" In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
- Galileo Galilei
Two decades ago, we posted our first website on Climate Change primarily because we could not find meaningful discussion on the Climate Debate. We gathered what we found. By 2013, we shared an objective discussion. But by 2022, it appears the warnings of a climate problem is definite. This what we posted.
The following is a video course was prepared by ChatGPT (Sep 2026) for my weekly science study audience about climate science. It details climate science, the impact climate is currently having both pro and con, a discussion of the debate of human impact on climate science, and the future the world population can expect.
Typically, the audience watch their video for about an hour from YouTube, TED, or university courses. It is not about “for” or “against” climate change. Several different propositions are involved, and they have very different degrees of certainty.
The greenhouse effect is basic physics. The recent warming is measured. The dominant human contribution to recent warming is very strongly established. Much more legitimate argument exists over climate sensitivity, regional consequences, attribution of individual extreme events, model uncertainty, economic damages, adaptation, mitigation costs, and what policies are justified by the risks.
The National Academies' current explanation says that natural solar and Earth-system changes cannot account for the observed modern warming and that human activities are the cause.
SESSION #1: Climate Physics: How Can a Trace Gas Warm a Planet? Start with radiation balance, infrared absorption, greenhouse gases, albedo, feedbacks, oceans and atmosphere.
SESSION #2: Four Billion Years of Climate Change: Climate changed long before humans. Why? Examine orbital changes, solar output, volcanism, ice ages, paleoclimate proxies and CO₂..
SESSION #3: How Do We Know Humans Are Responsible? This is the week for carbon isotopes, declining atmospheric oxygen, fossil-carbon bookkeeping, tropospheric warming/stratospheric cooling and attribution models.
SESSION #4: What Climate Change Is Doing Now — Harmful and Beneficial Effects. Cover heat, precipitation, drought, wildfire conditions, sea level, oceans, health, agriculture and ecosystems. Explicitly include beneficial effects.
SESSION #5: Hurricanes, Floods, Droughts and Wildfires: Is Every Disaster Climate Change? This deserves its own session because media claims often outrun what attribution science can demonstrate.
SESSION #6: Climate Models and the Genuine Scientific Arguments. Now tackle equilibrium climate sensitivity, clouds, aerosols, ocean circulation, model resolution, parameterization and uncertainty.
SESSION #7: The Skeptical Case: Give serious dissenting arguments a fair hearing after everyone understands the underlying science.
SESSION #8: What Happens Next? 2050, 2100 and Beyond. Finish with scenarios rather than prophecy: warming, sea-level rise, migration pressures, agriculture, adaptation, energy and technological options.
I especially like that Week 5 video. It avoids setting up a straw-man “climate believer versus climate denier” debate and instead asks what the actual evidence says about specific extreme-weather claims.
For Week 7, I deliberately include Koonin and Curry. But I do not present their positions as though climate scientists are divided 50–50 over whether humans are warming the planet.
They aren't.
That would create false balance. Their value is in challenging claims about magnitude, model reliability, extreme-event trends, risk and policy conclusions. MIT itself has done essentially what I am proposing:
in 2023 it brought Koonin together with MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel for a civil discussion titled “Climate Change: Existential Threat or Bump in the Road?” Interestingly, they agreed on considerably more than one might expect while differing over the severity of the risk.
The current-state material also needs refreshing because some otherwise superb climate videos are ten or fifteen years old. As of the WMO's March 2026 assessment,
- 2015–2025 were the eleven warmest years in the instrumental record;
- 2025 was approximately 1.43°C above the 1850–1900 average;
- ocean heat content reached another record; and
- global sea level remained near its record high.
- NASA independently reports that 2024 remains the hottest year in its record and that the ten most recent years are the ten warmest.
For the future, I discourage statements such as “scientists predict the Earth will be X degrees warmer in 2100.” Climate science does not give one forecast because future emissions are themselves unknown.
IPCC AR6 estimates approximately 1.4°C warming by 2081–2100 under its very-low-emissions scenario, 2.7°C under the intermediate scenario and 4.4°C under the very-high-emissions scenario, relative to 1850–1900.
More practically, UNEP's 2025 assessment says policies presently in place point toward roughly 2.8°C warming this century, while full implementation of current national commitments would put the range around 2.3–2.5°C. That makes an excellent final-week question: “What does a roughly 2½–3°C world actually look like?”
There is one logistical advantage to these selections. MIT OpenCourseWare/Open Learning is particularly suitable for our group because its Global Warming Science course was designed for people with mathematical and scientific backgrounds, and its twelve sections cover paleoclimate, radiation, convection, atmospheric circulation, clouds and aerosols, oceans, the carbon cycle, forcings, feedbacks and climate modeling. It gives you a reservoir of replacement videos if a particular Nerd Night wants to go deeper.
For downloading, I would be conservative about copyright. The Earth: The Operators' Manual educator site explicitly provides downloadable high-resolution segments after free registration. MIT's Climate Primer is generally licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, with exceptions noted for externally owned material, and MIT OCW provides downloadable material. For ordinary YouTube and TED material, I would distribute the hyperlink rather than make and redistribute downloaded copies unless the site's own download/license terms expressly allow it.
I give the course a neutral title such as “Climate Science: What We Know, What We Don't, and What Comes Next.” That accurately signals what you are trying to accomplish: neither advocacy nor debunking, but learning enough science to judge the competing claims.
