Climate change is arguably the most dangerous threat we are currently facing, and the vast majority of scientists agree that humans are largely responsible for causing it. Several radical ideas have been proposed to mitigate and even potentially reverse the negative effects of climate change by deliberately engineering the Earth-climate system; this group of proposed solutions is referred to as geoengineering, and experts from around the world are hotly debating whether geoengineering's benefits outweigh its dangerous and unpredictable risks. The first part of this class will focus on the science governing climate change and will include analysis of the cutting-edge climate research currently being undertaken in labs all around the world. The latter portion of the class will be centered around the potential rewards and risks posed by a variety of different geoengineering solutions including carbon capture and sequestration, cloud seeding, and stratospheric aerosol albedo modification. Even though the geoengineering apocalypse in the movie Geostorm is not realistic, geoengineering can be dangerous and even catastrophic.

Scientists and engineers around the country perform cutting-edge research to tackle the world's most challenging problems including eradicating diseases, reducing the impacts of global climate change, and investigating the outer reaches of our universe. However, now that Donald Trump is president, many scientists are concerned about how the new administration will impact their research and the governmental agencies responsible for creating regulations based on their research. This class will begin by explaining the basic science underpinning hot-button scientific issues such as climate change, hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. fracking), and vaccines. The latter part of the class will then cover how the government has historically dealt with these issues and how we can expect the Trump administration to address these topics.