Climate Challenges & Solutions

At school, I was taught about global warming and “the greenhouse effect”. Stories of environmental hazards and the risk of climate change have since caught my attention. I recycle a little, use LED lighting, public transport and other techniques to lower my net resource consumption. I have realised this does not help enough. A 2015 essay by the ever-interesting Bret Victor prompted me to think about how to use existing technical skills to contribute better to the social and business changes necessary to steer human progress away from self-infliced disaster. I don’t mean to say I can manage this alone, I mean that I want to contribute more to collective efforts.

Scientific knowledge has deepend since I was school and an understanding of the problems we face has broadened. We have become strongly aware of an imbalance between the impacts climate change will have on richer and poorer countries, expressed through the growing “climate justice” dialog and movements. Coming to this with only willpower and out of date knowledge, I felt swamped with new information. I know that I get a lot from training courses, so I was excited to discover Exeter University’s Climate Challeneges and Solutions 8-week course, delivered through Future Learn. I have enrolled. I shall blog my progress.

I might also take a longer-form programme from Leeds University (which I have found whilst researching this article).