Author

This unit was prepared by Tom Power with guidance from Dr Arlene Hunter.

Tom Power is a lecturer in science education at The Open University. His research interests include teacher education in the global south (www.open.ac.uk/deep) and the CASE intervention. He has been a teacher and an advisory teacher in East Sussex and a specialist adviser to the TTA teacher research panel.

Dr Arlëne Hunter, Staff Tutor in Science in Ireland, The Open University, is responsible for the management of the science programme across Ireland and contributes to various undergraduate earth and environmental science courses. Her research is divided between geochemistry and enhancing the learning and teaching experience for students and staff.

This unit draws upon many sources, but has been developed primarily from the Open University Science short course (1998) S103 Discovering Science: 2 A Temperate Earth, Milton Keynes, The Open University.

Other acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:

Charts of: variation of the Earth’s surface temperature, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, natural forcing, anthropogenic forcing, natural and anthropogenic forcing, carbon dioxide emissions, temperature change, rise in sea level: copyright © IPCC.

Extracts from the Open University course S103 Block 2 ‘A temperate Earth?’: Figures 3.3 and 3.5: courtesy of Tony Waltham; Figure 3.4: Landform Slides; Figure 3.6a: The British Geological Survey, copyright © NERC, all rights reserved; Figure 3.7: John, B. S. (1977) The Ice Age, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd; Figure 3.10: courtesy of C. Turner; Figure 3.11: courtesy of C. J. Hawksworth; Figures 3.12 and 3.13: West, R. G. (1977) Pleistocene Geology and Biology, 2nd edition, p. 362, reprinted by permission of Addison Wesley Longman Ltd; Figure 3.14: reprinted with permission from Nature, 281, 18 October 1979, p. 559, Woillard, G. (1979) ‘Abrupt end of the last interglacial S.S. in North-East France’, copyright © 1979 Macmillan Magazines Limited; Figure 3.15: reprinted with permission from Nature, 338, 23 March 1989, p. 312, Guiot, J., Pons, A., de Beaulieu, J. L. and Reille, M. (1989) ‘A 140,000-year continental climate reconstruction from two European pollen records’, copyright © 1989 Macmillan Magazines Limited; Figure 3.16: Brown, G. C, Hawkesworth, C .J. and Wilson, R. C. L. (1992) Understanding the Earth, 2nd edition Cambridge University Press.

Figure 2.10: Parker, D. E. et. al. (1966) ‘A new daily Central England temperature series, 1772–1991’, International Journal of Climatology, 12, Royal Meteorological Society.

www.meto.gov.uk/climate/uk/2003/june.html; video model of changes in the temperature of the Earth: © Crown Copyright. Reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright owners, but if any has been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.