When Climate Communication Requires a Security Guard

In November of 2016, the website Breitbart.com published an article claiming that the earth was in fact cooling, not warming and used a video created by weather.com about La Nina to support their argument. In an unprecedented move, weather.com crafted a rebuttal in both text and video form. This video has now been watched more than 10 million times but at the cost of online attacks and even personal threats. Weather.com produces several videos a week communicating both climate and environmental issues along with our daily forecasts but the video rebuttal to Breitbart help us to challenge our process and broaden our coverage of climate change. Thanks to millions of users a day on weather.com and through The Weather Channel app, we have seen what language and messages resonate with the listener and how we can more effectively communicate our message without alienating.