For the month of March, in honor of Women’s History Month, I am dedicating some of my blog posts to the outstanding organizations, resources, and inspiring stories about women in STEM. You can view my posts from this year and past years by searching on the tag “Women’s History Month”.

For those new to the term “global weirding” please see this New York Times op-ed by Thomas Friedman (Feb. 17, 2010) titled Global Weirding Is Here and this interview by Northwestern of Auroop Gan­guly. You can also view this introductory video by Katharine Hayhoe.

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe (personal website) is an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University, where she serves as the Director of the Climate Science Center. Her research focuses on developing and applying high-resolution climate projections to evaluate the future impacts of climate change on human society and the natural environment. She has served on national-level committees from AGU to NOAA, and she has given a TEDx talk titled What if climate change is real? She is profiled on PBS’ The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers, The Climate Reality Project’s Women Climate Champions Spotlight, on the Carbon Brief website, and in an interview with NPR titled There Must Be More Productive Ways To Talk About Climate Change. Her accomplishments and successful engagement on climate communication are known and celebrated across the science community and beyond.

In 2016, I blogged about Dr. Hayhoe’s first season of Global Weirding: Climate, Politics, and Religion, a video series available via YouTube, produced by KTTZ Texas Tech Public Media, and distributed by PBS Digital Studios.

The videos in Season 2 of Global Weirding include:

• • This is all just part of a natural cycle, right?
  • Renewable energy is way too expensive, right?
  • Plants and animals can adapt to climate change, right?
  • Was this latest hurricane caused by global warming or not?
  • The oceans are so big surely climate change won’t effect them, right?
  • Climate change, that’s just a money grab by scientists… right?
  • What is geoengineering anyways?
  • Is a warmer world a better world?
  • What happens in the Arctic really doesn’t matter, right?
  • So, why is two degrees the magic number?
  • Does messaging with fear really work?
  • The easiest ways to fix climate change is population control and going vegan, right?
  • I’m only a kid, I can’t do anything about climate change, right?
  • Developing countries need fossil fuels to reach the standard of living we enjoy, right?

Dr. Hayhoe presents non-threatening, accessible answers to these questions – questions that are being brought up in the news, in our campus dining halls, and online. Please consider sharing at least one of these videos with your students, or post a link on your social media account. Help the climate change discussion by sharing a thoughtful and accurate response to a frequently asked question.

I’ll end this blog post with the same ending from my previous Global Weirding post:

Let’s hope an ever-increasing audience listens to Dr. Hayhoe and follows her very wise advice, from our students to everyday citizens, to political leaders in our own nation and across the globe. She has much to teach us, and we have much to learn. Thank you, Dr. Hayhoe, for being a leader in climate change communication – you are a voice we need now and in the future.