How much land is needed to offset industrial CO2 emissions? Answering this question is one way to determine a carbon footprint, as the reserved land will hopefully be a net sink of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, thereby balancing industrial emissions. I will outline approaches to determine the carbon footprint for a proposed biomass incinerator between Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Results were student-generated from a service learning project integrated into the curriculum of an undergraduate differential equations course. Mathematical models were developed and analyzed to examine the local contribution of emissions to the atmosphere and the extent of land needed to offset incinerator emissions both in the short (daily) and long (yearly) term. Qualitative results show the sensitivity of atmospheric carbon content to the incinerator output rating, area and type of land dedicated for offsets, and atmospheric wind speed. The incinerator's carbon footprint, or the area of land needed to offset emissions, is approximately the size of Saint Paul. I will also highlight how this land requirement changes when other factors (e.g. air quality effects from incineration) are taken into consideration.
Reference

The paper, "The future of ice sheets and sea ice: Between reversible retreat and unstoppable loss," by Dirk Notz, will be discussed.
Reference (cached copy)

The paper, "Sea-Level Highstand 81,000 Years Ago in Mallorca," by Jeffrey Dorale, et al., will be discussed.
Reference (DOI: 10.1126/science.1181725)

Abstract:
Peatlands store an estimated 455Pg of carbon. This is roughly one third of the terrestrial carbon pool. If the peatlands were to catch fire, then much of that carbon would rapidly return to the atmosphere. Given our run-away carbon levels, the idea of returning more carbon to the atmosphere is unpleasant at best.
Accessible to everyone, this talk will take some time to explore the science of climate. We'll use predictions given by IPPC & SAP and a simple model to generate the predicted climate in Northern Minnesota. Using another simple model, we'll look at the water budget of the peatlands to see if they dry up or not. (And there is a LOT of water in the peatlands, so it's reasonable to think they might not!) Finally I will survey several recent papers by Jason Keller, Scott Bridgham and Joon Kim to determine how the peat will react to these changes to see if the peatlands really could catch fire.

The paper, "The Last Glacial Maximum," by Peter Clark, et al., will be discussed.
Reference Science 325, 710 (2009) (DOI: 10.1126/science.1172873)

Abstract:
There is a unique ecological phenomenon in Minnesota, called the triple point of the North American ecosystems. This is the meeting point of the northern borealis forest, the western prairie, and the eastern deciduous forest. Some recent papers suggest that this point is moving north due to global warming.
The climate parameters that influence the location of the triple point are the total annual precipitation and the annual mean temperature. In this talk we will show some results from our current work in comparing the trajectories of some climate parameters in Minnesota. We compare two sets of data, namely that obtained from Global Circulation Models and that of observation data, collected by the US Historical Climate Network.
The GCM prediction is a result of massive work by climate scientists, involving PDE's, using Goliath size computational power. The curve fitting method, on the other hand, uses linear algebra, Matlab and a laptop. Nonetheless, both predict the northward trend of the triple point.