Human-induced climate change has become the most pressing environmental issue of our time. If you want to understand the science behind climate change and the impact of climate change on people —what is happening today, how climate has changed in the past, and how it may change in the future—this class is for you. In one semester, you will learn the science of climate change, climate prediction, and the global impacts of a changing climate. You will understand how Earth’s rocks, oceans, atmosphere, and vegetation influence how climate changes naturally. You will appreciate the impact of people who for thousands of years were subtly altering Earth’s climate across the globe. Then came the Industrial Revolution and now human-induced climate changes are easily detectable and wreaking havoc with every society on Earth - the result of burning fossil fuels and wholesale land clearance. Using climate models, you’ll look into a warming world and predict the climate of Earth centuries and millennia into the future. We will spend significant time exploring how people take action to address, mitigate, and respond to climate change and how to communicate your feelings about a warmer, stormier future in order to make productive change.

This is a class about learning and finding out just how interesting climate change science can be. We have several simple and straightforward expectations of you as a student in this class: 1. We expect you to respect your classmates and faculty at all times when they voice opinions that may differ from yours. This is a class that could raise emotions. Please respect your peers' feelings. 2. We expect you to participate in the class by asking questions in office hours and in review sessions. We expect you to participate out of class by reading all assignments before the class at which they are due. 3. We expect complete academic honesty. We expect that you will neither give nor receive information on the quizzes and tests and that assignments you hand in are your own work. You will sign an honor statement on each test. Violations of this trust and our community will be handled according to UVM protocols. 4. We expect you to read this class syllabus carefully and inform yourself about the class, the assignments, and their due dates. We will do our best to remind you but it is your responsibility to know what assignments are due and when. We also have high expectations of ourselves as faculty. We will come to class prepared every time with the most interesting and informative slides, videos, and demonstrations we can muster. We will have assignments graded within several days and turned back to you. We will grade as objectively and fairly as possible using rubrics that you can check. We will treat every student with respect, and we will do our best to maintain a fair and balanced learning environment in the classroom so that everyone’s opinion is valued.

We will use a variety of means to assign grades. Your grade will be based on daily quizzes, tests at the end of weeks 1, 2 and 3, and a final essay due at the end of week 4. There is no final exam.