Climate-change expert Katharine Hayhoe, a scientist and a Christian, is on a mission to change the minds of faith-based climate change deniers
Katharine Hayhoe never goes where she’s not invited, and when she accepts an invitation, she usually finds herself surrounded by people who vehemently disagree with her.
Hayhoe, 43, is one of the nation’s foremost atmospheric scientists. She was lead author of the second and third U.S. National Climate Assessments, she directs the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, and she has written more than 120 peer-reviewed publications and works with city managers, engineers and ecologists across the country to prepare for climate-change impacts.
She’s also an evangelical Christian on a mission to convince faith-based climate-change deniers that climate change is real, that it’s caused by human activity and that taking action aligns with their core values and beliefs.
Her strategy is simple: build a bond over a shared value; connect things that affect that commonality to climate change, then — and only then — explain the science. She concludes with common-sense solutions, many already set in motion, because hope, not fear, inspires people, she says.
She uses the same tactics when speaking with farmers, ranchers, fossil fuel industry employees and other groups less likely to be on board with the climate movement.
On June 24, 2015, Hayhoe will be in Portland at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall to give a talk, “Climate Change: Fact and Faith .” She says it’s a rare exception to her rule against taking speaking engagements with audiences who don’t need convincing.
Hayhoe recently spoke with Street Roots from her home in Lubbock, Texas, about our changing climate, how the media perpetuates myths about climate change, and what approaches work best when trying to convince climate-change deniers to accept the facts and take action.
Emily Green: What are some of the takeaways from the 2014 U.S. National Climate Assessment of the United States you think might surprise even the most avid of climate activists?
Katharine Hayhoe: Looking at those observed trends and future projections, it was clear climate change matters to each of us in the places we live today. If we live in the Southwest, we know water shortages are our issue. If we are in the Northeast, we know too much water is the issue. If we live in cities, heat is our issue. The National Climate Assessment clearly showed the reason why we care about climate change varies from place to place, but those reasons are all very real, and they are all here today.
E.G.: How have predictions for future climate impacts changed in recent years, and do you think we’re getting better at predicting what will happen in the future?
K.H.: First of all, there was a paper published by (scientists and academics) Brysse, Oreskes (O’Reilly) and Oppenheimer two years ago that looked at climate projections from 1990 to 2010, asking: “Is it true that climate scientists are alarmists?” If it was true, we would expect to see, over the last 20 years, the rate and magnitude of change in the real world is much less than what scientists predicted. They found that far from being alarmist; climate projections had been consistently on the low side — so much so that it could not be accounted for by scientific uncertainty. And so in this paper, they coined this syndrome, ESLD — Erring on the Side of Least Drama. Subconsciously, we (scientists) are so conservative, and we so hate being accused of being alarmist, that we are downgrading the risks in our own projections.
Second, one of the most important new things we have learned over the past 10 years is the impacts of climate change are far more wide-ranging than we imagined. In the beginning, scientists often focused on the direct impacts of warming: sea level rise, heat wave risks, increasing rainfall intensity. And these are important. Hundreds of millions of people could be homeless this century due to sea level rise alone. In 2003, a heat wave over in Europe was responsible for 70,000 premature deaths; climate change had doubled the risk of that event occurring. Just this year, Texas was devastated by record rainfall and flooding, consistent with what we expect more of in a warming world.
What we’re recognizing now, though, is that secondary impacts may be just as, if not more, important. The direct impacts of climate change may be dwarfed by the indirect impacts of climate change on, say, political instability or the ocean’s food chain.
E.G.: Some have said you’ve made it your mission to spread the gospel of climate science among Christians. How did you come to take on such a mission?
K.H.: “Gospel” means good news. I feel more like an Old Testament prophet than I do a New Testament evangelist, warning people to turn from their ways before disaster happens.
Part of the problem with climate change is that it’s been deliberately framed as alternate religion. Many people — maybe few in Portland, but many where I live here in Texas — interpret, “Do you believe in climate change?” as “Would you like to worship at the altar of Al Gore?” So I think it’s really important to differentiate between what we believe versus what we know.
Based on physics and the available evidence, not based on a crystal ball, the most logical and solid conclusion is that climate is changing due to human activities.
Until 2008 or 2009, I don’t think anybody really knew where I went to church on Sunday. The reason I decided to tell people I was a Christian was because when I looked around in the United States, evangelical Protestants, the group that I’m in, were the least likely to agree that climate is changing due to human activities.
My community, my church, my neighbors — the people who believe much of the same theology as I do — they were the ones being deliberately misinformed about climate change.
E.G.: In Showtime’s “Years of Living Dangerously ,” a documentary series on the impact of climate change, you and your husband reached out to Kurtis, a cotton farmer and Christian who wasn’t on board with climate change. After your husband told him 97 percent of scientists agree it’s happening, he changed his mind. Can you explain why, with so much information available at our fingertips, so many Americans don’t have all the facts?
K.H.: Ed Maibach and his team at George Mason University traveled around the country asking people what they thought about climate change and whether it was human caused. They wanted to know, if you only have 10 seconds to talk to someone, what’s the most impactful thing that you can say. They found the simple message that scientists agree changed the most minds, and that’s exactly what you saw with Kurtis.
Americans believe scientists are divided about 50-50 on whether humans are changing climate change. In actual fact, survey after survey has shown scientists are at least 97 percent in agreement and the scientific literature is over 99 percent.
Why do we think it’s 50-50?
The Union of Concerned Scientists went through every segment on several major news networks and counted how many times accurate information versus demonstrably false information on climate change was presented. What they found for 2013 was, even on CNN, which most people regard as a fairly middle-of-the-road news network, 30 percent of the information on climate change was false. On Fox News, over 70 percent of the information was false. In 2012 on Fox News, over 90 percent of the information was false.
When you look at CNN, where does that false information come from? It came from two talking heads arguing with each other. In fact, every time I have received an invitation to appear on CNN, it was always, “Would you debate so-and-so, who is saying that climate change isn’t real, or if it is (real), it isn’t human (caused), or even if it is humans, it’s not a big deal?”
Every time they asked, I said no. I feel it is morally wrong for me, as a scientist, to perpetuate the myth that it’s 50-50 by engaging in a 50-50 debate.
E.G.: What kind of impact do you think Pope Francis’ statement solidifying climate change is going to have on the faith-based community?
K.H.: Here in west Texas, one of my close colleagues attends a Catholic church. He’s shared with me how he’s horrified by the number of people at his church who’d rather listen to what Fox News says about climate change than the pope.
If we look across the entire United States, Catholics are more similar to mainline Protestants in what they would say about climate change, whether it’s real or not, or caused by humans or not. I hope the pope’s encyclical will improve those numbers further.
But in the evangelical world, we don’t have a pope. We don’t even have a very strong hierarchy of religious leadership. So our vacuum of leadership has been filled by the media and by our political leaders.
E.G.: If every conservative Christian accepted that climate change was real, do you think that would be enough to motivate them to vote for political leaders who want to do something about climate change but who disagree with them on some of their other values?
K.H.: I think that would be enough to change the tune of most of our politicians. We have examples of politicians, starting with (James) Inhofe, who have said things like, “I thought it must be true until I found out how much it cost.” And I have other examples from colleagues who have been on an airplane, for example, sitting beside a Republican congressman well known for his public rejection of climate science, saying in private, off the record, things like: Of course climate change is a very important problem, but I can’t get elected if I say that.
Bob Inglis is a very conservative Republican congressman who lost his seat in the primaries just because, when confronted with the evidence by his son, he decided to publicly say, “Yes, climate change is real.” I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a room somewhere with a picture of Bob, a room that young, promising, potential Republican candidates are led into and sat down and told, “Do not be like Bob. Look what happened to him. You can say whatever you want in the privacy of your own home, but do not say that climate change is real in public if you actually want to be elected.”
Politicians respond to what they believe their electorate wants. A big part of the issue of climate change, perhaps the biggest, is the fact that what people really object to are the solutions, not the science. The solutions have been presented as solutions that involve government policies, government intervention in people’s personal and private lives. That’s how the solutions have often been framed. And so I think that there is room for free market, conservative solutions in the debate, and Bob Inglis is one of the people who is championing this idea.
E.G.: How do you explain to Christians that they can say climate change is real and also still believe in intelligent design or creationism?
K.H.: I ask people to walk with me through what we believe, to listen and think about how we connect those beliefs to the issue of climate change, to consider the evidence that God’s creation is giving us as the reality of climate change, and then to think about what are ways we can respond that are consistent with our faith and our values.
Along the way, I have made a conscious decision — one that not all my fellow scientists would agree with, I’m sure — that in order to convince people of the reality and the urgency of acting on climate, I am willing to walk around some very ancient and very explosive mines that divide science from faith.
I took our ice core data, which shows us what temperature, carbon dioxide and methane were like going into the past, and I created a figure that looks at the history of our planet over the last 6,000 years.
For example, from ice core data, which shows us the Earth’s temperature, carbon dioxide and methane for hundreds of thousands of years in the past, if we’re looking at the warm interglacial period that we’re in right now, we’d probably want to go back 18,000 to 20,000 years. If a scientist is plotting any given data set, we’d usually just show the entire record. In this case, however, I used ice core data to make a figure showing only the last 6,000 years. Why did I do that? Because a large proportion of people here in the U.S. believe the Earth is quite young.
So I made this plot and looked at it, and here’s the amazing thing. When we look at the last 6,000 years, the impact of human activity on our climate is unmistakable. There are no major large natural cycles over the last 6,000 years. In fact, our temperature was on the long, slow slide into what we know was going to be the next ice age — until the Industrial Revolution, that is. And then all of a sudden, boom — it goes almost straight up.
What I say to people is: We don’t need to agree that the Earth is any more than 300 years old to agree that humans are changing climate. And I think we can all agree on that.
E.G.: And what do you say to skeptics who say, “The Earth will be our habitat for as long as God wants it to be, and there’s nothing we can do about it”?
K.H.: Well, there are two arguments in that one sentence.
The first argument, “God would never let this happen,” is often invoked by politicians. It centers around the concept of the sovereignty of God and the idea that, “How can we puny humans imagine, in our arrogance, that we are powerful enough to affect something as great as this planet, which God created?” And to answer that question, we don’t go to science; we go to the Bible.
In Genesis, God gave us responsibility for every living creature on this planet. We are responsible for the planet now. We’re not usurping the role of God; we are the ones in charge, and God is saying, “How will you steward the resources I have given you?”
In the Bible, we are told very clearly that we reap what we sow, that our choices have consequences. We can look around in the world today, and each of us can find an example of something tragic that God has let happen, because God created human beings to make our own decisions, and we don’t always make the best decisions.
Climate change is nothing more than a consequence of a decision that we humans made. Way back when, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we didn’t know that burning so much coal and natural gas would put all this carbon into the atmosphere.
But by the 1800s, we did know that we were wrapping this extra blanket around the planet, and by the early 1900s, we knew the planet was heating up in response. Now we know the consequences of our decision; it’s time to make a different choice.
The second argument is, “The world is going to end anyway, so why do we care?” Again here we can go back to the Bible and look at the book of Thessalonians, where people were saying, “You told us that Christ was returning any day now, so I’m going to quit my job, lie around, eat, drink and be merry, because hey, the world’s going to end anyway. Might as well enjoy the last few days we have.”
Liberally paraphrasing the apostle Paul’s response, he said: “Get a job, support your family, care for the widows and the poor who can’t care for themselves, because we don’t know the day or the time the world will end, and in the meantime, we’re not supposed to sit around twiddling our fingers; we’re supposed to love others as Christ loved us.”
And how loving is it if we bury our head in the sand — or in a barrel of oil — and pretend that climate change doesn’t exist? How loving is it of us if 300 million people stand to lose the land they live on due to sea level rise during the next 100 years and we do nothing about that? I think we all know the answer to those questions.
E.G.: About a year ago, Time magazine named you as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Do you feel like you are one of the most influential people?
K.H.: (laughs) No, are you kidding! When I got the email from Time magazine last April, my family had the worst case of the stomach flu I have ever seen in my entire life. For days, all I had been doing was cleaning up unspeakable things. It was awful. So in the middle of these days, I was sitting down at the kitchen table just for a second to try and check my email, in vomit-splattered jeans, having barely slept for three days, and I get this email saying, “Congratulations. You’re one of the most influential people in the world,” and I think, “That’s got to be spam,” and I delete it. Fast-forward a week, everybody had recovered and I’d washed my jeans and I went back to the university to work, and I check my mailbox for the first time, and there is this very formal card asking me to attend the Time gala event, and I thought, “Oh my goodness! Is this real?”
E.G.: What do you wish people would ask you when they interview you that they don’t?
K.H.: One of the most important things I wish everyone knew was that we don’t have to be a super green person to act on climate.
We often assume that if we are already a person who hugs trees, who eats granola, who bikes to work, then we have the values and we have the lifestyle we need. But for the rest of us, even if we agree with the science, even if we think it’s a problem, we feel as if we just don’t have the values, it’s not on our priority list and there isn’t much we can really do about it. I think that is one of the most pervasive and harmful myths that most of us have bought into today.
I’m convinced that nearly every single one of us already have the values we need to care about climate change. If we live on this planet and we have not signed up for the trip to Mars that 100 crazy people have apparently signed up for, then this is the only planet we have. It just makes sense for all of us to want this to be a good home for ourselves and for our children, no matter what religion, political party or country we come from.
