Exam 2: The Earth System and Climate Change

Which of the following best reflects the change in sea surface temperature of the past half-century?

Not all systems require energy to operate.

Whirlpool-like storms are called all of the following EXCEPT?

Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

In the distant geologic past, the temperature of Earth's atmosphere was the same worldwide.

Scandinavia has much less ice cover than Greenland because it is at a lower latitude.

If Earth were to stop receiving energy from the Sun, it would not become a frozen iceball because of radiogenic heat slowly escaping from the interior of the planet.

Worldwide seasonal effects in carbon dioxide in the northern and southern hemispheres cancel each other out.

Why is it that the urban heat island effect contributes very little to overall atmospheric warming?

Fossil fuel consumption is the only way humans are impacting climate.

Who invented the first thermometer?

Judge the following sentence according to the criteria given below: The net warming of the oceans over the past fifty years is not significant BECAUSE the oceans are enormous in size.

Phoenix, Arizona does not need to learn from the Hohokam because technology has improved greatly since the 16th century.

Which has the greater chance of sending the Earth's climate past a tipping point: the cloud-albedo effect or the snow-albedo effect?

Which of the following factors, responsible for large-scale temperature changes presently being experienced, has changed decisively due to human activity?

Explain how the observed increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be a result of increased temperature and not the other way around?

Which of the following is a product of the conflicting processes driven by Earth's internal and external heat sources?

Without greenhouse gasses, Earth's average air temperature would be well below zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Ice cores from Antarctica span hundreds of thousands of years of time.

Judge the following sentence according to the criteria given below: Earth's climate for the next several hundred thousand years depends strongly on the carbon emissions we put into the air over the coming century BECAUSE as much as 25% of the carbon-dioxide in an emissions spike can persist for tens of millennia.