Find out how climate change will affect us, why we should care about it, and what solutions we can employ. Climate change is the biggest global challenge the human race has ever faced. Our insatiable demand for energy from fossil fuels is changing the atmosphere, and in turn changing our climate. Climate change is already affecting the physical surface of the earth, the environment that provides our life support, our food supply, economy and society.
These changes will accelerate over the next few decades
In this subject you will explore the impacts of climate change; why we should care about them, the science that underpins our understanding and how we can fix the problem before it’s too late.
What will you learn?
- Why human activities are changing the climate
- How our knowledge of science underpins what we know about the past, present and future climate
- What our future might hold, and why we should care about it
- Why an increase of 2 or 4°C in global average temperature is important
- How the changing climate is affecting, and will continue to affect, the incidence and impacts of extreme weather events
- The role of extreme events and the effect it has on our species, ecosystems, coastlines, food supply, health, infrastructure, economy and security
- How climate change is likely to exacerbate existing problems of social inequality
- How climate change will interact with other pressures on global systems such as ecosystem degradation and human population growth
- Why fixing the climate problem is urgent, and how the timing of solutions is critical
- The relative contributions that different emission reduction solutions have had on solving the climate problem
Note: This course is currently not available.
