Three Ohio State professors work together to teach multidisciplinary climate change course

History professor Sam White didn’t kick off his first lecture on climate change by pulling up graphs of rapidly rising global temperatures or a diagram of greenhouse gases.

Instead, he started with a passage from William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The students in the lecture hall then scoured the text for allusions to a pale moon and contagious fogs, which indicate that 430 years ago, Europeans experienced the same upsetting of natural order facing our planet today.

The Climate Change course — new to Ohio State University this semester — covers everything from tree rings and rising seas to endangered species and alternative energy. Like any introductory level class, students represent a number of academic departments. And as one of the university’s first multidisciplinary courses, so do its three professors.

“Climate is so large and multifaceted,” White said. “No one professor, or really any one department, could claim the full range of expertise necessary. ...