Two weeks ago, we featured Harvard Thinks Green, a series of six TED-style lectures presented by Harvard experts, each focusing on the environment and strategies for reversing climate change. One thing Harvard Thinks Green didn’t offer was a primer on climate change itself, a good scientific explanation of the underlying problem. Enter Global Warming (YouTube – iTunes – Web Site), a 23-lecture course presented by David Archer, a professor in the Department of The Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. The first half of the class explains climate physics and how the climate works; the second half shows how human activity and ever-increasing carbon levels disrupt the equilibrium of the environment, creating a very uncertain future for generations to come. The first, short lecture above outlines the scope of the class.
Originally presented at UChicago in Fall 2009, Archer’s course was geared to non-science majors and taught in conjunction with his textbook, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, which happens to be available on Amazon here. Global Warming (YouTube – iTunes – Web Site) is now listed in our collection of 825 Free Courses Online.