Joint Program In the News
By Genevieve Wanucha
Oceans at MIT
The ocean plays a critical role in climate change, especially in setting the climate's response to increasing anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. As excess heat accumulates in various parts of the Earth system, most of that thermal energy...
Genevieve Wanucha
Oceans at MIT
John Marshall, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography, recently accepted the 2014 Sverdrup Gold Medal of the American Meteorological Society for his “fundamental insights into water mass transformation and deep convection and their implications...
Michael Davidson
MIT-Tsinghua China Energy and Climate Project
According to tallies by the National Energy Administration, China added 14 gigawatts (GW) of grid-connected wind power capacity in 2013, now the fifth consecutive year with installs of over 10 GW (here, at a glance, is...
By Genevieve Wanucha
Oceans at MIT
Water has a lot of say in how Earth’s climate works. And scientists often acknowledge that the uncertainty about climate’s future trajectory comes from a lack of understanding of water. This intellectual challenge filled the better part of February...
In climate change, science and policy are inextricably linked—more so than in most contemporary social phenomena. The complexity of understanding earth’s systems generates uncertainty, which feeds into an imperfect policy process that often warps ideal economic instruments...
Genevieve Wanucha
Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate
IAP 2014 was bone-chilling, and thanks to 12.310, An Introduction to Weather Forecasting, 20 new amateur forecasters can tell you why.
Always offered between semesters, 12.310 reveals the principles of fluid...
By Michael Davidson
It is quite a challenge to pin down an electricity system that has grown 10.8 percent annually over the last decade, doubled power generation in just 7 years and added 80-90 gigawatts (GW) – the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s entire generating capacity –every year...
The Global Young Academy (GYA) is an international group of two hundred young (up to ten years post PhD) scientists selected based on research excellence and commitment to impact. Through GYA, members are linked to the senior international academy network ...
By Michael Craig, Amanda Giang, Colin Thackray 

What’s the difference between climate change, the Northern spotted owl, and acid rain?
That question is not the beginning of a bad joke. Rather, it was the type of question that lay at the heart of the class ‘Science, Politics, and...
In many public discussions of climate change, science takes a back seat to political agendas and rhetoric. But 12.340x (Global Warming Science), a new massive open online course from MITx now open for...