Since 1970, global temperatures have risen more than a degree Fahrenheit, leading to cascading ramifications from sea level rise, longer droughts, deadly heat waves, destructive wildfires, loss of the world’s rainforests, growing species extinction rates, and changing water availability. Yet, our societies continue to emit climate-warming greenhouse gases at an alarming pace, despite dire warnings from climate scientists— but what do these warnings say?

What do we know, how do we know it, and how is it misconstrued or ignored by various levels of our society? Many of us understand that climate change is an issue but were never taught the physical science basis behind it.

In a time where climate change is a significant problem, misinformation is rampant, and education is highly gatekept, I invite you to join me on this 8-week FREE course, where I deliver 2 hour lectures 1x a week via Zoom overviewing what we know about Earth’s climate change. We will cover climate science fundamentals, Earth’s climate history, misinformation, the history of fossil fuels, the most up-to-date climate change reports, and discuss solutions for the future.

We will address the following questions:

• How does the climate work?

• How do we know what we know (e.g., how do scientists study climate change or climate history)?

• What makes our contemporary climate change truly unprecedented within the scope of Earth history?

• How is climate science misconstrued? How do you identify and confront misinformation?

• How can scientific knowledge empower our information gathering and the focus of collective organizing for future solutions?

We will explore the essence of Earth’s climate — including the development of its dynamics and feedbacks through time — in order to contextualize modern-day global warming and its many devastating consequences. Moving through time, we will examine a few key abrupt climate shifts and disasters in Earth’s 4.5 billion year-old-history that bear resemblance to the climate change we face as a society today. We will explore scientific explanations of both contemporary, past, and future abrupt climate changes, as well as the underpinnings of climate change denial and common misinformation about abrupt climate change and humanity’s role in it. We will consider how videos, texts, relevant news, policy solutions, and other media construct representations of climate change and comment critically on what makes global warming so catastrophic– and for whom.