CM 402 – Earth’s Climate: Past, Present and Future

Professor when you took the course:

Prof. Raghu Murthugudde

Course Content:

This course provides an overview of all natural-human system issues related climate variability and change. The course structure is divided into 2 parts: Pre-Midsem syllabus surveys the field of climate science and the approaches used to unravel Earth’s climatic history, while the post-midsem part focuses on Modern Climate Changes and using the concepts learned to predict future projections. As the course progresses you start getting insights to reason out and hypothesize against a range of data and other methods, including experiments with climate models to explain Climate change and variability.

Pre-requisites: None

Course Structure & Syllabus:

  1. Introduction to Climate Science (4 lectures)
  2. Climate Data and Archives (2 Lectures)
  3. Tectonic Timescale Climate Change (3 lectures)
  4. Orbital Timescale Climate Change (3 lectures)
  5. Glacial/Deglacial Timescale Climate Change (3 lectures)
  6. Millennial Oscillations (2 lectures)
  7. Historic Climate Change (3 lectures)
  8. Modern Climate Change (3 lectures)
  9. Future Climate Change (5 lectures)
  10. Climate Change over India (3 lectures)
  11. Monsoon Variability and Change (3 lectures)

There’s also a lecture series of ICTS for the same course (by Prof. Raghu) where you can find the course content and lectures as well – https://www.icts.res.in/lectures/summercourse2019-climate

Marks Distribution: 50% Midsem, 50% Endsem. No Quizzes. There was an option for
getting extra credits by doing a course project.

Feedback on lectures: Apart from classroom lectures, online modules were provided for people who missed the lectures. Attendance was not compulsory but the classes were highly discursive and interactive. The online modules too were very descriptive and included most of the content that was discussed in the classes.

Feedback on exams and grading:

Exams were subjective and fairly straightforward. Majority of the exam questions were asked from what was discussed in the classes, and therefore, going through the entire text/online lectures a day before the exam was a poor substitute for attending lectures. Grading was lenient and one can be pretty much sure of getting an AA/ AB by just attending lectures regularly.

Grading stats: AA – 7, AB – 4, BC – 1, CC – 2, CD – 1, DD -1

Difficulty Level: 2.5/5

We thank “Sourav Mishra” for the course review.