The Harvard Extension School is offering an online course on climate change that starts on Wednesday, 30 January at 4:30pm. It is entitled:
Global Climate Change: The Science, Social Impact, and Diplomacy of a World Environmental Crisis
This 15-week, semester-long course may be taken for credit on an undergraduate or graduate school level, but it can also be taken with a “Not for Credit” option. Many citizens, fellow scholars, and environmentalists working in government or NGOs throughout this country and around the world have found these courses to be of great value as a source of strategic information and analytical insight as they try to address environmental problems in their own careers and workplaces. From this perspective many active professionals engaged in the everyday work place — whether as businessmen, government officials, college or university professors, NGO and environmental activits — have found this course of exceptional value in the past. It has helped them orient themselves toward the largest shared experience before the human community in the coming decades, and it has given them the tools to take forward in their own lives to continue to make sense of the changes in our climate and help them formulate realistic and effective responses to it in their own lives.
Anyone enrolled in the course is given access to and instruction in using the “Clearing House for Environmental Course Materials” which can serve to support their ongoing work well after the completion of the individual courses. Further, students in these courses will receive information about Food-Matters.TV where they can explore the emerging impact of climate change upon both local and global food systems and the ways in which this will express itself in the coming years as an environmental justice issue.
In addition the course is designed to exposed students to a variety of “outside” experts and opinion-leaders as a component of the weekly lectures. For example, in the second week of the Climate course, students will be able to view (or attend if they are on campus) a presentation by former Vice-President, Al Gore, reflecting upon our current global climate predicament and offering insights about how we might proceed from here. Further, the course offers students a “window” to other climate-related events going on at Harvard throughout the forthcoming semester. For instance, the day after Al Gore’s presentation to the Harvard community, there is going to be an important public discussion of climate change policy in the United States, touching upon why nothing of substance has been accomplished by a wide variety of political figures over the last quarter century.
The course starts on Wednesday, 30 January. Syllabus for the course can be accessed by clicking here. The initial meeting of the course from 4:30 onwards on 30 January 2013 is available in streaming mode by clicking here.
