There’s no doubt you have already heard about climate change. It’s been intensively discussed in mass media for years; you heard about it from your friends, family and professors. But have you ever had a chance to examine it from your own perspective?

University of Exeter offers this chance to you, and with the help of FutureLearn platform, presents a course Climate Change: Challenges and Solutions. Several leading experts from the spheres of mathematics, marine biology and others will be working throughout the course to explain to you what is going on with the climate, what it means, what it might lead to and what solutions there are. The course claims that these solutions “can help avoid the most dangerous climate changes and increase the resilience of societies and ecosystems to those climate changes that cannot be avoided”.

The course will be focusing on some enthralling questions, for example:

• Why is the greenhouse effect a bad metaphor for the process of atmospheric warming?
• Why could one of the greatest threats to humanity from a climate change be a tiny fungus?
• Why could the Sahara desert be transformed to lush vegetation?
• How exactly could we engineer the climate to put a stop to global warming?

It is important and exciting to learn more on the topic of the global climate, because we all are presenting at the dawn of a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which humanity is shaping and transforming the Earth forever.

Although Climate Change is a worrisome topic, the course does not aim to unsettle you. The instructors promise to try and to balance “the ‘bad news’ about climate change impacts on natural and human systems with the ‘good news’ about potential solutions”.

This course is completely free. It is there to provide an inter-disciplinary introduction to a broad field. No previous experience or qualifications are required.

The course will last for eight weeks, and it will require approximately three hours of study per week. There are certificates available at the end of the course. You can view the introduction video, and register for the course on its page.