Climate change, which is driven by global warming, is one of the most pressing global environmental crises of our generation and our children's and grandchildren's generations. Although the crisis has only been recognized in the public sphere in the past couple of decades, the foundations of our understanding of global warming are almost two centuries old. We will use The Warming Papers, a compilation of the canonical papers describing the scientific logic of global warming, as our guide.

This course will lay out the scientific logic of global warming from Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier's 1824 paper on what would come to be known as the greenhouse effect, through to the most recent discoveries, and will cover climate physics and the carbon cycle.