Jackson Free Press

This story appeared on The Daily Climate.

Atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe delivers the message on climate change with a skill that makes it easy to believe that she is the daughter of missionaries.

Her pulpit, though, is at Texas Tech, as professor and director of the university's Climate Science Center. She is a prolific scientist, with recent work ranging from the impact of drought in the southern High Plains to the effects of weather extremes on U.S. roads and infrastructure. And she is founder and chief executive of ATMOS Research and Consulting, a company she started in her parents' basement in 1997, which is working with cities, states, and communities to determine how climate change should figure into planning decisions.

Her vocation, in many ways, is communicating climate risk. Hayhoe has been called a "climate change evangelist" who sees connection—not conflict—between her Christian faith and her calling as a scientist.

Whether meeting with business groups or students or starring in the Showtime series "Years of Living Dangerously," she links science on changes underway in the atmosphere with the on-the-ground concerns of the people she is trying to reach. The Daily Climate caught up with her via telephone earlier this summer.

What do you say to people who dismiss climate change, or see it as a distant concern?

The way to get at those issues is to give people specific and concrete examples of what's happening here in the place where we live.

It's very powerful when you can point to an example of something happening today [as] an impact likely to be exacerbated by climate change in the future.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get local information out of global climate models: Rather than saying "the world will warm by 3 degrees," figuring out how here in Delaware or Texas or California we're going to see "x" number of more extreme heat days over 100 degrees each year or "y" number of flood events. That's what matters to us!

What sort of examples?

I was in Austin, Texas, and we were talking specifically about what climate change would mean for their public works department, and for their water management—nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts, rubber-hits-the-road things.

Plugging into concerns is really important. If agriculture is important to a certain area, or if tourism, or if it's a coastal area prone to flooding, that gives you a stepping stone for connecting climate change with something people care about.

It's very powerful when you can point to an example of something happening today—an impact that is likely to be exacerbated by climate change in the future. For example, the long-term drought in Texas dropped lake levels so low that in some places the surrounding small businesses are going bankrupt because nobody comes to the lake anymore.

What's happening today is not only because of climate change. But we do know that climate change will make these types of droughts more frequent and more severe.

Have scientists been too cautious attributing local impacts to climate change?

We're able to do a better job now that we have more powerful computers, better satellites, better observing systems and higher-resolution models. That is one reason why scientists feel more confident in being able to make statements about these events happening today than we were a decade or two ago.

The second reason is that climate has changed quite a bit over the last few decades. There's more to see.

Thanks to our improved understanding of the climate system, we are getting better at separating the signal of human-induced climate change from the noise of natural variability. But at the same time, that signal is getting stronger.

What do you think of the job journalism has done in showing this change?

The journalists I've spoken to and that I've read are eager to make connections between climate change and what's happening to real people today—because that's what's interesting, what makes this news that people want to read rather than a science textbook they'd prefer to avoid.

However, there is a separate issue of how major news networks still continue to portray the science as an unsettled argument. This tendency gives people an entirely false perspective on the reality and seriousness of this issue, and in general it does an enormous disservice to both science and society.

There must be a breakdown in communication about the science somewhere, because it also is portrayed as an unsettled argument among policymakers—for instance, on Capitol Hill.

People seem to be digging in and doubling down. However, in nine cases out of 10, I'd venture to say most people do not have a problem with the science. They have a problem with the solutions, because they perceive those solutions to involve actions or choices that run counter to their ideology and/or identity.

So they have decided—and they're probably right—that it's easier to deny the reality of the problem than it is to accept the reality, and then say that they don't want to do anything about it.

What gives me hope is what I see happening around the country at the individual, community, regional, and state level. I was speaking to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and at the end of my talk [a mayor] came up to me and said, "I'm a Republican, and we care about climate change. It's something we have to deal with, to make sure our cities will be OK." That's so encouraging. It's so sensible.

What I love is there are a lot of sensible people who look out their window and see things changing and know that planning for the future is a smart thing to do. And they're doing it, regardless of their political stripes.