“It was a complete breakthrough for me to realize that sharing from the heart, which is the opposite of what we’re taught to do as scientists, was the way for me to connect with people,” Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and acclaimed climate science communicator at Texas Tech University, tells us in this episode of the Mongabay Newscast. “And then, after that connection, share from the head how we know this is real, we know it’s us, we know the impacts are serious, but we know there also are solutions. And the solutions bring it around full circle back to the heart, because the solutions are what give us the hope that we need to fix this thing.”

Hayhoe is a professor in the Department of Political Science and the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech. Last year, she teamed up with her local PBS station, KTTZ, to write and produce a web series called “Global Weirding,” which tackled common questions, misconceptions, and myths around climate science, politics, and religion. We check in with Hayhoe as she’s in the midst of shooting the second season of Global Weirding in order to get a sense of what to expect from the new episodes of the show and how Hayhoe views the overall political landscape around climate action today.

Our second guest on this episode is Branko Hilje Rodriguez, a PhD student in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department at the University of Alberta, Canada. Hilje Rodriguez is originally from Costa Rica, and that’s where his research is currently focused — he’s studying the soundscapes of different successional stages of the tropical dry forest in Costa Rica’s Santa Rosa National Park, the largest remaining remnant of tropical dry forest in Mesoamerica.

In this Field Note segment, Hilje Rodriguez plays for us a number of the recordings he’s made in the park, allowing us to hear the sounds of the dry forest during different stages of regrowth and different seasons, as well as some of the iconic bird species that call the dry forest home.

Here’s this episode’s top news:

• Meet the new giant sunfish that has evaded scientists for centuries
• Brazil’s Temer revokes constitutional indigenous land rights
• Western Chimpanzee numbers declined by more than 80 percent over the past quarter century
• UN moves one step closer to convening high seas treaty negotiations
• Pangolin hunting skyrockets in Central Africa, driven by international trade
• Rare bird not seen in 60 years rediscovered

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Featured Image: Still from “Global Weirding” episode “Climate change is really only affecting the polar bears, right?“

Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter: @mikeg2001

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