Offered by Coursera:

Global Warming: The Science of Climate Change:

This class is an introduction to the science of global warming for students without a science background. Students will examine the evidence surrounding climate change from a variety of perspectives and approaches, and, in the process, gain a multidisciplinary understanding of the scientific process.

The instructor is University of Chicago professor David Archer.  I registered the other day.  This will be interesting.  I have no experience with on-line education.  In addition to an on-line class being a new experience, I should know most of the material very well but I also expect I’ll discover some big gaps in my knowledge.  (It’ll be interesting to learn where those gaps are and to try to fill them.)

Additional detail on the class from Coursera’s website:

This class describes the science of global warming and the forecast for humans’ impact on Earth’s climate. It brings together insights and perspectives from physics, chemistry, biology, earth and atmospheric sciences, and even some economics. The simple mathematics underlying these differing approaches is the only background one needs. It is an accessible, multidisciplinary tour of climate science for a general audience.

The first unit explores the basic principles for understanding Earth’s climate.  The class begins with the nature of heat and light, then builds the very simplest conceptual—and algebraic—model for the climate of a planet, including the greenhouse effect. Over the next weeks, we introduce complexities of the real world to this model: how greenhouse gases are selective about what light they absorb, how the temperature structure and windiness of the atmosphere sets the stage for the greenhouse effect, and how feedbacks amplify it.

The second unit describes the carbon cycle of the Earth, how it stabilizes Earth’s climate on some time scales but destabilizes it on others. Fossil fuel carbon is part of the cycle, and it is in this context that we discuss the impact of fossil fuel energy on the Earth’s carbon cycle.

The last unit of the class is about the human impact on Earth’s climate: why we believe it’s changing, why we believe we’re changing it, the impacts that could have, and the options we have to mitigate the situation.

(Hat tip to Eli Rabett for mentioning the class on his website.  I wouldn’t have heard of it otherwise.)