Climate and Climate Change

Overview

Welcome to the public course website for Climate and Climate Change, a course on the fundamentals of climate science taught in Spring 2025 at The City College of New York (CCNY) in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS).

See the links on the left or below for more material. If you’re a student enrolled in the class, definitely start with the syllabus.

Course description

This class introduces you to modern climate science. We’ll explore questions like:

• What does climate mean?

• What is Earth’s climate like now, and why?

• What was it like in Earth’s past, and why?

• What is it likely to be like in the future?

• How do human activities influence it?

• For each aspect of climate change, how much uncertainty is there, and what are the sources of that uncertainty?

Answering them requires multiple scientific approaches including physics, meteorology, physical oceanography, hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, ocean biogeochemistry, and ecology.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when contemplating climate change. After all, climate science relies on incredibly complicated and powerful tools such as a satellite-based observational network and supercomputer-run climate models. But this class will emphasize simple models and conceptual understanding: how we can understand many fundamental aspects of the incredibly complex climate system on a chalkboard via remarkably elegant and simple frameworks.