Hello everyone and welcome to the CLEAN climate communications workshop! This has been an exciting event to plan and we are very much looking forward to a lively couple of weeks of learning.

So we will kick off this process with a thread where we can all introduce ourselves. Let us know your name, where you work, the type of work you do and what prompted you to take this workshop.

I'll start: I'm Karin Kirk and I am one of the organizers of this workshop. I am an employee of SERC, the Science Education Resource Center out of Carleton College. I telecommute from lovely Bozeman, Montana where I also work as a ski instructor (thus I have my own motivations for preferring a cold climate!).

This workshop is a repeat of a similar one held in June 2011. We have a mixture of returning favorites (Richard Alley, John Cook) and new voices. I am very much looking forward to learning from our speakers and from all of you over the course of the workshop! Please jump in below and introduce yourself here.

thanks!
Karin

This is Alicia Siegrist and I am faculty at Anne Arundel Community College outside Annapolis, MD. I teach Physical Geology, Oceanography, and Geology of Maryland, and work on college sustainability initiatives, particularly in the curriculum.

I'd like to say Hello to my UMD Geology classmate Pam and Hafa Adai to Theresa in Guam (Ipan, Talofofo was home for 12+ yr).

Hello, all. My name is Lindsay Dubbs. I teach Coastal Ecological Processes and Energy and the Environment: A Coastal Perspective at the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Albemarle Ecological Field Site on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I teach in the fall and summer and otherwise conduct research related to the environmental impacts of marine hydrokinetic energy generation.

I am looking forward to learning new ways to integrate information about climate complexity into my courses and to virtually meeting lecturers and professors interested in similar topics.

Hi everyone. I am Melissa Godek. I am an Assistant Professor at SUNY Oneonta in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. I am a climatologist and teach the Meteorology majors on campus, including a mid-level course called Climatology.

My name is Andrea Bixler and I teach biology courses, including environmental science, at Clarke University in Dubuque, IA. I am also participating in the NASA Climate Stewards Education Project. I find climate science interesting but do not have a strong background in the area, so I hope to improve that and learn strategies for addressing student misconceptions.

This post was edited by Erik Christensen on May, 2012
Hi everyone! I am Erik Christensen. I teach physics and astronomy at South Florida Communtiy College. I have integrated the physics of climate change into my algebra-based physics class and students really seem to enjoy it. I attended this workshop last year - it was by far the best professional development activity that I have participted in last year! I look forward to working with you over the next week and a half. I know we are in for a real treat!

Hello, I am Kyle Fredrick. I teach Geology at California University of Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh in California Borough (that tends to throw people, especially when our university vans make it as far as Idaho!). I am the sole tenure-track geology faculty at CalU, so I have, at one point or another, taught every geology course we have. I am a Hydrogeologist by training, and my teaching focus, if I had one, would be Hydrology and Environmental Geology related to Water issues. My Hydrology course each fall includes all of our geology majors as well as the meteorology/climatology majors. It also attracts many environmental science students from the biology side. I chose to participate in this workshop to improve my ability to speak intelligently about climate in the context of the Hydrologic Cycle, as well as to make it a relevant topic in my Intro to Geology course. I am also teaching a seminar course this Fall with a focus on Petroloeum Geology and Fossil fuels. I have been involved with SERC for many workshops and have always found them useful and enlightening.

Hello everyone! My name is Candace Lutzow-Felling. I am the Director of Education at Blandy Experimental Farm, a University of Virginia field ecology research station. It is my job to communicate and share our science research skills and knowledge with the preK-12 learning community. My training and research experience is in archaeobotany and conservation biology with a focus on forest population genetics. I teach a graduate course in watershed ecology for K-12 teachers and am in the process of adding a section on the impacts of climate change to our regional hydrologic cycle and sea level impacts along the SE Atlantic coast and within the Chesapeake Bay. I also am developing a climate science course for our Virginia public school teachers. I am looking forward to learning with and from all of you during this course.

Hi everybody!
I'm Sara Harris, one of the co-convenors of this workshop. I teach at the University of British Columbia - climate science, environmental science, oceanography, field geology. I had a wonderful time as a participant in this workshop last year, learning from the guest speakers and sharing with other people who have similar challenges. I found the small group work particularly useful, productive, and fun. I've been lucky to have been on sabbatical since last September and have spent part of that time interviewing students from different campuses to elicit their mental models of how Earth's climate works. It's been an eye-opening experience, and I hope to use what students expressed in interviews to improve future learning activities for climate science.

Looking forward to meeting you all virtually!
Sara Harris

Hi everyone!
I'm Ondine Wells. I currently work with six gulf coast aquariums on a climate change education program. I am also beginning a PhD program at the University of Florida where I plan to focus on climate change education and behavior change. I hope to ultimately develop a course related to climate change communication. I have worked in environmental education for many years, but am fairly new to the climate change field.

My name is Kristopher Kraus and I am the Climate Research Coordinator at the National Environmental Education Foundation’s (NEEF) Earth Gauge Program. Earth Gauge works with the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on the Station Scientist and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research’s COMET program to provide environmental and climate education tools to the broadcast meteorology community. I joined the Earth Gauge program in October 2006. I look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts on what works and what does not as far as discussing climate system dynamics and hope I can provide some useful lessons of my own to the rest of the group.

I am a professor at the University of South Dakota, and my specialty is vertebrate paleontology. I teach courses in historical geology, oceanography, and energy that touch on climate complexity. I'm looking forward to hearing from the experts (the first talk was fantastic) and helping to develop pedagogical tools for the college classroom.

This post was edited by Avery Swearer on Jun, 2016
Hello All,

I am the Science Communication Specialist for the Northeast Temperate Network of the National Park Service (http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/units/netn/ ). I have also worked as a "frontline" interpretive Park Ranger for several National Parks and have been speaking about and delivering programs on climate change for a little over a decade now. Really looking forward to this class. If Richard Alley's presentation is any indication, it's going to be a great one!

Fun to share climate learning with all of you from the ordinary surroundings of my office! I am a professor of hydrology in the Forestry Department at Humboldt State University in Arcata, CA.
I teach hydrology and water quality courses, and have leaped into the breach to offer a course called WSHD 458 Climate Change and Land Use. (The '58 is for the year Keeling started his measurements). My research is veering towards climate topics such as effects of forest management on stream heating and water quality. I am headed to Nicaragua next year for sabbatical where I will study village watershed reforestation efforts and read lots of books on climate change, including (just added) Earth: The Operators Manual!

This is Pamela Gore, from Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta. We are a multi-campus two-year unit of the University System of Georgia, serving about 27,000 students. I mainly teach Physical Geology, Historical Geology, Life and Earth Science (for Early Childhood Education majors), Freshman Seminar (including Sustainability topics), and sometimes Earth and Space Science for Middle School Teachers. I have also been active in STEM Education grants in various ways at the college. I am very interested in climate change and climate literacy. Particularly when someone says the cold winter in Europe this year proves that global warming isn't real. I need to know how to access data that I can use to develop activiites with my classes to address these complex issues.

Hi Alicia! Good to see you again!

Hi all; I'm Dave Finster. I've been teaching chemistry at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH, for three decades and I have no formal training remotely related to climate change. About 18 months ago I decided to add climate change to my teaching repertoire, but not without trepidation. I've humbly taught two courses on the topic directed to non-science majors, and I've been furiously reading IPCC reports and a stack of related books for the past year. I'm becoming less ignorant but still not in a comfort zone of background knowledge. As we all know, it is a fascinating topic for a "science and society"-type of course that spans several disciplines.

In the 1960s I recall wondering if America would survive the social upheaval of that decade. We did, but many of those problems still permeate our culture although we are, at least, not burning down our cities any more. I wondered from 1960-1990 if we would manage not to destroy the earth with a nuclear holocaust. We did, but that involved some luck along with doses of international diplomacy and some safeguards. Now I wonder which path national and international cultures/populations and political leaders will select with regard to climate change in this century. I am not filled with optimism but, like Richard Alley, Amory Lovins and others state, we have the ability to avoid disaster. Part of my reason for teaching about climate change is to try to have a tiny effect on that choice by educating students on this topic. The stakes seem high for our grandchildren and their offspring.

Hi; I'm Jeanne Troy, Program Officer at the Koshland Science Museum. I develop and manage programs for teens and adults at the museum of the National Academy of Sciences. We have a fantastic Earth Lab exhibit about climate change; I have the opportunity to develop creative programming in and outside of the museum in relation to that and the work of the Academies.

Me, I'm Harold Geller. I'm at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. I teach introductory astronomy, astrobiology, integrated science, and most recently "energy and the environment." In the '90s I was involved with a university consortium where I was a PI on a grant related to remote sensing, especially in the Arctic region (sea ice extent) and for a little known island of Hawaii called Kaho'olawe. Some links related to my classes and work here:
https://twitter.com/#!/AstroBioProf
http://physics.gmu.edu/~hgeller/observing.html
http://physics.gmu.edu/~hgeller/EnergyAndTheEnvironment/
http://physics.gmu.edu/~hgeller/astrobiology/

This summer I am working on a grant with the Graduate School of Education here at GMU where I will be teaching teachers and kids (5th/6th graders) in a summer science camp. Our focus is based upon the results from the statewide "Standards of Learning" where students did poorest. It turns out that the environment, particularly plants was a low scoring area. Another low scoring area was force and energy. I managed to convince a committee that a scenario to hit all these issues was space exploration of Mars. There's a mission to Mars on its way now, called the Mars Science Laboratory, and it's due to land on 5 August 2012, which helped me sell the scenario. So, teachers and students will about plants, the environment and how humans can effect an environment as they take an imaginary trip to Mars and think about what they have to do to start a colony on Mars.

Hello, I'm Suzanne OConnell. I teach at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. For the last 5 years I've been the Director of Service Learning, so some of my geoworld has been neglected. In the past, I've been involved in bits of climate research and currently teach a course called "Oceans & Climate," at the sophomore/junior level. I haven't taught if for a long time and am trying to catch up on new ideas and pedagogy. I also teach "Into to Environmental Science" and include information about climate in that course. I really enjoy learning about what everyone is doing to advance this important topic.