Please, before the exam, refresh your memories on the following topics:

1. Elements of climate system (atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere). Global thermal properties of different components of climate system.

 2. Feedbacks in the climate system. Climate sensitivity and feedback factors.

 3. Energy balance on the top of the atmosphere and on the surface of the planet. Changes of solar luminosity during the last 4.6 billion years and Hertzprung-Russel Diagram.

4. Greenhouse effect in the atmosphere. Selective absorption and emission by atmospheric gases (arrangement of atoms in the molecules and absorption properties of different gases). Absorption lines and line broadening. Major broadening mechanism in the atmosphere.

6. Variability of the surface temperature at different time scales. "Red" and "white" noise in the temperature records.

7. Records of earth’s climate. How long are the instrumental records of earth climate? Historical? Records of proxy parameters? Compare length of these records with typical natural variability of surface temperature at corresponding periods of time.

8. Methods of paleoclimate reconstructions: historical, archaeological, lithological, palaeoecological and palaeontological, isotopic and geochemical.

9.Brief history of climate changes during the last 140 million years. General trends in the surface and deep oceanic temperatures. Border between Cretaceous and Tertiary periods.

10. Time of continental glaciation in the Southern and Northern Hemispheres.

11. Messinian salinity crisis.

12. Pliocene climatic optimum.

13. Closing of Panama passage and formation of modern ocean-atmosphere circulation in the Northern Hemisphere. Appearance of Homo erectus and cooling/drying of global climate at the end of Pliocene.

14. Astronomical theory of glacial periods.