Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (June 19, 2015)
Page 4 BY EMILY GREEN STAFF WRITER T atharine Hayhoe never goes where she’s not invited, and when she A X accepts an invitation, she usually : finds herself surrounded by people who vehemently disagree with her. Hayhoe, 43, is one of thenation’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, 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 tfie media perpetuates myths about climate change, and what approaches work best when trying to convince climate-change deniers to accept News the facts and take action. . Emily G reen: What are some o f the takeaways from the 2014 US. National Climate Assessment of the United States you think might surprise even the most avid of climate activists? Street Roots • June 19-25, 2015 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 warmihg: sea level rise, heat wave risks, increasing rainfall intensity. And these are important. — KaUiarin e T^nnking, „ ... i liu n d i redo of mrik ww o oi" p eo p le ■ewwWHge——— observed trends and future projections, it homeless this century due to sea level rise was clear climate change matters to each of alone. In 2003, a heat wave over in Europe us in the places we live today. If we live in was responsible for 70,000 premature the Southwest, we know water shortages deaths; climate change had doubled the risk are our issue. If we are in the Northeast, we of that event occurring. Just this year, Texas know too much water is the issue. If we live was devastated by record rainfall and iji cities, heat is our issue. The National flooding, consistent with what we expect Climate Assessment clearly showed the more of in a warming world. reason why we care about climate change What we’re recognizing now, though, is varies from place to place, but those that secondary impacts hiay be just as, if not reasons are all very real, and they are all more, important. The direct impacts of here today. climate change may be dwarfed by the indirect impacts of climate change on, say, ... E.G.: How have predictions for future political instability or the ocean’s food chain. climate impacts changed in recent years, and do you think we’re getting better at predicting E.G.: Some have said you’ve made it your what will happen in the future? mission to spread the gospel of climate science among Christians. How did you-come to take K.H.: First of all, there Was a paper on such a mission? published by (scientists and academics) Érysse, Oreskes (O’Reilly) and K.H.: “Gospel” means good news. I feel Oppenheimer two years ago (hat looked at more like an Old Testament prophet than I climate projections from 1990 to 2010, do a New Testament evangelist, warning asking: “Is it true that climate scientists are people to turn from their ways before alarmists'?” If it was true, we would expect disaster happens. to see, over the last 20 years, the rate and Part of the problem with climate change magnitude of change in the real world is / is that it’s been deliberately framed as much less than what scientists predicted. alternate religion. Many people - maybe few They found that far from being alarmist; in Portland, but many where I live here in climate projections had been consistently on Texas — interpret, “Do you believe in climate the low side - s o much so that it coiild not change?” as “Would you like to worship at be accounted for by scientific uncertainty. the altar of Al Gore?” So I think it’s really And so in this paper, they coined this important to differentiate between what we syndrome, ESLD - Erring On the Side of believe versus w hatwe know. ' Least Drama. Subconsciously, we" Based on physics and the available (scientists) are so conservative, and we so evidence, not based on a crystal ball, the hate being accused of being alarmist, that most logical and solid conclusion is that we are downgrading the risks in our own climate is changing due to human activities projections. Until 2008 or 2009,1 don’t think anybody Second, one of the most important new 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 ■-aiThe-p epp ua wnu mmuo inumrui mraum 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 j fingertips, so many Americans don’t have all the facts? RIH,: Ed Maibach and his team at George Mason University traveled around the I 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 th a t, 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 agreem ent and the scientific literature is over 99 percent. I I 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, See HAYHOE, page 5
