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Building and Maintaining a Habitable Planet
Proposed Geological Sciences Course (01:460:203), Fall 2013
Professor Robert Kopp
Robert.Kopp@rutgers.edu
Office: 225 Wright Lab, Busch Campus
Phone: 732-200-2705 (but email is best)
Office hours TBD
Catalog Description: Understanding human-caused environmental changes in in the context of Earth’s
4.6 billion year history. Geological and human timescales; planetary habitability; planetary, biological,
and civilizational flows of energy and entropy; feedbacks between life, the carbon cycle, and climate; the
evolution of complex life; human alterations of the Earth system; intelligent life in the Universe.
Course Description
Humanity has become a geological force, reshaping Earth’s land, atmosphere, oceans and climate through
our activities. Some geologists have proposed that this era of human influence be recognized as a new
geological epoch, the Anthropocene. “We are as gods and we HAVE to get good at it,” the writer Stewart
Brand says, yet “civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental
problems.” How do we reconcile the time scale of news cycles, quarterly reports, and elections with the
timescale of our impacts, which will last for tens of thousands if not millions of years?
This course will prepare you to be an informed citizen of our empowered global civilization, able to step
outside the realm of short-termism and interpret the environmental changes humanity is effecting today in
in the context of our planet’s 4.6 billion year history. We will address questions such as: Why is the Earth
so habitable, while Mars is at best marginally so and Venus totally uninhabitable? How did life evolve to
regulate the planet’s chemical and energy flows before we arrived on the scene? How does human
civilization fit into this long history, and what are the implications of the planetary and human experience
for the frequency of intelligent life in the Universe?
Indicative Course Schedule (Subject to Revision)
Part I: Setting the Stage
1. The Earth as a system
2. The nature of time
3. Measuring time
Part II: Habitability through Earth history
Part IIa: Energy and entropy
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The concepts of energy and entropy
Planetary energy and entropy 1: Climate in the planetary habitable zone
Planetary energy and entropy 2: The diverging climate histories of Venus, Earth and Mars
Biological energy and entropy 1: Photosynthesis, respiration, and other metabolisms
Biological energy and entropy 2: The power of oxygen
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Part IIb: Feedbacks between life, the carbon cycle, and climate
9. Feedbacks in the global carbon cycle
10. Snowball Earth: the world’s first biologically-caused climate catastrophe
11. Forests and feedbacks: the climatic impact of land plants
Part IIc: The rise and fall of species
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Cooperation, competition, and the evolution of complex life
The life and death of species
Past global catastrophes
Group presentations: Climatic and evolutionary events
Mid-term exam
Part III: The rise (and fall?) of humanity
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The climate that gave rise to humanity
Cooperation, competition and the development of human civilization
Energy and entropy in human history
The life and death of species in the Anthropocene
Energy and entropy in modern human civilization
The climate and the carbon cycle in the Anthropocene
Planetary boundaries
Toward a sustainable future?
Global catastrophic risks
Implications for the frequency of intelligent life in the Universe
Group presentations: The futures of civilization
Group presentations (continued)
Final exam
Texts (Subject to Revision)
Charles Langmuir & Wally Broecker, How to build a habitable planet
Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun
Additional articles will be posted on Sakai and assigned during the course of the term.
Assignments (Subject to Revision)
“Minute” Papers will be occasionally assigned either pre-class or in the last few minutes of class. These
are graded on completeness, and will generally involve writing a 1-paragraph reflection upon or question
about material covered in class or in the readings, or responding to a short prompt. These will count
toward the class participation portion of your grade.
In-class exercises will sometimes be collected and will count toward your course participation grade.
Problem sets are designed to help you get comfortable with the mechanics of the Earth system.
Collaboration and citations: You are welcome to collaborate on the problem sets. You can also
use any resources available to you. Scientists collaborate with each other all the time; they just cite each
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other to avoid “stealing” ideas. Therefore, I ask that you explicitly cite any ideas or hints you get from
other people, books, the Internet, or other resources, in your homework.
Guidelines: Please make sure submitted homework assignments adhere to the following
guidelines to avoid plagiarism or losing credit unnecessarily:
• Cite any work you get from outside sources, and any classmates or others with whom you
work. (If you do a problem completely in your own head, state so explicitly.)
• Show your work and explain your thinking (so that someone who didn’t know how to
solve the problem could follow your work). If you are doing a problem set in Excel,
please make sure any parameters are explicit in their own cells, not hidden in formulas;
and annotate your spreadsheet with textual statements of the relevant equations or
algorithms.
• Box, circle, or highlight your final answer(s). Make your conclusions clear.
Group Presentations provide the opportunity to share, develop and implement ideas collaboratively.
They will each culminate in in-class oral presentation and a 1-page abstract.
Grading: Grades will be based on both your presentation and abstract. At the time you turn these
into Sakai, you should also give me a paragraph statement, reflecting the consensus of your group, on the
contribution of each group member to the activity. These contributions will be taken into account in
assigning your grade. The abstract, final slide deck, and contribution statement are due midnight two days
after the presentations are given in class. For every 24 hours past the deadline an assignment is turned in,
half a letter grade will be deducted.
Citations: Any figures on your slides that you did not generate yourself must be cited in (Author,
Year) format in the corner of a slide. You should have a “References” slide at the end of your slide deck,
which need not be presented but should provide full citations for all of these.
Guidelines: Use PowerPoint, Keynote, or comparable software to prepare your presentation. In
general, effective PowerPoint presentations use the slides to highlight key figures; if your slides are more
than 25% text on average, they are probably not designed as well as they could be. Please do not spend
your presentation reading text off your slides.
Abstracts should be double-spaced, 1” margin, 12 pt Times New Roman font, and no more than 1
page. The bibliography does not count toward the page limit.
Presentations, in PPT or PDF format, should be uploaded to Sakai after your presentation and will
be made available to the entire class. Your abstract, in DOC, RTF or PDF format, should also be
uploaded to Sakai and will likewise be shared. Please include the name of all group members on both the
title page of the slide deck and on the abstract.
Exams: Exams will be done individually and in class. You may prepare a single sheet of paper to use as a
reference during the exam.
Extra credit: You can get extra credit by participating in discussion on the class Sakai site of (1)
geological and environmental talks happening on campus and (2) related news articles that I post on the
Sakai site. I will try to keep you informed of opportunities as I become aware of them, and please let me
know of any interesting seminars or news articles you find. For news articles, good places to look include
realclimate.org, eenews.net (I encourage you to sign up for their daily newsletters),
green.blogs.nytimes.com and climateprogress.org.
Grading (Subject to Revision)
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The grading metric will be subject to revision, but will be roughly:
10%: Attendance and course participation
20%: Problem sets
20%: Group presentations
50%: Mid-term and final exams
Attendance
The classes exist to help you achieve the goals of the course, and it will be much harder for you to do so
without them. I therefore expect you to attend and participate in class; this will constitute part of your
grade. If you have a legitimate reason for not attending (e.g., illness, family emergency, etc.), please use
the University absence reporting website https://sims.rutgers.edu/ssra to indicate the date and reason for
your absence. An email will be sent to automatically. Absent extreme extenuating circumstances, please
send a notification at least twenty-four hours in advance.
Likewise, both so that you get the fully learning experience and out of respect for your fellow students, I
expect you to show up to class on time. Failure to arrive in a timely fashion on a regular basis will lower
your course participation grade.
No unexcused make-up exams and recitations will be given. Those with valid excuses will be allowed to
take exams and make-up recitations in a method that I will determine. To be valid, an excuse must be
obtained from me prior to the lab/exam being missed. It is your responsibility of the student to
communicate with me and to keep a proof of such communication. Rare cases of extreme emergency
preventing timely communication must be discussed with the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences’
Undergraduate Director and/or Department Chair.
Electronic Devices (Phones, Computers, Tablets)
Humans are poor but self-deluding multitaskers. We can cycle attention between different tasks, but have
great difficulty actually focusing on multiple activities at the same time. For example, it is extremely
unlikely that you can give full attention to the class if you are on your phone or checking out Facebook at
the same time.
Please be respectful of me and your fellow students – please do not use your phone in class. If phone use
in class is a recurring problem, I will talk to you about it; and if it persists, I will regard a day in which
you check your phone in class as an unexcused absence, and it will affect your class participation grade
accordingly.
Likewise, laptop or tablet use in class is allowable only in support of class activities. Appropriate uses
include making presentations, reading papers, taking notes, or looking up something class-related on the
Internet in response to specific instructions from me. Examples of inappropriate uses include checking
email, Facebook, Twitter, or GChat. Inappropriate laptop or tablet use will be treated the same way as
phone use.
Academic Integrity
All students are responsible for upholding the highest standards of student behavior, as specified under
the University Code of Student Conduct, including but not limited to strict adherence to the terms of the
University’s Academic Integrity Policy.
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Please make yourself familiar with the terms of the University Code of Student Conduct
(http://studentconduct.rutgers.edu/), including the University’s Academic Integrity Policy
(http://academicintegrity.rutgers.edu/).
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