The federal government’s latest National Climate Assessment, released late last month, was grim and unequivocal: Human-caused climate change is wreaking havoc on the economy, human health, and quality of life — and current efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are not enough to dodge looming catastrophe. The White House and key allies quickly disavowed the report, saying it was based on the most extreme scenario, or relied on out-of-date information, or was driven by financial interests.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong, shot back Katharine Hayhoe, in a series of tweets with screen shots of specific lines in the report, highlighted for emphasis, and supplemented with links to some of the cheerful “Global Weirding” videos she makes for PBS. An atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University and one of the authors of the report, Hayhoe has made a second career of calmly, systematically debunking the would-be debunkers — including those who tweet things like, “Ice cores drilled prove it’s cyclical so STFU.”
Just back from giving a talk at TEDWomen, Hayhoe spoke with The Chronicle about the responsibilities of scientists, her evangelical Christian faith, and what she’d like to say to Donald Trump.
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You regularly respond to people who lob falsehoods at you on social media by pointing them to information available online and saying something like, “Please have the courtesy to review these resources before responding.” Has anyone ever done that and come back and said, “I’ve changed my mind”?
My faith is really the ultimate source of my hope, but then in order to bolster that, I look for positive stories of what real people are doing.
Probably one out of 500 people engage positively. But here’s the thing: I was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research annual meeting in October, and a colleague I didn’t even know, from a different university, came up to me and said, “We use your Twitter feeds in my class. We don’t just go through the information you provide, we go through how you respond to people and we have great discussions about it.” So I guess the reason I respond on social media is 99 percent for everybody else and only 1 percent for the actual person.
I imagine at Texas Tech you have plenty of students who come to your classes armed with talking points to dismiss human-made climate change.
Well, you would think so, but I’ve actually discovered — and we survey our classes, so we have data on this — if people have already built their identity on rejecting a certain set of facts, they avoid any interaction or experience that would possibly show them that what they believe is not true.
So they don’t even enroll in your class.
That is correct. We found that if the class had something about climate in the title, then the students were self-selecting. If it didn’t have that in the title but there was content about it in the class, you got a much larger mix of students.
So have you banned the word “climate” from all of your class descriptions?
Believe me, I’ve considered it. Many of my colleagues are able to do that more easily. We have anywhere from a lecture to a week to a unit of something related to climate in all kinds of classes — law, English, ecology, political science. It does make a difference. At the root of everything is fear.
You seem resolutely sunny in the face of all of this — the very frightening science and people’s resistance to grappling with it. How is that possible?
I certainly have moments where I can’t feel so positive. One of the times that I’ve been most discouraged in my life is when I went to Paris for the climate talks. Now, I was very encouraged, clearly, by the fact that all the countries in the world came together and agreed on a target. But the vast majority of countries were not there to talk about emission targets and reductions. They were there to talk about how they’re already suffering and how they’re going to survive in the future.
I already knew that they were producing basically nothing contributing to the problem but bearing the brunt of the impact. But to actually see their faces and hear their stories just broke my heart, and made me so angry at the blindness and the selfishness of people who have the wealth in the world and just shut their eyes and bury their heads in the sand, and when anything that is inconvenient comes along they accuse people of being ignorant or of lying. It was several weeks before I could even bring myself to again put myself in somebody else’s shoes and understand where they were coming from, which is the essence of good communication.
You’ve said, “This report is not policy-prescriptive, because that’s not what we scientists do.” But you’ve been open about the policy changes you think need to happen, like taxing carbon. How does that not undermine your objectivity?
Because I’m very clear that, as a scientist, I’m solution-agnostic. I support any solution that will actually reduce carbon emissions. So I educate myself on solutions, and when I talk to people, I make sure to tell them: Hey, if you’re a libertarian, here are some libertarian solutions. If you’re an advocate of a free market, here are free-market solutions. If you prefer regulatory solutions … I give people a whole range.
But then I say, as a human, I’m in favor of whatever works, and what seems to work is a price on carbon. They’ve had it in British Columbia for 10 years, and it’s reduced carbon, and the economy has grown. As scientists, we go way too far in the other direction. We’re like a physician where somebody has been running a fever for a long time. It goes up and down from day to day, but week after week it climbs higher and higher and higher. The physician runs all these tests on you and finds you have something very unusual. Thousands of colleagues around the world agree that this is what you have, and that it’s a result of your lifestyle choices, except for a handful of scientists who say it isn’t. You’re like, Well, what am I supposed to do about this? And the physician’s like, Oh, I don’t know. That’s not my job.
We are physicians of the planet, and to hide our heads in the sand and pretend that our research somehow has the purity of complete detachment from modern-day policy and politics is an abnegation of our moral responsibility and of the expertise that we have worked so hard to achieve.
So should more climate scientists be mixing it up on Twitter?
Not necessarily, no. Outreach and engagement is a very broad spectrum. Where each one of us falls on that spectrum is, first of all, a very personal choice. Second of all, it depends on what we’re good at.
The further you go to the outreach side, the greater the personal toll in terms of the impact on your time, your emotional health and well-being, your energy level. So every step you take further down the spectrum is not to be taken lightly. For some scientists, outreach could be participating in a national climate assessment or an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report — I mean, that is outreach. It’s donated time.
On Twitter, a colleague thanked you for debunking lies about the new report, and you replied: “I take comfort in the fact that it’s all been laid out for me in Eph 2:10.” [“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”] What did you mean?
This actually gets back to a question you asked before, which is where do you find hope. I don’t find it in the science. And I certainly don’t find it in the state of public dialogue. I find my hope in two places, and the first is, absolutely, in my faith. There’s a passage in Romans 5: “Suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope.” My faith is really the ultimate source of my hope, but then in order to bolster that, I look for positive stories of what real people are doing. There are incredibly hopeful stories right here in Texas and all around the world.
The president said he “didn’t believe” the report. And you pointed out that climate science is not a religion. If you found yourself face to face with Donald Trump, what would you say?
I really truly do believe that just about every single person in the world has the values they need to act on climate. If I had 30 seconds with Trump, I would say to him simply this: We stand at a pivotal point in the history of human civilization on this planet. Do you want to be remembered as Nero, who fiddled as Rome burned? Or as the hero who saved us?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jennifer Ruark is a deputy managing editor at The Chronicle.
