 Well, thank you all for joining us this evening for our conversation on climate change. My name is Ryan Collier, and I serve on the board of the Future Forum. The Future Forum is an organization that is dedicated to having balanced conversations on the issues that affect us today, and so pleased that you're all here with us. The Forum is a member-supported organization, so for all of our members that are here, thank you for helping us make tonight's event possible. For those who are not members, I strongly encourage you to join. You have access to incredible events like this. And our next event is actually going to be on Women in Leadership in June. Should be fantastic. You can sign up and learn more at lbjfutureforum.org. I also want to thank our sponsors for tonight's event. We've got Mad Green, who's going to be providing some light bites after our discussion. We've got the Austin Winery and Carbock Brewing, so please make sure you take advantage of those lovely libations. Thank you. And thank you to Google Fiber for allowing us to be here in this wonderful space. So tonight's discussion is going to be with Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, who is a climate scientist who studies climate change on the areas where we live. And we're going to have Nina Satija, who is an investigative journalist with the Texas Tribune. Before they all come out, we're going to have Dr. Katherine Hayhoe is going to give a brief presentation and discussion. So thank you all for being here and please enjoy tonight. Thank you for coming here tonight. Isn't this a great spot? I love this. Yes. It looks like almost every chair is taken, but there's a couple of people still standing. So if you have a chair beside you, if you could just raise your hand. Okay, so there's, oh, there's a bunch of chairs. Okay, so if anybody needs a chair, there's a bunch of chairs over there. And there are some people coming in right there, so maybe wave at them and tell them to come on over to where you are. Nothing worse than walking straight into a room that's already full. You know, you always hope that the door is going to be at the back. But once in a while, especially at universities, you walk in the doors at the front and you realize you just like walked onto the stage when you're late. Anybody ever done that? Okay, thank you. I'm not the only person. All right, wave at them if you have some seats. People are waving at you. There's seats. All right, so today we are going to talk about why climate change matters to us here in Texas. Because normally when you talk about climate change, people think of one thing and that one thing has nothing to do with Texas. It only exists way up north. It is big and white and furry, and it is A2, exactly. So why would we care about climate change if the number one symbol is an animal that just about none of us have seen in real life, right? The reality is we care about it because it affects us here where we live. So I'm going to talk a little bit about specifically why we are concerned about what used to be known as natural disasters. And now we're kind of this compound of human and natural disasters here in Texas. And then Nina and I are going to have a chat about all kinds of ways that we are working on this issue here in Texas. And then we're going to ask for your questions too. But first of all, don't you love this? This is not real, it's not from a real Egyptian tomb. But it makes the point that as long as there have been humans on this planet, as long as there has been any type of civilization, as long as we have had anything to lose, we have been affected by weather and climate disasters. As soon as we had something that we did not want to lose, we were at risk from flood, from fire, from drought, from all kinds of things. It is a truth that no matter where we live, we are at risk from natural weather and climate disasters, right? And if we live in Texas, we are even more at risk. This is a map showing simply the number of weather and climate disasters that have cost at least a billion dollars worth of damage since 1980. And which state is number one? It is us. We are currently, this is the latest map, we are currently at 99. That is a lot of events to have happened since 1980. And so what I want to do is, this is the part where you get to participate, it's fine, actually take out your phone. Yes, do take out your phone. You can turn off the ringer, but do take out your phone. And what I want you to do is I want you to text Texas Tech, all one word, to that number. When you do, you should get a reply saying, you have joined Catherine Hayhoe's group. Isn't that cool? So text, Texas Tech, all one word, to 37607. And when you get a reply message, put up your hand so I know it's working. Oh, got a couple of very speedy textors. Excellent. I've got about four hands. Oh, another, yep, good. This is kind of like popcorn. Excellent, a few more there, yep. Okay, good. All right, this is working, awesome. Oh yes, everybody, okay, great. Now you don't have to, it's not mandatory, it is not tracking your name or your number, or anything like that. But this is gonna be fun because you're gonna see the results of what everybody else is thinking. Yes. Okay, so again, if you haven't done it yet, Texas Tech, all one word, it doesn't matter if it's caps or not, to that number. And then what I want you to do is I want you to tell me what crazy Texas weather have you personally experienced? Now, it's better if it's all one word. So if you wanna say like crazy hurricane, just make it one word. But I want you to text, there we go. Text, oh, nice, isn't this cool? This is what people are actually texting. Okay, so we've had people who have experienced hurricanes, hail, tornadoes, high water, yes. Blizzard, yep, absolutely. Did I see Haboop? Flood, cold, storms, water, waves. And the scary hurricane wasn't me, that was somebody else who took my suggestion. Isn't this cool? This is what you're actually texting. And the bigger the words, the more people have texted that. If we live in Texas, we have a unique ability to witness some of the craziest weather in the entire United States and the world. Did you know that they actually run tours for people to come to Texas to see severe weather? From other places in the world? Yes, this is awesome, I love this. We have everything, we have blizzards, we have snow, we have ice storms, we have hail, we have dust storms, heat waves, tornadoes, hurricanes. We have pretty much every type of severe weather known to humans. The only one I could think of that we don't have is glacial lake outburst floods. It's because we don't have the mountains and the glaciers. If you just review the headlines on any given week or month in Texas, you will see headlines like, and this is just from a couple of weeks ago, driest three years severe drought returns to Austin or flood projects or wildfire damages or crazy hurricanes. Wherever we live, we're at risk from natural climate and weather disasters, especially if we live in Texas, but today those risks are going up and that's what we're gonna talk about today. Risk is a factor of three things. It is a factor of exposure, that's the number of people and the infrastructure and the things that we value that are exposed. So in other words, if a crazy hurricane hits a place where nobody lives, does anybody care? No, exposure. Second is vulnerability, how prepared are we to cope with it? And then the third is the actual event or hazard itself. Now what's happening is our exposure is going up. It's going up for two simple reasons. Number one, the number of people are going up, right? Texas's population is going up. We have a number of the biggest fastest growing cities in the whole country right here in Texas. It isn't just a matter of the sheer number of people though, it's also the fact that we have trillions of dollars worth of expensive stuff. If we lived in Houston a thousand years ago and we lived in a tent and the hurricane came through, what would we do afterwards? We would rebuild our tent. It's not so simple anymore, is it? That's why our exposure is increasing. It's not just our exposure though, our vulnerability is also increasing. Now yes, we have better prediction. Yes, we have better weather forecasts and warning systems. But just this past year, the American Society of Civil Engineers graded our infrastructure. This is just this year. They graded our infrastructure and they estimated we need to spend $4.5 trillion just to bring it up to code, up to a decent condition. In fact, they went through every major type of infrastructure and look at these grades. Would you want your child to be coming home with these grades? It mystifies me that rail gets a B but maybe that's because we don't hardly have any of it. If we already have exposure going up and vulnerability going up, then why does climate change matter? We already have a problem, right? Yes, we do, but there's this thing called the straw that breaks the camel's back. Heard of that? We already have a camel where the legs are starting to wobble. The load is increasing on that camel as the exposure goes up and as the vulnerability goes up, but there's an extra straw that is being added to that camel's back. Why does this matter? It matters because our entire society, not just our infrastructure, but our economic system, our agriculture, our society is built on the assumption that we can have ups and downs, heat and cold, wet and dry, but it will all average out in the end. This assumption is what goes into our building codes. Where do our building codes come from? Looking at long-term averages in the place where we live in the past, right? It goes into what type of crops we plant, where, when and how. It goes into our flood zones. How do you determine the 500 year flood zone by looking at the past at where it flooded before? And it even goes into our future water plants. But what happens if this assumption is no longer valid? This is a map of where I live in Lubbock. And it is appropriately from Google. And if you've ever been to West Texas, you know that we have some super straight roads. In fact, I-27, going north to Plainview, is so straight in some places that you could drive up that highway, staying not just on the highway, but in your own lane, if you're driving along looking in the rear view mirror. Why does that work? Because where you were a minute ago is a perfect predictor of where it'll be in the future. The road is dead straight. It is dead straight, that is, until just before you get to Plainview, anybody been driving up I-27 and you've seen, okay, you're witnesses. This is real. There is one giant curve in the road, and there's a row of concrete grain silos on the curve. What happens if you are driving up the road looking backwards at where you were in the past and you hit the curve? You better know the answer to that one. Otherwise, they'll be collecting your driver's licenses at the door, right? Okay, he says yes. Planning for the future based on the past is like driving down the road, looking in the rear view mirror. It works great if climate is not changing, if it is stable. It works great if the road is straight, but if climate is changing, we're gonna end up in a different place than we planned to be, let's just put it mildly. We care about a changing climate because we still have our ups and downs. Between the months of November and May, one of the biggest questions I get, or not really a question, one of the biggest aha's I get is, it's cold outside. Therefore, global warming can't be real. And my answer to that is, well, it's winter, and it is cold during winter, but actually winter has been warming faster than any other season in Texas. But we can still have our ups and downs. We can still have our cold and our hot and our wet and our dry, but the long-term average is changing. So if we are planning for, does this have a laser? Oh, it does have a laser pointer, but you can't see it on the screen. Interesting. Oh, it's a tiny little laser, no, it doesn't work on the screen. If we are planning for being down here, if we're driving down that straight road looking backwards, we're gonna be planning to be down here. But when we get here, we're actually gonna be up here, we're not gonna be prepared. Our building codes will not be adequate, our water plan will not be sufficient, we'll be growing our crops in the wrong place, and even worse, what if the variability is increasing? Variability increasing is like rolling a paradise. There's always a chance of rolling a double six, right? And the double six is that event that you remember, the crazy heat wave or drought or hurricane. But what climate change is doing while we're not looking is it's sneaking in and it is replacing another one of those numbers with a six. All of a sudden, there's a chance of rolling a double six more frequently. And then, a couple of decades down the road, another number gets replaced. All of a sudden, we're rolling double sixes very frequently and we have actually seen this happen. Did you know in Houston, before Harvey, they had three 500 year floods events in three years? You can't call it a 500 year flood event if it happens every year. The dice are changing, they're being weighted against us. So our exposure's going up, our vulnerability is going up, but our weather and climate events are also being affected. And I'm just gonna take you through a couple of very specific ways they're being affected. Number one, heavy rainfall is getting more frequent and more intense. Why? Because in a warmer world, more water evaporates and the air can hold more water vapor. And so when the exact same storm sweeps through today, as opposed to 50 or 100 years ago, there's a lot more water vapor for the storm to sweep up and dump on us. If you look over the past 60 years in the US, this is since the 1950s, we have already seen a major increase in heavy precipitation across the country. This is already happening. The second thing we see is that heat waves are becoming more frequent and cold waves, they still happen, but they're less frequent. In fact, these days what happens is when we have a normal winter, everybody's like, oh my goodness, it's the polar vortex, we're gonna die. It's like, no, this was a normal winter 30 years ago, we've just forgotten what a normal winter looked like. It still gets cold. Why do heat waves matter? Well, this is showing our average number of days over 100 degrees in the past if we're looking in the rear view mirror. Then we had this crazy summer. Do you remember that? Dozens of days over 100 degrees. Who was in Texas during 2011? Okay, you know what I'm talking about. When I saw this map, I could not believe my eyes because two years before this, I had made a map of what the average summer would look like by mid-century and it was almost exactly the same. Imagine if 2011 was the average summer in Texas. That's why we care about heat. Droughts, droughts are part of life in Texas. They occur naturally all the time, but because it's warmer, they're getting stronger. Why? Because, again, when it's warmer, more water evaporates out of our soils and our reservoirs. But if there's no storm system coming along and that's what happens during drought, there's a high pressure system that camps out over our region and it deflects all the storms away from us. So if there's no storm system coming along to sweep up that water and dump on us, it just gets hotter and drier and hotter and drier. And looking to the future, some work that I've done, this is some work that I've done, looking at as the world gets warmer, in the summer, what would our drought index look like? You can see, well, if the world gets warmer by one degree, not so bad, two degrees manageable, three degrees not looking good, four degrees. I'm not gonna say Death Valley. I didn't say that. But inching in that direction, let's just say. And then we have the last one, hurricanes. Now, before you get all excited, I wanna tell you something very important. And that is, oops, there we go. That is, I know we had a crazy hurricane season this past year. We had an incredible number of hurricanes. But long-term, we do not see a trend in the number of hurricanes. And we don't expect to. Some years are bad, some years are good. But there are six ways, at least six, possibly more, that hurricanes are being affected. We are seeing more intense rainfall associated with hurricanes because in a warmer world, again, more water evaporates, and hurricanes are very big storms. They can sweep up and dump a lot of water vapor on us. The storms are getting stronger faster because they get their energy from warm ocean water and the oceans are warming. So they're ratcheting up past category one, two, up to three, four, and five, faster today. 25 hours faster on average than they used to. We aren't seeing any more frequent storms, but we're seeing a greater proportion of stronger ones. There's more stronger ones and less weak ones compared to 50 or 100 years ago. Interestingly, the storms are moving more slowly, which means they sit over top of us and dump for longer. And they're also getting bigger, no surprise, because they're pulling more energy from the ocean. And lastly, of course, sea level is rising, so there's more water for those storms to push on shore. This is a pretty damning list, isn't it? So if our exposure's going up, what can we do? We need to work on our vulnerability. We need to be more resilient. We need to be more prepared. We need to be ready for the changes that are happening. Not only that, but we need to decrease the impact we're having on our planet so that we won't see such a big increase in the climate and weather hazards too. This is what we need to do if we want to reduce our disaster risk because right now we're heading in the opposite direction. Our goal, driving down that road, oops, our goal, driving down that road, is to plan for the curve in the road. Our goal is to look ahead at where we're going in the future so that we can make sure that we all have a safe future because if you take this metaphor of the road a little further, we are all in one giant bus driving down that road together. And we wanna make sure that we make it around that curve because the biggest myth that we've bought into, the biggest myth we've bought into is not the myth that the science isn't real. I know that's the one we hear about all the time, right? We always hear people saying, oh, you scientists just make it up or the world isn't warming or it's just a natural cycle or we're not sure we haven't studied it long enough. We've only studied it since the early 1800s but clearly that's not enough. We think that the biggest myth we've bought into is do you think climate is changing due to human activities? And we look across the country and we say, well, there's a lot of places where it's sort of like around 50%. Now the actual average across the whole country is over 65%, it's between 65 and 70% would say yes. But we look at this and we say, but clearly we just need more education on the science. This is not our biggest problem. You know what our biggest problem is? You know what the biggest myth that the largest number of people have bought into? It is the myth that it doesn't matter to us. Hardly anybody thinks that it matters to us. That is the biggest myth we have bought into. And that is why the most important thing that I hope that you can take away today is the idea that we care about a changing climate not because of the polar bears. We care about it because it takes the risks we already faced today and Texas faces more risks naturally than any other state in the country just because of where we're located. It takes the risks we already faced today right here, right now, and it is amplifying or exacerbating them and that is why we care. Thank you. Presentation, I just wanna ask someone who works at the future. Okay, how about now? Yes. I just realized I don't have any timekeeping device of any kind. So if someone can wave at me when we have about 10 minutes left for questions. Nobody has anywhere to go tonight, team. If, thanks, appreciate that. So Professor Hayhoe, I've seen you give a version of that presentation in the past. Do you feel like you're getting a different response now than you were? Is the response changing when you're out there in the public, when you're talking to people about this? What are they responding and has that changed in the last few years? 10 years ago, we would have been hard pressed to say that we had personally experienced some aspect of a changing climate in the place where we lived. Today, almost everybody has some type of story of how things are changing in the place where they live. If you look around all of Texas, over 70% of people in the entire state of Texas, including where I live in West Texas, would say, yes, there is something different happening today that was not the same as when my parents and my grandparents lived here, and that's why the risk is changing. So actually, let's ask people here. Why don't we do that? All right, great. Get out your cell phones. Here's your chance. You tell us. You all live here. Do you feel, and don't answer the way you think we want you to, be honest, because we don't know who you are. I'm not, you know, there's no tabs kept on who texts what. Do you feel that average conditions here in Texas are changing, and your answers are definitely, maybe so, no change, and the cop out, you tell me. Isn't that cool? You can actually see people responding. Knowing I wouldn't know who you are, you took option D. So I think you're hearing more from folks that they are recognizing there's been a change. Do they feel there's anything that they can do about it? Do they feel that there's any action that they can take? That's often one of our biggest challenges is because we feel like it's this giant global problem, and I'm just one person, what can I do, right? The answer is there's a lot that we can do, and one of the most important things we can actually do is what we're doing here tonight, which is talk about it. Because you remember that map that I showed you, the dark blue map of, you know, does anybody think that climate change matters in pretty much the whole country's blue? If you notice there's a couple of orange counties, and if you're wondering what those orange counties were, the most concerned people group about the impacts of a changing climate in the entire U.S. are Hispanic Catholics, and those counties are predominantly Hispanic Catholic. I'm not interesting. Not white Catholic. When you separate out by race, white Catholics are least concerned. Yeah, white Catholics actually beat out white evangelicals. I'm happy about that personally. It's good not to be at the absolute rock bottom on one survey. But, but, there is one map I didn't show you that is more blue than that, and you know what the more the most blue map is? Do you talk about it? If we don't talk about it, why would anybody care? Right? So one of the most important things we can do is talk about it with our family, with our neighbor, with our colleagues, with our friends, with our elected representatives. Yep, they actually measure how many calls and letters they get, because we need solutions at all scales. What do we talk about? We can talk about what we're doing in our personal lives. We can talk about our concerns and our worries. We can talk about building resilience. We can talk about reducing our emissions. Do you feel that Hurricane Harvey has changed the conversation here in Texas? Have you heard from folks or spoken to folks who may not have been convinced and then they experienced Hurricane Harvey? I would say the answer to that is yes and no. I was just in Houston recently, and I was there this time last year as well, and there was definitely a lot more interest in talking about resilience than there used to be. But at the same time, there was just an article that you and I were discussing before this. There was an article saying the council voted to support rebuilding in the floodplain. And it's like, well, you call that the floodplain. The floodplain now extends over much of Houston, not just the tiny little area. So it's always kind of, you know, plus and minus, plus and minus. In terms of Harvey, you talked about how hurricanes, the effects of hurricanes are exacerbated by climate change. What do we know about Harvey specifically? So when it comes to Harvey, we do know a few specific things. First of all, we know that in general, hurricanes are getting stronger. There's more rainfall associated with them. They're moving slower and they're getting bigger. We already know that in general. When it comes to Harvey, we know that the specific risk of a Harvey event has been increased by a factor of three due to human-induced climate change. In other words, could you still get a Harvey in 1900? Yes. But the chances of a Harvey was three times less. Currently, the chances of another Harvey happening again is about 1% per year. Those are not good odds, are they? Would you get on a Southwest flight if there was a 1% chance of the engine exploding? I came here on Southwest, so I thought about that today. And also the rainfall associated with Harvey was increased. On average, the total rainfall across the whole storm was likely increased by about 40% relative to if the same storm had happened 100 years ago. That's a huge increase, and that means that there are significant damages that would not have occurred 100 years ago that occurred today. I just wanna make sure I understand Harvey is now essentially a 100-year storm. Yes. It is now, but by the end of the century, if we continue on our current pathway, it could be almost a one in five year event. Wow. Which is insane. And so yet, of course, we're still thinking of the 100-year floodplain as what it was. And it sounds like even if Houston were to move to the 500-year floodplain being the place they'd regulate, that's still the wrong floodplain. That's still not what Harvey is. It is because it's still looking backwards. It's still looking backwards, and we know that things are changing. We're on a curve. It's still setting your navigation based on a straight road instead of a curve. The reality is the definition of a floodplain needs to change decade by decade today. And that's a really tough concept. I work with engineers a lot, and the whole field of engineering is built on the concept of stationarity. What happens if this entire, the bedrock of your planning is changing? Have you spoken to Houston officials with that specific that Harvey may now be a 100-year event? Because what we hear from everyone is it was an 800-year event. It was a 1,000-year event. We won't have another one in 1,000 years. Well, the key there is the tense of the verb. It was, it was a 1,000-year event. Now it is a 100-year event. And in the future, it may be a five-year event if we continue on our current pathway. It, again, it's this concept of there's a curve in the road, and we have built our entire civilization, not just going back decades, going back centuries and even millennia. We have built our entire civilization on the concept of a stable climate, that there can be variability, cold, wet, hot, dry, but over long, decadal time scales, we have assumed everything stays the same, and today it is not. Given that we have a city like Houston where I believe the previous mayor was part of the climate conference of mayors, spoke out actively on this issue, you see an event like Hurricane Harvey, now it's a 100-year event. It still feels like the city has essentially given a collective shrug to this. How can we be optimistic about the future? How can you be optimistic about the future in light of that? Well, I can tell you who has not given a fatalistic shrug, and that is the insurance industry. They have been monitoring flood risk for decades now, and in some places, flood insurance and even normal home insurance has skyrocketed, and in some places in Minnesota, it's got up 300%. I'll tell you who else is paying attention, and that is mortgage companies and insurers. Did you know that coastal properties at risk across the United States have dropped an average of 7% in value already as of today? That's a pretty big hit, especially when you're talking about some very expensive homes in coastal areas. So we are starting to see market forces respond to recognizing that these risks really exist. It was interesting because in September, I was here in Austin at a big conference for the housing industry. So it was a lot of the reinsurance companies, so not the insurance, but the reinsurance people, the really big guys. It was a lot of people who owned tens of thousands of rental properties around the country, and we had a session on how the risks are changing from weather and climate. Well, you know, a couple of months in advance of the session, there was nobody really signed up, and the organizer was really gung-ho and about it, and she's like, well, we're gonna do it anyways, even if just a few people show up, we're still doing this session. And then Harvey happened. Everybody showed up for that session. And we had a great discussion with people from the insurance and the reinsurance industry, as well as people from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, to talk about investment in infrastructure and a changing climate when all of a sudden the risks in some places are going through the roof. What do you think will bridge that gap between insurance industry, reinsurance industry, these market forces, and government, and policymakers? Oh, that's the hardest question. That question makes me glad I'm a scientist and not a policymaker, because unfortunately we see a lot of short-term financial pressures from people who will not bear the costs. In Houston, it's developers. Once they've sold the property, they're home free, right? Who's left holding the baby, so to speak? The people who own the property who will be paying the price for the damages that occur. So we have this tension between people who can make the buck now and don't care about the consequences next year versus the people who are left paying for those consequences, which already many of us are through our taxes and even through our insurance rates, because the dirty secret of the insurance industry is that we are paying and subsidizing people who live in higher risk areas because they're spreading the cost out across the country. Do you think that your whole career, so much of your career has been about communication, what is it that you've learned about the most effective ways to get through to people on this issue? That's a great question. So one of the most important things I've learned is we have to start where we're at and climate change is not at the top of everybody's priority list, let's be honest. So I think this is a good time for our next poll. You tell me, where is climate change on your personal priority list? Is it top five, top 10, top 100, or I couldn't care less? Now if you're like my husband, if you're from the South, he says I could care less. I said that is not correct. That means there is less to be cared about. You couldn't care less means it is at the rock bottom. So you tell me, where is it on your priority list? Okay, we got a pretty concerned group here. Let me tell you what my answer would be. My answer isn't on this. My answer is I don't think climate change in and of itself, just the issue of climate change itself needs to be on anybody's priority list because the only reason we care about it is because it affects everything else already at the top of our list. So where do we have conversations? We have conversations by starting with what is already in our top five list, for example, and is also in the top five list of the person we're talking with. Are we somebody who cares very passionately about our local economy? Let's talk about the fact that we have 25,000 jobs in the wind energy industry right here in Texas, many of them in small towns whose economies were disintegrating until the wind industry came in. That's a pretty cool conversation to have. Are we somebody who cares about health? We can absolutely talk about the health of ourselves and our kids and the fact that 200,000 people die from air pollution in the United States every year and the fact that even though Houston has done a great job of cutting their emissions, the hotter it gets, the worse air pollution is gonna get. So we wanna keep things cool. Or we could just talk about the fact that I just sunk my family savings, I didn't, but many of us do, sunk my family savings into a retirement property in Houston. And I'm very concerned about what's gonna happen to it, but I made sure that I bought it not just outside the 100 or the 500, I bought it outside the 1,000 year flood zone to make sure I would be okay. If we care about national security, we can talk about how the military calls climate change a threat multiplier. If we care about conservative values, we can talk about how there are bipartisan and free market solutions to climate change. If we care about jobs, we can talk about how there's more jobs in the solar energy industry than the coal industry. And the Museum of Coal Mining in Kentucky put solar panels on the roof. And if we care about living in Texas, we can talk about how can we make sure that our economy continues to grow and thrive, that there are local jobs for people right here in this state, that we have safe places to live that are resilient to the weather and climate risks that we already face naturally today. We can talk about things we have in common as the number one best place to start is whatever you have in common with the person or people that you're talking to. We don't see a lot being done about climate change on the federal level or on the state level, but you work with a lot of cities who are really committed to this. Tell me a little bit about what they're doing in Texas or elsewhere. Cities are my favorite organizations to work with because they can do so much. And there is tremendous action happening at the city level. I've worked with cities like Chicago and Washington DC and Boston and Austin right here in Texas as well as a couple of smaller towns like St. Angelo. And I love working with cities because cities get it. They understand that being resilient is just common sense. Two years ago, I spoke at the US Conference of Mayors when it was in Dallas. And after I had talked about how the risks are changing and we need to be prepared and resilient, a mayor of the Chicago suburb came marching up to me and he said, I'm a Republican. And usually when somebody says that to a climate scientist, the conversation tends to kind of go downhill after that. But I nodded and he said, and everybody needs to care about this. He said, it just makes sense. We want people to have safe places to live. We want people's homes to be safe. We want a healthy and thriving community. We all need to care about this issue. And I said, oh man, will you run for president? He's probably too smart. It's a dog's life. I'm not knocking, I'm just saying it is a dog's life to be a president of anything. Cities are doing tremendous things. And so I love that I get to work with the city of Austin. I love that the city of Austin's water plan looks ahead down the curve in the road to make sure that as climate changes, they will have enough water to provide people with. And I love that when the city has public meetings, dozens of people show up. And the vast majority of people are saying, do more. We want more, do more. It is incredible for a city to have a mandate from its citizens to do more. Do not ever underestimate the fact that you're a citizen of a city. And cities do seek the input of its citizens. And when it is told to do more, cities want to work for the citizens and are much more intimately connected to the citizens of its city than giant states or even countries. It's really hard to meet everybody's needs when you're speaking for an entire region or a country. But when you're speaking for a single city, there's a lot that can be done at the city level. And one of my favorite stories actually comes from the first city I worked with Chicago. They're very concerned about heat waves. Heat waves are really serious, especially up north where a lot of people don't have air conditioning. And so when heat waves happen in Chicago, people die, hundreds of people die. So we looked at specific heat waves they had had in the 90s, and we looked at how frequently those heat waves were likely to recur in the future. And the answer was very frequently. And the city set out to lower its urban heat island effect. You know, because cities are warmer than the surrounding area. It set out to deliberately lower its urban heat island effect by the same amount that climate change was pushing it up. Through green roofs and more reflective surfaces, the city could actually control its micro climate. How incredible is that? Cities have tremendous power and many of them are acting. El Paso has tremendous desalinization plans. Incredible things are happening and in Dallas, DFW is the first carbon neutral airport in the US. Not amazing. There are really incredible things happening in cities and happening right here in Texas that we can all be proud of and we can all have conversations about. Do you find that the resiliency argument, the argument that climate change is happening, it's affected you and you need to prepare for it is more effective than the larger concern about the effect of carbon emissions and human activity and oil companies. I mean, is it easier to just talk about resiliency? Is that a better way to get people interested in the issue? It really depends. I do a lot of work with water managers. The water sector does not produce a lot of heat trap and gas emissions. So there's not a lot of mitigation talk you can have. With the water sector, it is all about resilience and adaptation. So those conversations are almost 100% resilience because that's it. But if we're having broader conversations about the economy, about the future of Texas, then we have to talk about building resilience but we also have to talk about shifting gears and figuring out different ways to get our energy and the good news is you know what, we're already doing that in Texas. We are the wind leader in the United States. We got 12% of our electricity from wind in 2016. We got 18% last year. We're well on our way to 25% and solar is just ramping up. Where I live in Lubbock, they're putting in two new solar farms and a wind farm. Now that we've joined the ERCOT, we're joining the ERCOT grid. So there are changes happening and the changes don't mean that we all have to pull the plug and live off the grid. The changes mean that we can still be an energy leader but we are supplying the energy for the 21st century, not the energy for the 19th century. At this point, continuing to invest in fossil fuels is like continuing to invest in horse farms and buggy factories. When Henry Ford is already producing the Model T Ford. The world is changing and Texas has an opportunity to lead this new world in many ways and so I think the mitigation and the adaptation conversations are both very necessary conversations to have here in Texas. I keep thinking about this idea of Harvey as the 100 year storm and where we are, what the reality is today. The climate's already changed. It's changing. It's like this train is coming towards us and there's some amount we can do to prepare for it and there's some amount we have to do to try to stop it from running us over. When you look at your projections for 2100, 2050, how much, if anything, can really be done to stop those or is it really about making sure those projections don't actually get worse? So that's what I actually do. I look very specifically at what we expect to happen in the future to things that we care about. Like our water and our food and our health and our air quality. And when I look to the future, the number one thing I see is this. Our decisions are the single factor that have the biggest impact on our future. In other words, specifically how fast we can wean ourselves off old and dirty ways of getting our energy that we've been using for hundreds of years. And how fast we can transition to new clean sources of energy which make no mistake, all the emerging economies in the world are already doing. China has more wind and solar technology than any other country in the world. The cheapest prices for solar energy are in India right now. The biggest solar farm is in Morocco. The world is changing very quickly. And we need to not just be worried about leading, we're not leading anymore in the nuclear energy industry. We need to be worried about catching up. And the good news is by catching up and keeping up with the clean energy revolution, that is the single most important thing that we can do to make sure that the worst projections don't come true. Our choices really do matter, but the time to make those choices is now. Do you see a deciding characteristic in governments or whether it's nations or cities that have decided they need to make a change, whether it's Chicago with the resiliency, whether it's other countries that have really invested more in renewable energy. What is it that you think makes those policy makers decide the time is now to actually do this? That's a great question. Somebody should look into that in more detail. I would love to know the answer. I would say that first of all, as humans, change is hard for us. Change is hard. It takes energy to change, to do something differently. And so in order to change, we have to recognize first of all that sometimes change can be good. It can be positive. We have to have the courage to imagine and envision a different future, what that might look like. And we have to be able to keep the big picture in mind. Instead of making decisions for only a very small part of the demographic, we have to make decisions for everybody because we are all in the same giant bus hurling down the road. And the people in the front seat will end up in the same place as the people in all the other rows, all the way to the back. So we have to understand that we are making decisions that are for us to ensure a better world for us, here, right here today, as well as for our kids. Is part of your job persuading governments or policy makers, or do you feel that it's more, they come to you, they say, hey, we want to work on this issue. Chicago approaches you, says, we want to deal with our heat waves. How does that work? In my experience, trying to persuade somebody who is not interested usually doesn't go that well. So in some cases, what I do is, I've just made myself available and said, you know what, when you're interested to talk, I'm here. And sometimes even think of people that you know, that's the only conversation we can have at this time. When you're interested, I'm here. But when they're interested, they come. And I have had some of the most amazing conversations with people who I never, ever would have dreamed of having a conversation with just because they knew I was there and I was available and I was willing to talk. And when there is mutual interest and respect, those conversations can be incredible. So the most important thing I think is just making ourselves available. Talk about it. If the conversation doesn't want to go anywhere at that time, just say, hey, I'm here if you ever want to talk again. Because so much of your work is about projections, you talked about sea level rise, where we expect, where we might see Texas summers go. What, if there were one projection, you wanted people to know about, whether it was for 2020, 2050, 2100 here in Texas, what's the thing that worries you the most about where we're going? Well, those are two different questions, I think. Fair enough. In terms of what the future might look like, I think it's really important to put it in terms that we can personally identify with. Part of the problem of what I do is it's so esoteric. You know, what if the global temperature of the planet increases by two degrees Celsius? Well, there's a two degree Celsius difference between this room and the hallway over there. And we can't even feel it with our bodies. So the most important thing to do is put it in terms that we can understand. And so, for example, the idea that the summer of 2011 could be the average summer in a couple of decades. That's something that sticks in our head because we know what the summer of 2011 looked like. The idea that Harvey could be a one in 100 year event, and actually I don't even like that, I prefer to think of it as a 1% chance every year event. We know what Harvey looked like. So I can say hurricanes are getting stronger and bigger and slower. But if I say Harvey has a 1% chance every year, that sticks in our head. So I think finding these analogs of events that have already happened and understanding how much more frequent they get in the future is really important. What is the thing that worries me the most? The thing that worries me the most is the future of human civilization. Will the planet survive? Yes, it will. Will humans survive? Probably, I've read a lot of apocalyptic novels to suggest that they could. Will civilization survive? And by that I mean our economy, our infrastructure, our political system. Will it survive? One of the most frightening essays I read in recent years was an essay by a political scientist who was arguing that in times of crisis, people enable stronger and stronger leaders to take more and more power into their hands and democracy falls by the wayside in times of crisis. What is climate change other than a crisis on our economic and political and social systems? So I think there is a serious risk of our society as we know it with all of our safety nets, with our bank accounts and our insurance and our mortgage systems and FEMA and flood insurance and crop insurance. There's a serious danger of all the safety nets that we take for granted disappearing. And then what will happen? That is my biggest concern. We're gonna take some questions. And then what might happen is there'll be polar bears running through the streets. All of a sudden nobody will be worried about the polar bears anymore. Elise of our worries. We're gonna take some questions but I think we wanna try a different way of doing that. All right. Okay, questions. Now, you can type entire sentences. They don't have to be all one word. And they will appear on the screen in the order that you type them. So any questions that you might have, go ahead and text them to this number. So while we're waiting for that, let me ask you one more question to give people some time. We've got a room full of folks who decided to come here for a conversation on climate change. And 50% of them put climate change in the top five of their priority list. But now you know. It doesn't have to be on your priority list. It's there because of all the other things you care so passionately about and that's why we can talk to people who might not be on their list at all. Because most of us have, the health and wellbeing of our family on our top of our priority list, right? Most of us have a healthy economy, jobs, things like that on the top of our priority list. We all have things in our top five that we can connect with people on even if it's not climate change. And that segues perfectly. In fact, someone sort of asked my question. Oh my gosh. What is the most important thing we can do to support the changes that need to be made? Okay. Given the current administration was in there too, but in general. Awesome. Isn't this great? Okay. So I have these little global weirding videos on YouTube. Has anybody seen the global weirding videos? Okay, a few people have. Everybody else should go check them out. They're a part of a PBS digital series and they're super short. Like five or six minutes each. If you just go to YouTube and you just Google global weirding, it will pop right up. And one of the global weirding videos is I'm just one person, what can I do? So go check that out because I go through a lot of things in that video talking about the impact that individual things we can do can have. But again, one of the most important things we can do is not just do things, but share what we do. Talk about it. Talk about how, you know, I got a plug-in car last January and it's awesome. And every single neighbor in my street who drives a giant SUV stopped their car, got out of their car, looked at my car, said, what is that? Does it have a gas pedal? What about a steering wheel? And I got to have conversations about how much money I was saving and how cheap our electricity is and how I didn't have to go to the gas station more than once or twice a month anymore with people who never in a million years would have had a conversation about climate change. So check out the global weirding videos. So what about those? Not yet. We have too many questions right here. One small flaw in the system is that so many people are asking questions that I'm not able to see all of them on the screen. I know. She's been writing them down like crazy. She's been writing them down as quickly as possible. And if your question has disappeared off the screen, feel free to text it again, okay? That's totally fine. It will not be taken in any negative way at all. Slightly. I really like this question. Someone asked, someone said they work with farmers. Is it a lost cause to be a farmer in central Texas? Oh, that's a great question. It is not. It is a lost cause if you insist on doing things the way your great-granddaddy did them. But they don't. You remember the Dust Bowl? The Dust Bowl was made a lot worse by very poor agricultural practices. Now if you go to West Texas and you see the fields in the winter, you know what they look like? Giant furrows to prevent the top soil from being blown away. I know, through my colleagues that are doing research at Texas Tech, I know that there is tremendous advances in drought-resistant crops, in crops where you do not have to water them using the aquifer, which is going one way fast, in crop rotation, and most importantly of all, putting carbon back into the soil. Because our problem is that we've dug up so much carbon and we've burned it and it's sitting in the atmosphere. Well, guess what? We don't want it in the atmosphere, but we would love to have it in the soil because carbon is a natural fertilizer. So farmers are actually a huge part of the solution, potentially, in smart agricultural practices that put carbon back into the soil, which benefit them as well as benefiting all of us. Farmers are absolutely part of the solution. What is the number one state policy change that you wish to see? Okay, magic wand time. If I could wave a magic wand, it would be this. I would not create a climate office. I would not create an office of resilience. I would not make it like some separate thing over here. My magic wand or magic wish would be this, that every single aspect of planning consider the risks posed by a changing climate and consider how best to incorporate them into building future resilience across the entire state, and cities we see this doing this too. This is a really good one. I'm a middle school teacher. How can I teach climate science without traumatizing my kids? I didn't think it would be a funny question, but I see it. Yes, I'm a mom too. I should add, I saw a question earlier about, what do we say when people say it's just a natural cycle? We have a global weirding episode for that. It's just a natural cycle, isn't it? We also have a global weirding episode, which is my personal favorite episode on, I'm Just a Kid. Well, you know what? When we were researching this episode, I could have done an entire series on what kids are doing. Kids are awesome. Kids are doing incredible things. So yes, when we speak to our kids, we have to tell them the facts. And the facts are, we've been digging up massive amounts of coal and oil and gas for hundreds of years and burning it. It is wrapping an extra blanket around our planet. That blanket is trapping too much heat and the earth is running a fever. We absolutely have to tell our kids this, but do not ever stop there. In fact, don't stop there with anybody. Because we have to say, well, how can we fix it? What can we do about it? And if we're looking to kids, there are incredible things kids are doing. Now you have to watch the video. I'll just give you a couple of highlights. There are kids, three seventh grade girls in Florida decided that they wanted to cut their school's energy bill by things like painting the roof white and reducing food waste. Because for many of us, what we eat is one of the biggest parts of our carbon footprint. And eating lower down the food chain lowers our carbon footprint. And even opening the windows instead of running the air conditioning or the heater. They saved tens of thousands of dollars and now they're encouraging schools all around the country to do that too. If you look at who's won the Intel Science Fair the last few years, one of the biggest science fairs in the country, the last few years, kids growing algae to make biofuel that can power airplanes under their bed, that's one of the things that have won it. A girl who's figured out how to make energy from wind and sun for $5 is another person who's won it. Kids are doing amazing things and if you just look for what kids are doing, you'll be overwhelmed with all the incredible and hopeful things that kids can do and are doing and can do working through their schools. Schools are really the incubus of change. And so if you are a teacher or if you have kids, you're one of the luckiest people in the world because you get to work with these amazing human beings who have not given up yet. So many of us give up, don't we? We've talked a little bit about what people can do but this question is still coming up. Three things I can do when I get home. What can one individual do today? What other suggestions do you have? Okay, so number one, find a carbon calculator. A carbon calculator is like a scale. You know, if you're gonna lose weight, the first thing you do is step on the scales, right? And then you scream in horror and then you pretend you didn't see the number and then you decide how much you're gonna lose, right? In the same way, a carbon calculator is like a scale. You step on and you measure your carbon footprint because how would you know what to do if you don't know what aspects of your life are producing the most carbon, right? I mean, I have a pretty different life. I've reduced my carbon footprint in most areas of my life to the point where my biggest part of my carbon footprint is my travel. So what I do is I travel smart. When I travel, I don't go somewhere usually for one event or for two events. I usually go somewhere when I have a whole ton of events. So I'm actually doing three different events tomorrow. That's a total of four events. So the carbon footprint of that one flight is actually divided by four. I do a ton of video stuff. I know a few people are here from the church I spoke to last Wednesday. About three quarters of the talks I give are video talks which are almost no carbon. The carbon that I can't reduce, I offset using a program called Climate Stewards. I know these people personally, they're a non-profit in the US, in the UK and the Netherlands, and they run clean cook stove programs and tree plantations in Ghana and Kenya and Mexico where they work with rural communities. They help build a local economy and they also help sequester carbon and that's part of what we can do. It's not the ultimate solution. Reduce first is the goal and then second of all offset what we can't reduce and then always, always, always talk about it because what good is it talking about how I found these amazing light bulbs on Amazon that I totally love because I'm such a like wavelength nerd. I just need the perfect wavelength and you can get them now in LEDs. What good is that if I don't tell people how excited I am about it? And the fact that if every household in the US changed just one light bulb that would be like taking 800,000 cars off the road. Right, which is about the number of cars in DFW or maybe Austin these days. Probably feels like it doesn't when you're stuck on I-35. There is no one magic thing that everybody can do because it invades almost every aspect of our lives. For many people, the biggest part of our carbon footprint again might be actually what we eat. For other people, it might be commuting. For other people, if you're so fortunate it might be the giant hell we live in perhaps or the fact that you use very old appliances and air conditioners. We bought our first house. We bought, had a furnace that was sold. It should probably be at a museum. The first time we got our heating bill it was four digits. After that we went to Lowe's. This was up in Indiana. We went to Lowe's. We bought insulation. We completely destroyed the historic credibility of the house by just putting insulation everywhere and plastic wrap over the windows. And then our heating bill was like $100 after that. The bottom line is, is you are different than anybody else. And so the most important thing for you to do is first of all figure out where your carbon emissions are coming from. Make decisions for you that reduced your emissions and then tell people about why this matters, what they can do to, and talk to our elected officials about how we need larger scale changes. Because for example, where I live there is no public transportation so that is not an option for me to get to work. I can't fix that myself. I have to talk to somebody else about that. There's a new study coming out that I just heard the results of and the question was what gives you hope? And they asked people what gives you hope? And you know what people said? When I see somebody else doing something that makes a difference. Even a little thing. When I see somebody in West Texas driving in front of me down the road and they have a hybrid car or a plug-in car, I'm like, West Texas, yes. When I'm walking into the grocery store and there's all these people walking out and they're terrible plastic bags and along comes this elderly woman with her own bags, I'm like, yes! You know, does one bag make that big of a difference? No, but it gives you hope because you realize we're not alone. This is the image that we have. We have an image like this is a giant boulder that we have to roll uphill and nobody's rolling the boulder uphill. That is false. The boulder is already starting to roll downhill. There are millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of hands on that boulder. And when we see another hand on the boulder that is what gives us hope that yes, we can do it. It's a great note to end on. I'm so sorry we can't take all these questions but we have our three things I think. I love these questions. Find a carbon calculator just to review. Find a carbon calculator. Tell people about that. Tell people what they can do and talk to your elected officials as always. Absolutely. And vote, yes. I believe this is recorded and that people can access it afterwards. And just a little plug here. On Facebook, I make a point on my Facebook page which is just my name, Katherine Hayhoe on Facebook. I make a point of trying to share at least one hopeful story every week that you can then share. I make a point of sharing stories that you could feel comfortable sharing with all of your friends and relatives on Facebook no matter what part of the political spectrum they come from. And I'm gonna make this commitment. I am going to answer these questions on Facebook. Okay? It will answer these questions on Facebook but in return you have to like my page and you have to invite other people to like it too. That's our deal, all right? Deal? Deal, okay, deal. Thank you so much, Professor Hayhoe. Thanks to everyone for coming.