Thermometers are nonpartisan

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We talk with world-famous climate scientist Dr. Katharine Hayhoe about overcoming the divide, why facts alone are not enough, and how her evangelical faith inspires her work. Katharine has been called the best climate communicator of our generation and was recently recognized by Time and Fortune Magazine as one of the world’s most important leaders.

No Place Like Home is hosted by Mary Anne Hitt and Anna Jane Joyner, and produced, edited and mixed by Zach Mack

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NPR: Climate scientist ponders Trump presidency’s effect on climate progress

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: One thing President-elect Donald Trump has been pretty clear about this campaign season is that he wants to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency. He called the agency a disgrace and has put a leading climate change skeptic in charge of his EPA transition team. To get some perspective, we called up Katharine Hayhoe. She’s an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She’s also a devout Christian and has spent her life outside of her research convincing fellow conservative Christians that climate change is real.

When I asked Katharine Hayhoe how Donald Trump’s presidency would affect climate policy, she said she wasn’t terribly worried because if you look at the headway that’s been made in clean energy solutions, much of it, she says, hasn’t come from federal programs.

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Is God having a climate moment? Foreign Policy Podcast

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In this week’s Global Thinkers podcast, 2014 Global Thinker and atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe joins 2009 Global Thinker and activist Bill McKibben to discuss climate change, denialism, faith, and what to expect from the upcoming Paris conference. Mindy Kay Bricker, FP executive editor for print, and FP energy reporter Keith Johnson host.

About the participants:

Katharine Hayhoe is the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, the CEO of Atmos Research & Consulting, and an evangelical Christian who has become one of the most effective communicators on religion and climate science in the United States. Along with her husband, an evangelical pastor, she published A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions in 2009. Hayhoe was a 2014 FP Global Thinker. Follow her on Twitter: @KHayhoe.

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, activist, and writer. He currently is the Schumann distinguished scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. He has authored more than a dozen books, including 1989’s The End of Nature, widely considered the first general-audience book on climate change, and, most recently, Oil and Honey. In 2009, he founded 350.org, a global campaign devoted to grassroots climate change action. McKibben was a 2009 FP Global Thinker. Follow him on Twitter: @billmckibben.

Mindy Kay Bricker is the executive editor for print at Foreign Policy. Follow her on Twitter: @mindykaybricker.

Keith Johnson is a senior reporter covering energy geopolitics for Foreign Policy. Follow him on Twitter: @KFJ_FP.

Subscribe to the Global Thinkers podcast and other FP podcasts on iTunes here.

Canadian scientist uses faith to convince climate change skeptics – CBC interview

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To convince skeptics that climate change is real, Canadian atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe often refers to something that may seem contradictory: the Bible.

“It’s much more convincing to go to the bible and to walk from Genesis through to Revelation and see how people, humans are given responsibility over the earth, how we’re told to love others, to care for people who don’t have the resources we do, than to pull out the 5,000 pages of the latest scientific report and whack someone on the side of the head with it,” Hayhoe told The Early Edition‘s Rick Cluff.

Hayhoe, who is the director of the Climate Science Centre at Texas Tech University and Canadian as well as an evangelical Christian, was in Vancouver on Thursday, to give a talk about climate change at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.

She is known for her work in trying to bridge the gap between scientists and Christians in the U.S., and has been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Though Hayhoe often turns to her faith to make climate change relevant to some people, she says it isn’t always the best way.

Plus, the fact that extreme weather conditions such as stronger hurricanes, extreme droughts,and heavy rain or snowfall appear to be happening more frequently and in unexpected places around the world is already helping shift people’s attitudes about how climate change could impact the things and places they love, she said.

“If we are somebody who enjoys hiking and skiing, of course we want to preserve the resources that give us so much pleasure,” she said.

“If we’re a person who wants a healthy economy, climate change impacts our economy. We need to speak the language of whatever it is that we care about and connect the dots to climate.”

This CBC interview originally appeared here.

A Christian Climate Scientist’s Mission – NPR interview

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Last week, the Obama administration announced historic regulations to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Policies to address climate change have been a tough sell among some Republicans on Capitol Hill, but also in many Christian congregations around the country.

Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is also a devout Christian.

Hayhoe has spent the last few years trying to convince other Christians that climate change is real, and that caring about the issue is one of the most Christian things you can do. She told NPR’s Rachel Martin of the difficulties of spreading that message among Christian congregations.

“The people we trust, the people we respect, the people whose values we share, in the conservative community, in the Christian community, those people are telling us, many of them, that this isn’t a real problem — that it’s a hoax,” Hayhoe says. “Even worse, that you can’t be a Christian and think that climate change is real. You can’t be a conservative and agree with the science.”

Hayhoe says what Christians often question about climate change is if God is in control, how could this happen? Another argument she hears is the idea that humans could change climate threatens the sovereignty of God.

“The answer to that is pretty simple: It’s free will,” she says. “God gave us the brains to make good choices and there’s consequences to the choices that we make.”

And that’s what climate change is, she says, a consequence of an industrialized society that depends on coal, oil and gas for many of our resources.

Hayhoe says that once people can get past the stage where they’re bashing each other over the head with facts and political opinions, and get to point of sharing what they truly care about, at that point, she says, we can make some progress forward. She also says that to care about green issues you don’t have to be a liberal or what people call “tree huggers.”

“I think the most important message for people is that each of us already has the values in our hearts that we need to care about this issue,” she says.

In her presentations, Hayhoe says she finds it effective to address the questions people have: How do we know that climate change is even real? How could I care about climate change as a Christian/Conservative/Republican? For some people, she says, it can feel like giving up their identity in order to care about climate change.

But lately she is also seeing a shift in the questions she’s being asked. They’ve moved away from the specifics of climate change or what’s heard on the news. Instead, people are asking what they can do about the problem.

“That’s where I want to go,” she says.

This story originally appeared on NPR.

How To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real – Inquiring Minds Interview

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Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian, has had quite the run lately. A few weeks back, she was featured in the first episode of the Showtime series The Years of Living Dangerously, meeting with actor Don Cheadle in her home state of Texas to explain to him why faith and a warming planet aren’t in conflict. (You can watch that episode for free on YouTube; Hayhoe is a science adviser for the show.) Then, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2014; Cheadle wrote the entry. “There’s something fascinating about a smart person who defies stereotype,” Cheadle observed.

Why is Hayhoe in the spotlight? Simply put, millions of Americans are evangelical Christians, and their belief in the science of global warming is well below the national average. And if anyone has a chance of reaching this vast and important audience, Hayhoe does. “I feel like the conservative community, the evangelical community, and many other Christian communities, I feel like we have been lied to,” explains Hayhoe on the latest episode of the . “We have been given information about climate change that is not true. We have been told that it is incompatible with our values, whereas in fact it’s entirely compatible with conservative and with Christian values.”

Hayhoe’s approach to science—and to religion—was heavily influenced by her father, a former Toronto science educator and also, at one time, a missionary. “For him, there was never any conflict between the idea that there is a God, and the idea that science explains the world that we see around us,” says Hayhoe. When she was 9, her family moved to Colombia, where her parents worked as missionaries and educators, and where Hayhoe saw what environmental vulnerability really looks like. “Some of my friends lived in houses that were made out of cardboard Tide boxes, or corrugated metal,” she says. “And realizing that you don’t really need that much to be happy, but at the same time, you’re very vulnerable to the environment around you, the less that you have.”

Her research today, on the impacts of climate change, flows from those early experiences. And of course, it is inspired by her faith, which for Hayhoe, puts a strong emphasis on caring for the weakest and most vulnerable among us. “That gives us even more reason to care about climate change,” says Hayhoe, “because it is affecting people, and is disproportionately affecting the poor, and the vulnerable, and those who cannot care for themselves.”

The fact remains, though, that most evangelical Christians in the United States do not think as Hayhoe does. Recent data from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication suggests that while 64 percent of Americans think global warming is real and caused by human beings, only 44 percent of evangelicals do. Evangelicals in general, explains Hayhoe, tend to be more politically conservative, and can be quite distrusting of scientists (believing, incorrectly, that they’re all a bunch of atheists). Plus, some evangelicals really do go in for that whole “the world is ending” thing—not an outlook likely to inspire much care for the environment. So how does Hayhoe reach them?

From our interview, here are five of Hayhoe’s top arguments, for evangelical Christians, on climate change:

1. Conservation is Conservative. The evangelical community isn’t just a religious community, it’s also a politically conservative one on average. So Hayhoe speaks directly to that value system. “What’s more conservative than conserving our natural resources, making sure we have enough for the future, and not wasting them like we are today?” she asks. “That’s a very conservative value.”

Indeed, many conservatives don’t buy into climate science because they don’t like the “Big Government” solutions they suspect the problem entails. But Hayhoe has an answer ready for that one too: Conservative-friendly, market-driven solutions to climate problems are actually all around us. “A couple of weeks ago, Texas…smashed the record for the most wind energy ever produced. It was 38 percent of our energy that week, came from wind,” she says. And Hayhoe thinks that’s just the beginning: “If you look at the map of where the greatest potential is for wind energy, it’s right up the red states. And I think that is going to make a big difference in the future.”

2. Yes, God Would Let This Happen. One conservative Christian argument is that God just wouldn’t let human activities ruin the creation. Or, as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has put it, “God’s still up there, and the arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what he is doing in the climate, is to me, outrageous.”

Hayhoe thinks the answer to Inhofe’s objection is simple: From a Christian perspective, we have free will to make decisions and must live with their consequences. This is, after all, a classic Christian solution to the theological problem of evil. “Are bad things happening? Yes, all the time,” says Hayhoe. “Someone gets drunk, they get behind the wheel of a car, they kill an innocent bystander, possibly even a child or a mother.”

Climate change is, to Hayhoe, just another wrong, another problem, brought on by flawed humans exercising their wills in a way that is less than fully advisable. “That’s really what climate change is,” she says. “It’s a casualty of the decisions that we have made.”

3. The Bible Does Not Approve of Letting the World Burn. Hayhoe agrees with the common liberal perception that the evangelical community contains a significant proportion of apocalyptic or end-times believers—and that this belief, literally that judgment is upon us, undermines their concern about preserving the planet. But she thinks there’s something very wrong with that outlook, and indeed, that the Bible itself refutes it.

“The message that, we don’t care about anybody else, screw everybody, and let the world burn, that message is not a consistent message in the Bible,” says Hayhoe. In particular, she thinks the apostle Paul has a pretty good answer to end-times believers in his second epistle to the Thessalonians. Hayhoe breaks Paul’s message down like this: “I’ve heard that you’ve been quitting your jobs, you have been laying around and doing nothing, because you think that Christ is returning and the world is ending.” But Paul serves up a rebuke. In Hayhoe’s words: “Get a job, support yourself and your family, care for others—again, the poor and the vulnerable who can’t care for themselves—and do what you can, essentially, to make the world a better place, because nobody knows when that’s going to happen.”

4. Even If You Believe in a Young Earth, It’s Still Warming. One reason there’s such a tension between the evangelical community and science is, well, science. Many evangelicals are Young-Earth creationists, who believe that the Earth is 6,000 or so years old.

Hayhoe isn’t one of those. She studied astrophysics, and quasars that are quite ancient; and as she notes, believing the Earth and universe to be young creates a pretty problematic understanding of God: “Either you have to believe that God created everything looking as if it were billions of years old, or you have to believe it is billions of years old.” In the former case, God would, in effect, seem to be trying to trick us.

But when it comes to talking to evangelical audiences about climate change, Hayhoe doesn’t emphasize the age of the Earth, simply because, she says, there’s no need. “When I talk to Christian audiences, I only show ice core data and other proxy data going back 6,000 years,” says Hayhoe, “because I believe that you can make an even stronger case, for the massive way in which humans have interfered with the natural system, by only looking at a shorter period of time.”

temperature reconstructions

6,000 years of temperatures records and a projection of the warming to come. Jos Hagelaars/My View on Climate Change

“In terms of addressing the climate issue,” says Hayhoe, “we don’t have time for everybody to get on the same page regarding the age of the universe.”

5. “Caring for our environment is caring for people.” Finally, Hayhoe thinks it is crucial to emphasize to evangelicals that saving the planet is about saving people…not just saving animals. “I think there’s this perception,” says Hayhoe, “that if an environmentalist were driving down the road…and they saw a baby seal on one side and they saw a human on the other side, they would veer out of the way to avoid the baby seal and run down the human.” That’s why it’s so important, in her mind, to emphasize how climate change affects people (a logic once again affirming the perception that the polar bear was a terrible symbol for global warming). And there’s bountiful evidence of this: The just-released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Working Group II” report on climate impacts emphasizes threats to our food supply, a risk of worsening violence in a warming world, and the potential displacement of vulnerable populations.

So is the message working? Hayhoe thinks so. After all, while only 44 percent of evangelicals may accept modern climate science today, she notes that that’s considerable progress from a 2008 Pew poll, which had that number at just 34 percent. Ultimately, for Hayhoe, it comes down to this: “If you believe that God created the world, and basically gave it to humans as this incredible gift to live on, then why would you treat it like garbage? Treating the world like garbage says a lot about how you think about the person who you believe created the Earth.”

This is an interview by Chris Mooney that originally appeared in Mother Jones and is also available as a podcast.