PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY (also known as Penn State) is a large public multicampus university with its main campus located in University Park, Pennsylvania. The University has 24 campuses located throughout the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, including a virtual World Campus. The enrollment at Penn State is over 84,000 students, placing it among the 10 largest public universities in the United States. Penn State offers more than 160 majors. Pennsylvania State University ranks in the top five in the world in total number of citations in the area of global warming research. Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment is the central coordinating structure for energy and environmental research at Pennsylvania State University.
The concept of the Penn State Institutes of the Environment arose from intense interactions between Penn State’s administration and faculty and remains a novel partnership between the two. It is organized under the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) and is designed to position the environmental faculty to compete vigorously in this new interdisciplinary environmental science and engineering prototype. It facilitates environmental research, teaching, and outreach across eight colleges, including the University Park colleges of Agricultural Sciences, Earth and Mineral Sciences, Engineering, Health and Human Development, and the Liberal Arts, plus the Hershey College of Medicine and Harrisburg Capital College. The PSIEE promotes Penn State’s interdisciplinary environmental enterprise through a wide variety of activities.
The PSIEE has been instrumental in assisting faculty and departments in the creation of world-class programs such as climate change, and hydrogen energy, as well as other areas.
Courses offered at Pennsylvania State University that focus on global warming and climate change include:
EARTH 103: EARTH IN THE FUTURE: PREDICTING climate change AND its impacts over the next century.
The United States is actively working on national assessment of the impacts of the climate change predicted to occur over the next century. The U.S.
National Assessment has developed three major documents: an overview written for Congress, a foundation document giving the sources of information and their interpretation, and a series of regional and sector (water, health, agriculture, forests, and coastlines) reports. These reports present an exceptional opportunity to connect advances in the natural sciences to society. The course has four major objectives: (1) to gain an understanding of climate science and of the possible scenarios of how climate may change in the future; (2) to analyze the linkages between climate and major human and natural systems (e.g., agriculture, human health, water, coastal ecosystems, and forests), necessary to assess the potential impacts of climate change; (3) to demonstrate that the impacts of climate change, and the way in which society responds, are dependent on factors such as age, economic capability, lifestyle (e.g., urban vs. rural), generational differences, and cultural differences; and (4) to understand the different types of responses that humans may have to climate change, including adaptations to change and possible mechanisms to mitigate the factors that are forcing change to occur.
GEOSC 320: geology Of CLIMATE CHANGE
Geologic records provide a critical perspective on climate change, with implications for our behavior. Ice cores, ocean sediments, tree rings, and others reveal that agriculture and industry have arisen during a few thousand years of anomalously stable climate. Natural changes half as large as the entire difference between ice-age and modern conditions have occurred repeatedly in mere years, affecting hemispheric or broader regions. Such climate jumps have been linked to changes in greenhouse gases, but not driven by them. Students in this course will learn how records of recent climate changes are recovered, read, and dated, how the climate system works and has worked, and the causes of ice-age cycles and faster climate jumps.
BIOL 436: POPULATION ECOLOGY AND GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
In this course, students investigate the factors shaping the characteristics of populations and their dynamics in time and space, with emphasis on the responses of populations to climatic fluctuation and global climate change. These concepts include the science of climate change, how temperature trends are estimated, the data used in assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, large-scale climate systems such as the North Atlantic Oscillation and the El Nino Southern Oscillation, the basic characteristics of populations, how population densities are estimated, and the types of population data used in studies of population responses to climate change.
