Develop your scientific skills and knowledge and act on your concern about climate change through an MSc that’s never been more essential. Climate change and variability have played major roles in shaping human history – and the prospect of global warming as a result of human activity will present us with demanding challenges over the coming decades. 

This MSc in Climate Change is designed to provide you with in-depth interdisciplinary knowledge of climate change science, society and policy. You’ll have the freedom to direct your studies depending on your interests and career destination. 

As a graduate of this course you'll have strong employability potential in many areas including academic research, business consultancies, industry, policy-making, or government research agencies. 

ABOUT

Based in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV), this course will give you an authoritative understanding of climate change – including recent climate history, present-day variations and climate prediction. 

Through different modules you’ll discover the fundamentals of the changing climate, including the Earth’s energy balance, the global circulation of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect, and the causes of climate change and variability. You'll study the evidence and causes of climate change over the last two millennia up to the present day, including the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences for the behaviour of the Earth system. 

You’ll study climate model projections of the future, from temperature and sea-level changes on global scales, to extreme events such as drought. You will also learn about research methods, data preparation and analysis, how we detect anthropogenic changes to climate, and theoretical or model-based approaches to climate prediction. 

You will also consider climate change from the viewpoint of energy generation and usage. You'll learn about the key relationships between energy, fossil fuels and the economy, by drawing on historical analyses to understand how energy systems have evolved in the past. You will also examine the role that scenarios play in exploring energy futures. You will gain an in-depth understanding of the complexities of changing energy systems, enabling you to critically engage with debates around future “energy transitions”, the role that innovation and emergent technologies might play, and the various challenges of shifting towards renewable based energy systems. 

Our MSc Climate Change programme will open the doors to a wide variety of careers. You could go into environmental consultancy, postgraduate research (e.g. PhDs), fundamental or applied academic research, local government, utilities, health, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), climate impacts and policy, scientific publishing, or government research agencies, to name a few. 

CAREER DESTINATIONS

Examples of organisations that our graduates have gained employment with include: 

• Australian Bureau of Meteorology 

• Barclays 

• National Grid 

• University of Oxford 

• Nature Publishing Group 

• WWF Nepal