 My name is Catherine Hayhoe. I'm at Texas Tech University and I study what climate change means at the local scale where we live. I got into science at a very young age because my dad was a science educator. So for him science was the most fun thing in the entire world and if you saw a rainbow or if you saw a rare plant, you couldn't appreciate it unless you understood how that rainbow formed or why that plant was there. So from an early age, I thought science was not only fun but easy and it wasn't until I was halfway through my undergraduate in physics I realized it was still fun, but it was very difficult, but then it was too late. So when I was doing my undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy, I had to take a number of bread through requirements. I had already finished a minor in Spanish. I had already taken children's literature. I had already taken the Gothic cathedral. So I was looking around for a new topic and I saw a course in climatology over in the Geography Department. I took it, not knowing that climate modeling is all physics and so I still remember my amazement in that class when I realized that this is all physics and I have all of the background and information you need to do climate modeling. Not only that, but I didn't realize how urgent climate change was. I knew that it was real. I knew that it was a problem, but deforestation is also a problem. Biodiversity loss, air pollution, you know, there's a whole host of environmental problems and I'd put climate change in that category. When I took that class, I realized that climate change was much bigger. In fact, I don't think we can solve any of those other problems if we leave climate change out of the picture. So in my naivete, I thought, well, I can study climate science till we fix the problem. Surely it'll only be five or maybe ten years and then I'll go back to studying astronomy and physics because that's what I really love. And of course, many years later, I'm still hooked. I ended up in Texas as many academics end up places having two people who are both professors trying to find a place where you can both have jobs. Moving to Texas, I knew what type of situation I was stepping into. I knew that there was many people there, a lot of people, who didn't think climate change was real. But what I've realized now is that I wouldn't be doing the work that I'm doing if I didn't live there. Living in a place where who knows how many. I mean, for the state of Texas, I think it's 70% of people do not think that humans are causing climate change. Where I live in the western half, if I had to guess, it would be maybe more like 90. So living in a place where your friend, your neighbor, the person at church that you're sitting beside, or even your colleague down the hall at the university, doesn't think climate change is real, really challenges you to be clear about what we know is true. And why we care about climate change. One of the first conversations I had when I moved to Texas was with a friendly couple at the church that we went to. They came up and asked me what I did, and I said, oh, I work at the university. And they said, well, what do you study? And I said, I study climate change. They said, oh, it's so good that there's people like you telling people the truth because you wouldn't believe the lies that our children are being told in school. So I thought to myself, oh, no, I'm sure they're being told climate change isn't real. And isn't that awful? So I said, well, what lies are they being told? And they said, oh, they're being told that all the Arctic sea ice is disappearing, that the polar bears are endangered. I said, well, that's true. And there's a long silence, and I never saw them again. I never go talk to a group unless I'm invited. So there has to be at least one person who's willing to stand between me and the flying tomatoes at the end of the presentation. Otherwise, I'm not going to go. One of the most challenging talks I gave was in Midland, Texas. Midland is the center of oil production in Texas. It's a very wealthy part of the state. It's a very high level of education because there's a lot of PhD geologists. So I was invited to speak to an association of petroleum geologists in Midland, Texas. The man who invited me tried to warn me without discouraging me. So he really wanted me to come, but he wanted to make sure I knew that most people weren't on board. And I said, I thought I knew that. So I got in my car and I drove two hours down to Midland, Texas. And I gave a talk, and I knew what was coming. I knew there were geologists. So I made sure to talk about how geologic change differs from the rapid change that we're seeing today. And I addressed many of the arguments related to ice age forcing and CO2 and things like that. But at the end of the talk, the questions are very aggressive. And I think probably my favorite or least favorite, depending on how you look at it, question was from an older gentleman who stood up and said, Well, we all know that you're just in it for the money anyways. And I thought to myself, here I am. And this is a point at which I was a very junior in my career, making lower level assistant professor salary. And here is a very senior man who is a petroleum geologist who is easily making six figures, probably more. And so I thought to myself, well, I would really like to see his tax return. And I would be happy to compare it with mine to see who was making more money off what they did. And I think the point was underscored by the fact that in driving two hours down and two hours back and spending the time with them, as a thank you, I got a crystal ashtray. I feel like climate scientists are almost like physicians of the planet. So if you went to the doctor and you said, well, I have some troubling symptoms and the doctor did a scan of your body and found something wrong. Imagine if the doctor didn't tell you. If the doctor said, well, I don't want to tell this person that they have an incipient brain tumor because they wouldn't be very happy with me. They would probably accuse me of being in pay of the big pharmaceutical companies trying to make money off their illness. So I'm not going to tell them. Of course, that's ridiculous. The doctor has to tell somebody if there's something wrong and the patient does not respond by saying, oh, well, you're in the pay of big pharmaceutical companies. They respond by saying, thank you. What can I do? Give me advice. So in the same way, we are the ones, climate scientists, who have done that scan of the planet. We have seen that the planet is running a fever. We have determined why it is running a fever. And we have looked at all the other many symptoms around the world that are resulting from this increase in temperature. Many of them much more significant than the actual increase. So then, as a scientist, how can we stop and say, well, we don't want to tell anybody because they will accuse us of being alarmist or of being in the pay of whoever it is who somehow pays us? I don't know who that is. I get paid by the state. That's ridiculous. We wouldn't even consider that. So that, I think, is why so many scientists feel the obligation to speak out is because we have this information that affects every person on this planet. How can we not tell people? The main reason why people don't think climate change is real is not because of lack of facts. Most of the people that I meet from day to day, the lady in the grocery store or the man across the street, they have arguments at the tip of their fingers as to why they don't think climate change is real. They will cite the stolen emails. They will say, oh, global warming stopped 17 years ago. They have arguments, factual or semi-factual based arguments about why it's not true. So why is everybody so convinced? It's because we are all cognitive misers. We don't have the brain power to understand every single issue in the world. I don't know if we ever did. But especially now, I mean, I don't understand the fundamentals of stem cell research. I don't really understand the pluses and negatives of nuclear power, to be perfectly honest. I certainly don't understand the economic benefits and trade-offs of all the various climate policies that are being considered. And so you can understand how the average person doesn't understand the climate science. So what do we do? We go to people we trust. And in the United States, when we look at people we trust, if you look at the conservative half of the country, with one voice, conservative media, conservative thought leaders and conservative politicians are telling us that this isn't a real problem. Most people don't object to climate change because of the science. Most people object because of the solutions. The solutions are presented as being contrary to the values that we hold dear. So the first step in talking to people about climate change, I think, is to connect on the values that we share. We're all humans. We all, you know, live in a certain place. Many of us are parents. There's other things that we care about. We might care about the economy. We might care about a place that we grew up going to. That's a precious place we want to preserve. We might care about our faith. We might care about national defense. We might just care about not having to pay an incredibly high air conditioning bill in the summer. So first of all, we have to connect over a shared value. And then once we have connected on that shared value, then draw the line between what we care about and climate change. Here's why I care about climate change. I care about it because it will make our water even more scarce than it already is. And we've already agreed that we do not have enough water to go around. Climate change has been very successfully pigeonholed as being yet another issue on which scientists and people of faith disagree. But on issues like evolution and the age of the universe, there's reasons in a literal reading of the Bible why people would not agree with what the science says. So you could actually have a passage in the Bible that says one thing and a scientist says another thing. But with climate change, there's no such passage. In fact, there's passages saying, you know, God will destroy those who destroy the earth. And there's other passages talking about how humans are given responsibility to care for every little thing created on the face of the earth. So climate change has been falsely framed as an issue between faith and science. If anything, people of faith should be on the front lines of trying to address this issue rather than dragging behind. I feel that there's a really good basis to connect on values that we share and talk about creation in nature and science. So for example, if I'm talking to a conservative Christian college or a group of people who I know are a little doubtful in the science and maybe are a little worried about having a scientist come and talk to them, I think reminding people that the world around us and the universe around us is what Paul calls a revelation of God to us. It's almost like God's second book to us. So in understanding the way that the universe is put together and the way that our earth works and the incredible balance that our earth has that we are disrupting through our carbon emissions, we're understanding what God was thinking when he set it up in the first place. One of the main ways that we get our information is through the news and through the media. And the Union of Concerned Scientists has done this study last year and the year before, where they've looked at the percentage of information on climate science that is incorrect in the media. Now even if you look at CNN, last year 30% of the information on CNN was false. And CNN is seen as a pretty main line news media outlet. But if you look at Fox News, which most of the people where I live watch and which most of my in-laws watch, Fox News last year over 70% of the information on climate science was false. In fact, it was over 90%. So when you look at politicians, where are they getting the sound bites that they're parroting? They're getting it from the media. When you look at politicians who used to say that climate change is real, who changed their minds, which includes almost every single person in the last Republican primaries, not everyone, but most of them changed their minds, where was the pressure coming from? It was coming from the media. So we see this connection between vested interests, which doesn't just include the fossil fuel industry. It includes people who don't want government interference in industry. So we have vested interests. We have the media, which promotes the sound bites that the vested interests develop. And then we have the politicians that endorse it and use it to build a platform. So people say, well, which one would you fix? Could you go in and talk to the politicians? I think it goes a lot deeper than the politicians and I don't think that's the root of the problem. The solution is, I think two-fold. One is to connect this issue with the values we already have. Because for a long time, the issue of climate change has been presented as a green tree-hugging liberal issue. So if you don't already have green tree-hugging liberal values, it's been presented as you have to change who you are to agree that climate change is real. And once we're past the age of about 19 or 20, nobody wants to change who they are. I mean, that's an impossible task. So we have to work with the values that we already have. One of the news I believe is that almost every single human has the values they need to care. So that's number one. But number two is we have to offer solutions that people can get excited about and on board with, no matter what part of the political spectrum they're in. And so that's why I support efforts like Citizens Climate Lobby and other efforts that are trying to develop kind of free market, entrepreneurial solutions and technological solutions. I'm very agnostic when it comes to policy. My perspective is any policy is better than no policy, which is what we pretty much have right now. But I support the ones that are particularly trying to bring solutions to the conservative side of the spectrum, because we need something that everybody can buy into in order to support action. Any scientist who sticks their nose out of the window of their university is going to get it shot off. It's naive to assume that that is not going to happen. These days, to get attacked, all we have to do is step foot off campus and tell anybody, even a local Qantas club or a local church or even a group of elementary school kids that climate change is real and then the angry letters start to flood in. It's because, again, climate change has been presented as an identity issue that we can't be who we are and think that climate change is real. So if we go talk to the kids at the school down the road, a parent says, oh, well, we are blank. I can't have my child hearing this and then they wouldn't be like me anymore if they agreed with you. Whereas, again, the reality is we all have the values we need and so if we can connect on those values, I think that that diffuses a lot of the negative interactions that occur with all but a certain sector of the population. There are some people who have dedicated their lives to basically attacking people and nothing is really going to change and certainly not more values-based dialogue. With those people, I think the best we can do is shield ourselves from the attacks and try not to dwell on them unless it's a safety issue in which case we take appropriate steps and try to move on focusing on what we want to achieve rather than what's trying to hold us back. If we know that it happened to somebody else, then it doesn't feel so unusual when it happens to us. So there is definitely a pattern of what happens. I see emails, complaints to your university, requests for your emails, and a lot of attacks online. So my number one rule of thumb is do not Google myself. I don't want to see. My number two rule of thumb is do not read the comment section. I don't want to know. I also save my mail and occasionally I take pictures of some of the more inflammatory pieces of mail I get and I put them on Twitter and people will know what's coming but also just to show what it is that people are saying and like you said to shine light on the attacks that are being made. I think engaging with people online encourages people whereas just showing this is what happens is more informative. I think it's recognition of how important it is for us as a community to speak out on this issue. I really feel like I and Kathy Sullivan, another person who is named who is also a climate scientist, she's the head of NOAA. I think that we are named in recognition of the work that we do in trying to inform people about this issue. Recognizing it's not just this abstract scientific topic, it's a real world concern that's affecting real people and people need to know that. I think that the main result of that recognition and honor was increased visibility. So I get a lot more requests to speak, to engage, to write, and it's really tough to figure out, well, how can I use the limited time available to me because I still have a regular full-time job? How can I use that limited time to be most effective in helping the most amount of people know who need this information, what we can do about climate change? I love the Years of Living Dangerously because they tackled one of the main myths about climate change head on. One of the main myths is that climate change is a distant issue. In space, it's only about the polar bear, not about us, and it's distant in time. It's only about future generations, not about us. This is a myth that isn't just among people who don't think climate change is real. Even many people who do view it as, oh, it's just, you know, we'll deal with it in the future. The Years of Living Dangerously said no. We are dealing with it right now, whether you like it or not, and let us show you the faces of the people around the world who are dealing with it. And I thought that was just fantastic because you cannot watch that series saying climate change is not an important issue test today. I think that the TV series has reached people who may have been cautious or disengaged about climate change. I always kind of frame my own air at reach in terms of the Six Americas of global warming. I think of those six different groups and which group I'm talking to and where I want to move them to. So Years of Living Dangerously, if people were seriously dismissive they would very much doubt that they're going to pick up that series and watch it. But if people were disengaged but they're like, oh, my favorite vampire is in the series, or if they're cautious and they're like, oh, well, that looks interesting. Let's find out more. Or if they're concerned but not alarmed, I feel like that was the series that will move people up the next level. The main things I would tell people, I wouldn't start with the science. So often we're told to say, with the science it's real, it's us, it's bad, but there are solutions. So that's the science message. But I don't think we can start right away with the science. I think we have to start with the values. So I would start with saying, I care about X, whatever I have in common with the person I'm talking to. Even if, you know, say it's somebody from West Texas. I care about Texas and I care about our future. We don't have a future with water. Climate change will make that water worse. We know climate is changing here and around the world. We know humans are responsible. We know it's going to affect our water resources, but here are all the great things that we're already doing and that we can do even more of in Texas to benefit ourselves and to give ourselves a more secure future. Whenever you step out as a communicator, as a scientist, one of the most precious things to us personally as a scientist is our scientific reputation. Things are changing now, and communication was seeing as light and fluffy, an indication of lack of seriousness in your science. Someone even once said to me, not that many years ago, that a blog is seen as a charming eccentricity in an older scientist, but it's seen as a dangerous lack of focus in a junior researcher. So in making this investment in communication, I also made an investment in my science to not only reach but exceed or even double the standards for a person at my stage in terms of publications, research, relevance, all of the metrics that scientists use to judge each other. If we're going to be a credible scientific messenger, we have to make sure our science is credible as well as our communication. I have to say though, in terms of the faith component, when my husband and I came out with our book together in 2009 on climate change and what that means for people of faith, I was nervous. I was thinking that a lot of my colleagues were kind of dismissing me because of that. The reality was exactly the opposite. I've received so much support from colleagues who say, I do not share your faith or I don't even understand your faith but I support what you're doing. In contrast, I would say I receive about ten times more hate mail from Christians than I do from atheists or from other scientists saying that you can't be a Christian. I've gotten a tract saying if you repent of your evil sins then you might be saved. Is it the sin of being a scientist or the sin of accepting climate change? It's accepting climate change because we've been told we can't be a Christian and think that climate change is true. You have another question? You've been lurking right behind him so I couldn't see you the whole time. Is he a puppet? Do you have like your hand up his back?