Understanding Climate Change Science
Learn the physics, evidence, and feedbacks behind climate change well enough to read the news and judge claims yourself.
This course is for members
$9 unlocks every course in the library, this one included, plus a credit to build a topic of your own and at least 10 new courses every month.
What you will learn about Understanding Climate Change Science
The 7-day sprint
- Earth's Energy Budget. Earth's temperature is set by the balance between the sunlight it absorbs and the infrared radiation it sends back to space.
- How the Greenhouse Effect Actually Works. Certain gases are transparent to sunlight but absorb and re-emit infrared radiation, which forces the surface to run warmer to push the same amount of energy out to space.
- The Carbon Cycle and Why Emissions Accumulate. Carbon moves constantly between air, ocean, and life, but burning fossil carbon adds a new stream to the system that only clears slowly, so the atmosphere accumulates it.
- Fingerprints: How We Know It Is Us. Multiple independent lines of evidence point specifically to fossil carbon and the greenhouse mechanism rather than to the sun or natural cycles.
- Feedbacks and Climate Sensitivity. The direct warming from carbon dioxide is amplified by feedbacks, chiefly water vapor and shrinking ice, and climate sensitivity is the number that summarizes the total.
- Weather, Climate, and Extremes. Climate is the distribution of possible weather, and warming shifts and stretches that distribution, changing the odds of extremes rather than causing individual events outright.
- Scenarios, Carbon Budgets, and Net Zero. Because warming tracks cumulative emissions, stabilizing temperature requires reaching net zero, and future warming depends on choices rather than on a single predicted number.
The 80/20: the 7 concepts that matter most
- Energy balance sets temperature
- Greenhouse gases raise the height of escape
- Cumulative emissions, not annual emissions, set the warming
- Feedbacks amplify the direct effect
- Warming shifts the odds of extremes
- Inertia and tipping points
- Convergent evidence beats any single dataset
The core idea, explained like you are 5
The greenhouse effect: greenhouse gases let sunlight in but slow the escape of Earth's heat, so the surface has to be warmer to keep energy in and out balanced.
Then the quiz and the ladder
10 questions that correct you when you are wrong, and beginner, intermediate, advanced levels, each with a practical exercise.