[ For the first time in history it is not only conceivable but in fact likely that human action will result in the extinction of our species. We face, in climate change, an impending global catastrophe beyond the imagination of all but the most recent generations. The first years of the 2020s made this inescapably clear, as they presented extreme challenges to human communities throughout the world. Uncontrolled climate change continued to accelerate the predictably unpredictable growth of extreme weather events like devastating mega-fires, hurricanes, droughts, floods, landslide, and monsoons, to shrink the habitable portions, and to spread novel diseases to new areas. This course will provide a foundation in the state of the current scientific knowledge of climate change and the multiple discrete and interacting planetary processes at work as the fact that the earth's atmosphere retains progressively more solar energy drives new, mutually interacting dynamics in the weather, oceans, rain and other forests, icecaps, glaciers, and permafrost, fires, and various ecosystems. Having surveyed the complex but certain science of global climate change, it will then relate it to what is called the vulnerable world hypothesis: in light of advances in technology, population growth and interconnectivity, human activity increasingly threatens consequences that can literally alter the entire planetary ecosystem. The final focus of this conversation, then, will be on ethics, politics, culture and technology, and specifically how we might develop the normative and imaginative resources to grasp the enormity of the advancing climate crisis and our increasingly vulnerable world, to face up to the ethical, political and technological challenges these unprecedented circumstances pose, and begin to develop new capacities for collective action to address the new threats we face.]