The Denial 101x MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) was a great success, with thousands of participants and many satisfied students. I admit that I was quite touched by the mostly positive student reactions and I am thankful to John Cook for inviting me to contribute to this course in a small way. This video compilation of students’ feedback shows how people from diverse backgrounds all got something from the course.

From July 1, 2015 onwards, the course is available for anyone to follow at their own pace. It’s completely free of charge, naturally!

My own contributions were three short video lectures.

The first one deals with the myth that the rise in CO2 that we have seen over the past 200 years could have come from a natural source, like volcanoes. I provided some supplemental material here or here, discussing the lecture material in more detail and providing some references.

The second looks at the rise in global temperatures since 1850 and debunks the myth that this could have been due to the natural processes that caused an end to the Little Ice Age. Supplemental material is here. There is now a much slicker animation of my central argument (which I had cribbed from the IPCC) done by Gavin Schmidt and Kate Marvel of NASA.

And now for something completely different…  My third lecture debunks an alarmist myth that claims that destabilizing methane clathrates in the Arctic will cause a catastrophic climate change this century. They won’t, but that doesn’t mean that the warming Arctic won’t throw any nasty climate feedbacks our way or that methane clathrates won’t provide a nasty feedback over many centuries. (I must thank my neighbours and friends Gary McNutt and Ky Fox for volunteering to film this lecture.)

My MOOC colleague Keah Schuenemann has compiled a list of the MOOC videos, all of which can be watched whether you are registered for the course or not. Here they are: