This course provides a theoretical and practical basis for understanding present-day tropical environments and the causes of global environmental change as well as for assessing the scale of human interference in natural environmental processes. While the causes and effects of climate change are global in scale, the course focuses on aspects directly relevant to the Caribbean Region, which include sea-level change, the influences of the different modes of climate variability (E.g. ENSO; NAO; AMO) and tropical cyclone activity.

Indicative topics include: documentary records of past climate change; biological 'proxy' records of climate variations and their quantification; the record of climate variability in the Tropics; low-latitude/high altitude ice-core records; oceanic records and past history of oceanic circulation and sea surface temperatures; role of atmosphere-ocean interactions (e.g. ENSO) on global climate change; sea level change; palaeotempestology; General Circulation Models (GCMs) of the global climate system; the concept of climate 'determinism' and human ecodynamics.