Texas Tech scientist Katharine Hayhoe has spent the past 20 years grappling with the question of how to convince skeptics that global temperatures are rising and that climate change poses a threat to life as we know it.
After earning a PhD from the University of Illinois and moving with her husband to deepred Lubbock, Texas, in 2005, she quickly realized that whether someone believes in climate change often boils down to where one resides on the political spectrum. To try to break through those entrenched attitudes, she did something radical: She started talking to people.
“What we need to fix this thing is rational hope,” Hayhoe, now the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, said in a 2018 Ted Talk that has been viewed more than 5 million times.
To foster that sense of hope, Hayhoe tells her audiences on social media to start their own conversations about why climate change matters, to join climate action groups, to transfer savings accounts to climate-friendly banks and investment funds, to try to hold politicians accountable and to reduce their own carbon footprint.
Called “one of the nation’s most effective communicators on climate change” by the New York Times, Hayhoe is the author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World and has been interviewed on Fox News, PBS, Jimmy Kimmel Live and dozens of other outlets.
Yahoo News spoke with Hayhoe about why it is important not to give into so-called climate doomerism, even though temperatures continue to rise. (Some answers have been edited for brevity.)
YAHOO NEWS: You spend a great deal of your time talking to people about climate change, explaining the risks, addressing misinformation and giving advice on how people can make a difference. Did you always see that messaging would be a central role in your career as a climate scientist?
HAYHOE: No. Within a couple of months after arriving at Texas Tech University, I started to get invitations to speak to groups about climate change. I figured, well, everybody needs to know about this because it affects all of our lives — literally the food that we eat and the water we drink, the cost of insurance and the energy that we need. The first invitation was to, if I recall correctly, the League of Women Voters. There was somebody there who invited me to speak to her book club, and then somebody at the book club invited me to speak to a senior citizens home. Pretty soon I realized that most people were actually curious about this, even in West Texas in the second-most conservative city in the country. People were curious about it, but they didn’t understand why it mattered, and they didn’t understand what they could do about it. Data shows that about two-thirds of the people in the U.S. are worried about climate change, but we haven’t connected the information we have in our heads with our hearts. Not enough people understand how climate change affects us today — our lives, the people, the places, the things we love — and hardly any of us have connected our hearts to our hands. We don’t know what to do about this.
I’m not the first person to notice that you have a very sunny disposition. How important is the way that the message is delivered to get people to take action or even to simply believe climate change is happening?
That’s a great question. It’s this really delicate balance, a nuanced interplay. We have to understand there’s a problem because if we don’t think there’s one, why would we do anything about it? But understanding that there’s a problem is not enough. We need to understand what we can do about it. We need positive, practical, actionable solutions that empower us rather than leaving us feeling paralyzed. For the last three years, I’ve been trying something whenever I give talks. At the beginning, I use interactive polling software and I ask people, “When I say climate change, how do you feel?” I’ve analyzed the results from thousands of answers, and no matter who I’m speaking to 90 to 95% of the responses I get are negative words, like “I feel paralyzed” or “anxious” or “I feel depressed.” Based on that, I have the strong sense that most of the people I’m talking to are worried but don’t know what to do. At the very end of my talk, after explaining what we can do to make a difference, I ask people again how they feel, and I see a flip to almost 80% who say “empowered,” “activated,” “determined” and “hopeful.” I’m not trying to make people feel positive and cheery about the problem, but I want to make them feel like they can do something about it.
Can you talk a bit about how your own evangelical Christian faith has influenced your work on climate change? Specifically, I’ve heard you comment on the belief among some people that it’s arrogant or un-Christian to suggest that humans could be having an effect on the climate.
That’s probably the No. 1 most common religiously-sounding myth that there is. In the Bible, in Genesis, Book 1, Chapter 1, it says God gave humans responsibility over every living thing on this Earth. Flip it around. It’s actually disrespectful not to fulfill our God-given responsibility to care for every living thing, which includes our sisters and our brothers. It’s a mandate to care for each other as well as nature.
You’ve laid out what you call the “five stages of climate denial.” What are those, exactly?
Just about every single argument [against climate change] that I’ve heard falls into one of these five categories. The first is “It’s just not real.” The climate is not changing, or it’s cooling. The second stage is “Warming isn’t being caused by humans.” It’s just a natural cycle, or it’s being caused by the sun or volcanoes. Of course, scientists have looked at all of these. Denial number three is “It’s not bad.” CO2 is plant food, the world is getting greener, warmer is better anyway. So if it’s not bad, why do we have to fix it? Number four is “It’s just too hard to fix.” I mean, sure, I’d like to fix it, but it’s just too hard and too expensive and too disruptive. It would harm the economy. We just don’t have the technology yet. Category five is “It’s too late; you should have told us sooner, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.” Often people think that it’s a positive thing when people move down that scale, like when someone who used to say, “It’s not real,” now says, “Oh, we can’t fix it.” But every single one of those stages has the same result, which is doing nothing about climate change.
You’ve also co-authored a paper on what you call the “myth” that science should remain politically neutral. Why did you conclude that?
Philosophers have been discussing this exact topic for thousands of years. Since the dawn of human civilization when leaders have found themselves on the horn of a dilemma, they have consulted experts who sit slightly apart from society for insight on how to proceed. But by providing those insights into a decision that is to be made for political reasons, that expert is then involving themselves in that decision-making process. If you’re studying ant behavior, or black holes or something that has no bearing on human decisions today, it’s possible for that science to remain disconnected from current affairs. But I became a climate scientist specifically to do research that would help people make better decisions to keep people safe. It’s much more akin to why some people become a doctor or a medical professional. As a doctor, you want to be objective about the diseases and the cures, but the reason you’re doing it is because you want to make a difference in peoples’ lives.
President Trump is going after all of the measures taken by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden to address climate change, ridding government websites of any mention of the subject. Are you worried about whether these changes will impact the scientific goal of keeping global average temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels?
I’m very concerned about it because a thermometer does not give you a different answer depending on how you vote. As we saw illustrated so vividly with the hurricane that hit Florida and the Carolinas, with the wildfires in L.A., a hurricane does not knock on your door and ask you who you voted for before it destroys your home. A wildfire doesn’t look at your voting record before it burns down your neighborhood. Climate change affects us all. While politicians should be arguing, because that’s what they do best, they should be arguing about who has the best solution to climate change. I want to hear who has the best case to make for the set of solutions to help people the fastest and keep us safe. Another way to put it is, we can say “I don’t believe in gravity,” but if we step off the cliff, we’re going down.