're here, you're speaking to mostly people who are believers. And the cultural discourse, you know, basically says that unless you're brain dead, you would probably believe that climate change is a very, man-made climate change is a very real phenomenon. I have some friends who are at the conservative end of the political spectrum though. And, you know, some of these people are not uneducated. They're not stupid. No. They're, you know, nonetheless, huge to this notion that it's not a legitimate phenomenon. And it's, I don't think what's going on is denial of science. I don't think it's conspiracy theory, which seems ridiculous on its face when you consider the size of the intellectual community around this problem. So, my question is, are there legitimate scientific questions, such as one you raised about cloud interaction that could legitimately raise questions about whether climate change could be as dire as the mainstream view? [01:22:42] David Archer: There are no models of climate that can make the planet have the weather and climate that we see and can explain the past that don't predict a huge amount of warming if we keep putting CO2 in the atmosphere. So, the skeptic side, you want to see, I made a cartoon. Actually, my wife drew it. She's an artist. Let me see if I can find it. So, the point is, there aren't any sort of skeptic climate models. There's no theory that would say, you know, if my theory is right and I can test this theory against data, it would mean that global warming is not a problem. You know, all of the climate models that have been created, and there's like 20 of them from around the world that participated in this intercomparison project, and you can see all the results in these sites that I've got. They all predict significant climate changes with rising CO2. So, there are no legitimate skeptics out there who are informing the timeline that there's, you know, possibly this isn't right? There are legitimate questions. hurricanes for example it's not clear you know whether there will be more or more intense hurricanes is a question kind of on the fringe of you know what we are able to deal with you there you have these sort of wind sort of proto hurricane events of some sort that sort of blow off of I guess Africa and they can grow into a hurricane or not but it depends on whether there's wind shear in the atmosphere that sort of pulls it apart and then the temperature of the sea surface has a big impact but also the temperature in the upper atmosphere and actually the intensity of hurricanes seems like it's going up more even than the theory can explain but it's not there's not a very good record of of hurricane intensity you know going back very far you can sort of look at old pictures and try to back it out but there's not a very good data set to so there are you know reasonable people on both sides of that issue and I don't have a strong opinion because I don't it's not my field at all but there are no there's no theories that you can just dump co2 in the atmosphere and it won't change the climate that's just there's just no reason really to believe that it seems like there's a strong kind of libertarian kind of I know there are a lot of the climate skeptics that I have tried to psychoanalyze just don't want to be told what to do [01:25:55] Katie Skeen: yeah okay well I think we should respect everyone's time and just end it here this is probably the liveliest Q&A we've had in a lot and I'm really sorry we couldn't get to everybody's question but hopefully for the most part you felt like you got real climate science from a real climate scientist so thank you very much thank [01:26:24] David Archer: you