[NEW COURSE] Global climate change is a major environmental topic in the news these days, but it can be a challenge to understand the science, models, and probabilities involved in the stories and reports that come at us from many sources (often, unfortunately, promoting a hidden non-scientific agenda). It can be even more challenging to handle this topic if we consider its potential social and ethical perspectives. In this course we will discuss, in non-expert language, the basics of the scientific underpinnings of our understanding of global climate change, including what it is (and isn’t) and the supporting evidence in our observations and measurements. We will move from there to a general discussion of the models involved and their basic structure and probabilities. We will then consider an overview of the expectations derived from our models, how they’ve changed over the years, and the apparent options we have as a result. We will then finish with the expected outcomes of various scenarios for people in NY, the country, and the world and discuss both what we can do and a few perspectives that can help inform our decisions. Course Website: TBA  Audio/Visual, Discussion, Lecture, Reading