David Archer has just posted all of the lectures from his global warming class at the University of Chicago this semester. They are based on his textbook, Understanding the Forecast, and they're available as QuickTime videos.1This 10-week course for non-science majors focuses on a single problem: assessing the risk of human-caused climate change. The story ranges from physics to chemistry, biology, geology, fluid mechanics, and quantum mechanics, to economics and social sciences. The class will consider evidence from the distant past and projections into the distant future, keeping the human time scale of the next several centuries as the bottom line. The lectures follow a textbook, "Global Warming, Understanding the Forecast," written for the course. See related links for more info about the book. (source)
I haven't read the book, nor have I had a chance to look at the lectures, but if the lectures are half as good as the blurbs for the book suggest they might be, they will be a very useful resource.
I'm delighted that Archer has made them available.
1An example, perhaps, of Randy Olson's claim that we'll all have to start making videos as part of our science communication portfolio. A video of a lecture isn't what he had in mind, of course, but it's a start.
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