Thermodynamics and Climate Change
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this thermodynamics course built for the MITES Semester program, aimed at rising high school seniors but open to anyone. Lessons cover the three laws of thermodynamics, entropy, and enthalpy, then turn to global warming analyzed through a thermodynamics lens. The back half applies these concepts to energy technologies: heat pumps, hydrogen fuel cells, metal-air batteries, artificial photosynthesis, molten salt storage, and concentrated solar power. Materials include lecture notes and problem sets from the original MIT program, published free through OCW under a Creative Commons license. The course connects abstract physical laws to concrete engineering hardware, showing how the same equations that describe heat engines also bound what a battery or a solar collector can do. No certificate is offered, but all course materials are available for self-study.