Hello, everyone and welcome to the course on communicating climate change and health. I'm Connie Roser Renouf. I'm at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. Before we get into the course content, I want to give you a little background on myself, so that you understand how it is that I came to be working on communicating climate and health. I studied health communication when I was in grad school with the intention of going to Africa after I finished school, and working in international development campaigns. But I never did that. After grad school, I became a professor and married and had children, and in the early 1990s I left a tenured position to stay home with kids. In part because I was dissatisfied that I felt like I wasn't having enough of an impact on the larger world. So I stayed home with kids for a decade, and was largely content with that decision. Sometimes I I really missed it. But for the most part, I was happy at home with my children and then something happened in around 2004 that changed everything. Which was that my son who was then maybe eight years old was taken with a friend by the friend's mother to see the disaster film the Day After Tomorrow, which is about climate change. Those of you who are familiar with the film will know that it is a highly unrealistic representation of the impacts of climate change. But my son came home from that film terrified, and I didn't know enough about climate change to really be able to reassure him that these this representation was really false. I started looking into climate change myself and then I became terrified for real reasons not because of false impacts like those that were presented in the film. Which made me very concerned about climate change and I also felt quite helpless at home. What am I going to do that can make a difference? At that point, I really regretted having left the University. In 2007, I was contacted out of the blue by Ed Maibach who had gone through the same graduate program that I went through at Stanford, and was also interested in health communication. He had come to recognize this as such a huge public health threat. That he was changing his research focus from public health to communicating climate change and health. He had heard through the grapevine that I was very worried about climate change and that I was ready to go back to work. So he and I together, in 2007, created the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. Since then we have been collaborating with Tony Leiserowitz here at Yale who has a similar center, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. The three of us started working together in 2007. It was just the three of us. Since then over the 11 years that have passed, the number of colleagues we have both at our universities and across the country has grown until we're really quite a large group of people, who are working on communicating this issue. I think that communicating climate change and health is a really important topic because we know enough about the science of climate change and its impacts on us. That science isn't uncertain, where our problem lies at this point is not in understanding more about climate change but it's in getting the public to understand that. So that we have an issue public who will demand from legislators and policymakers that we take action. We really need to do this urgently now because we are running out of time. So I hope to help you in this course figure out how best to communicate with your specific audiences about climate change in a way that they know what to do. Both to protect themselves, and to advocate for change in their communities to get us headed in the right direction.
