by Hope Jahren
But Zimmerman, it seemed, had no use for facts, and after the meeting he continued to harangue Hayhoe. The encounter, however, came as no surprise. In fact, it was depressingly familiar to Hayhoe, who has auburn hair, hazel eyes, and a calm, affable nature that is reminiscent of an excellent physician’s bedside manner. And she often likens herself to a doctor, but her patient is the planet. After taking its temperature, she feels compelled to report her diagnosis: because of manmade carbon emissions, the earth is running a fever. She knows that this message doesn’t always find a receptive audience. Over the past 15 years, climate change has emerged as one of the most polarizing issues in the country, ahead of guns, the death penalty, and abortion. And there is no group that is more unconvinced of climate change’s reality than evangelical Christians, who primarily identify as conservative Republicans. As Brian Webb, the founder of the faith-based Climate Caretakers, recently told Religion News Service, “The United States is the only industrialized country in the world where denial of climate change has become inextricably linked to a dominant political party.”
All of which puts Hayhoe in a unique position. A coauthor of the last two National Climate Assessments and a reviewer on the Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Hayhoe—the daughter of missionaries and the wife of a pastor—is herself an evangelical Christian. In her talks she uses the Bible to explain to Christians why they should care about climate change and how it affects other people, from a poor family on the island nation of Kiribati who will be displaced by rising sea levels to an elderly couple in Beaumont who can’t afford to pay for air conditioning in Texas’s increasingly sweltering summers. As she puts it, “The poor, the disenfranchised, those already living on the edge, and those who contributed least to this problem are also those at greatest risk to be harmed by it. That’s not a scientific issue; that’s a moral issue.”
Hayhoe maintains a dizzying schedule. In the past year she has attended the historic United Nations climate summit in Paris, traveled to the edge of Hudson Bay, in Canada, to witness the annual polar bear migration, curated a special Good Housekeeping issue on climate change, and appeared onstage in New York with Gloria Steinem at a talk at the Rubin Museum of Art. That’s in addition to teaching her graduate-level seminars, serving as a codirector of Texas Tech’s Climate Science Center, and publishing 17 scientific papers. (Travel is essential for Hayhoe’s job, but to do her part—and perhaps head off criticism about her carbon footprint—Hayhoe buys carbon offsets to reduce the impact of her trips.) One warm afternoon in October, on a day spent in Lubbock between visits to Colorado and Houston, Hayhoe spoke at a Phi Beta Kappa ice cream social inside Texas Tech’s Hall of Nations, a room draped with the flags of 190 countries and featuring a glossy terrazzo map of the world on the floor. The crowd, mostly professors from across the university’s departments and a smattering of students, dug into Styrofoam bowls of vanilla and cookies and cream as Hayhoe, who was wearing a red top and flowing linen pants, began her speech.
“I’m a professor here at Tech, and what I’m going to talk about today is not my research. I’m going to talk about the experience that I have talking about my research. Now, most of you are not going to have the same experience I do. If you study literature, you don’t have to spend a lot of time convincing people that books are real. If you study engineering, most people will agree that engineering is real and it’s an important part of our society. But I study something that about half of the country and much more than half of Texas thinks is a complete hoax,” she said. “Many people view having climate science at Texas Tech as similar to having a Department of Astrology. But we don’t use crystal balls, we use supercomputers; we rely on physics, not brain waves.”
The study of climate science dates to 1824, when French physicist Joseph Fourier discovered what would become known as the greenhouse effect, in which gases trapped in the atmosphere absorb heat and raise the temperature of the planet. It took 35 more years for John Tyndall, an Irish chemist, to pinpoint carbon dioxide as one of the heat-trapping gases in the earth’s atmosphere. And in 1896 a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius declared that burning coal contributed to the greenhouse effect, after spending almost two years calculating (by hand!) how increasing carbon dioxide concentrations raised the earth’s temperature. So the basic science, as Hayhoe often points out, has been settled since before the start of the 20th century. Today there is robust scientific consensus that global warming is “real, caused by humans, and dangerous”; a study found that 97 percent of climate scientists agree with those conclusions. The Department of Defense calls climate change a “threat multiplier,” because it exacerbates existing problems. And the year 2015 was the warmest on record, breaking the previous mark, which was set in 2014.
So why is climate science greeted with so much skepticism? Part of the reason can be attributed to the way the topic is often handled in the media. On cable news, two people from opposite sides of the debate are typically paired to argue about the subject, but that can lead to a false equivalency between scientists on the one hand and paid spokesmen on the other. As historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway chronicled in the book Merchants of Doubt, some of the most prominent climate-change skeptics are the same politically conservative scientists who were previously funded by Big Tobacco to spread falsehoods about cigarettes. Their employer this time around? The fossil-fuel industry.
And part of the reason is the suspicions that conservatives have of government intervention. Hayhoe has found that some people don’t reject the reality of climate change because they disagree with the science but because they fear that the solutions will upend their lives. This seems to be the case for U.S. senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, who once told journalist Rachel Maddow, “I thought it must be true until I found out what it would cost.” That day at Tech, Hayhoe recounted an anecdote about an experience she’d had speaking to a group of water managers for the Brazos River a few months back. At the end of that talk, an older man stood up and said, “Everything you said makes sense, but I don’t want the government telling me where to set my thermostat.”
Some critics feel so threatened that they resort to ad hominem attacks on climate scientists. Hayhoe receives a steady stream of hate mail, which she files away in a special folder. When I asked her when this started, she replied, “The first time I was ever quoted in a newspaper article.” The ugliness reached its height in 2012, during the presidential race. At the time Hayhoe was writing a chapter on global warming for a book Republican hopeful Newt Gingrich was coauthoring about the environment. Rush Limbaugh mentioned it on his radio program, dismissively referring to Hayhoe as a “climate babe.” A few days later an Iowa voter buttonholed Gingrich on camera to ask him about it, and Gingrich swiftly replied, “That’s not going to be in the book. We didn’t know that they were doing that—we told them to kill it.” Hayhoe took to Twitter to respond: “What an ungracious way to find out, eh? Nice to hear that Gingrich is tossing my #climate chapter in the trash. 100+ unpaid hrs I cd’ve spent playing w my baby.”
Most of the time she laughs these incidents off. “I got one today that was exceptional,” she told me in late September, as we sat inside the Climate Science Center. “Most of the stuff is rambling, but this one was not. Someone wrote on Facebook, ‘She is a lying lunatic, and probably a witch.’ That was very concise,” she said with a grin. But sometimes the comments veer into violent territory. Hayhoe recalls one email that prompted her to call authorities. “You are a mass murderer and will be convicted at the Reality TV Grand Jury in Nuremberg, Pennsylvania,” the email began. “After the Grand Jury indicts you, I would like to see you convicted and beheaded by guillotine in the public square, to show women that if they are going to take a man’s job, they have to take the heat for mass murder.” But most of the time Hayhoe doesn’t let such vitriol drive her to despair, though dealing with it can be exhausting. “What frustrates me the most, and what I find difficult not to take pe
rsonally, is how much of the hate mail comes from so-called Christians.”
That bile is something Hayhoe never anticipated when she was applying to graduate school 22 years ago. A native of Toronto, she had double-majored in physics and astronomy at the University of Toronto and spent every clear night one summer gazing through the telescopes on top of the physics building. She found that the astronomer’s life appealed to her and planned to study that in graduate school. Then she took a climatology class her junior year. “Until I took that course, I did not realize that climate change is affecting everything, from poverty to biodiversity to health, and so you can’t fix any one of them if you leave climate change out of the picture,” she told me. She also realized that her background in physics had perfectly positioned her to study climate modeling.
If she was going to leave astronomy behind, Hayhoe wanted to do policy-relevant climate science. When she was considering graduate programs, she was thrilled to learn that Don Wuebbles, who had been instrumental in addressing the chlorofluorocarbon problem in the ’80s, was the new head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He would serve as her adviser for both her master’s degree and her doctorate. Under Wuebbles’s guidance, Hayhoe eventually began focusing on statistical downscaling, which was still a relatively new field when she started graduate school, in 1995. “There was very little of this being done at the time,” Wuebbles recalled recently, “and the methods were not capturing the full extent of the science, so she set about to develop a new technique and very successfully did so. She’s brilliant.”
Statistical downscaling involves combining historical weather observations with global-climate models to better predict what the future could look like in a particular place. “The local environment, whether it’s hilly or flat, with crops or forest, urban or rural, modifies the weather patterns we get,” she said. “So, for example, if we had identical high-pressure systems over Lubbock and Houston, it would mean something different for the temperature, for the humidity, for the rainfall patterns.” Hayhoe also tries to see if the global models reflect real-world conditions on the ground. “When we get an El Niño, we see a very wet winter from here in Lubbock all the way across to Florida. Do the models pick that up or not? We need to know,” she explained.
Hayhoe runs simulations on a supercomputer, then she combs through the data to interpret the output. On a practical level, this means Hayhoe exists in a world of numbers, thousands upon thousands of lines of them. A single file dealing with one variable—say, temperature across the country over the next hundred years—can be almost five gigabytes in size. And she runs these simulations for multiple variables and scenarios on multiple climate models. (Some 42 global-climate models exist today, run by labs around the world.) These reams of data are shapeless until she translates them by writing code. “What a lot of people don’t realize is that the most important skill any climate scientist has is programming,” she told me over pizza in Lubbock one afternoon last fall.
Hayhoe has used downscaling in her consulting work for the cities of Washington, D.C., Boulder, and Chicago as well as federal entities, including the Department of Defense and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She helps analyze problem areas, such as sewer overflow during heavy rain or warped train rails during heat waves, and tries to pinpoint how often those things will be a problem in the future, based on changing climate patterns. In 2004, Hayhoe was an author on a paper that examined California’s future from different angles, from water supply to agriculture to tourism. She was heartened when, a few months later, that research prompted governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign an executive order limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. He was the first governor to do so. “When Schwarzenegger signed that bill, he had the authors from California standing in a semicircle behind him. The reason why I left astrophysics is to do policy-relevant research, and when I saw that picture, I thought to myself, ‘I did it. This works.’ ”
Hayhoe’s scientific credentials are impeccable, but what has made her an international star are her skills as a communicator. John Abraham, an associate professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, has called her “one of the best climate communicators in the world.” Abraham told me, “She is extraordinary at relaying very complex topics into language that other people can understand, without speaking down to them. The other thing she’s good at is hearing questions. We all listen, but she has this innate ability to understand the perspective of the person making the inquiry,” he said. “She has this knack for honestly presenting the science but doing it in a disarming way for people who are often antiscience.”
One mild Friday in early October, I flew to Houston with Hayhoe and her eight-year-old son, who spent the short flight absorbed in the game Minecraft on his iPad while Hayhoe tapped away on her laptop. She was to give a keynote speech at Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church, a collection of limestone buildings nestled between pine trees in one of Houston’s most affluent neighborhoods. The weekend symposium was called “Faithful Alternatives to Fossil Fuel Divestment.” Hayhoe arrived with some tough talk for her audience. “There’s no way to sugarcoat this, and I wish I could, because I know I’m in Houston, but the way that we get our energy does matter. If we continue to rely only on fossil fuels, we’re going to end up on a very different pathway than if we gradually and sensibly transition to clean and renewable energy that we can grow here in Texas—and that many of our energy companies are already investing in very heavily.”
The conference was organized in response to the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s proposal to divest church resources from fossil fuels, a move the Houston chapter had rejected as a symbolic one that unfairly vilified the people who work in the fossil-fuel industry. The group instead proposed that the national organization take steps to reduce its carbon footprint and advocate for a carbon tax. Hayhoe too is a proponent of putting a price on carbon and letting the markets sort it out. She thinks that a reasonable tax on gasoline would be around six cents a gallon. “Regulations just get more and more complicated, and you have to hire new people to deal with them,” she explained. “It gets expensive and difficult to plot your strategy, but any business—from the ma-and-pa shop around the corner to the biggest multinational in the world—knows what to do with a simple price change. Business is all about maximizing profit and minimizing costs. So in a sense, putting a price on carbon just frees up business to do what it does best.”
But the most revealing part of her talk centered on why Christians should care about climate change. To lead into this subject, Hayhoe flipped to a slide with a quote from John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser: “We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, or suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.” Suffering, Hayhoe said, is not a word often deployed by scientists. “As scientists we don’t know a lot about suffering, but as Christians we do. And we know that part of the reason we’re here in this world is to help people who are suffering.” And that suffering will not be meted out proportionally: if global warming continues unchecked, the poor—whether they’re in Houston’s Fifth Ward or in low-lying areas of Bangladesh—who have contributed least to carbon emissions will feel the most pain, from enduring more intense heat waves to paying the higher food prices that will accompany failed crops. Throughout the Bible, God charges Christians to serve others, Hayhoe said, from Genesis, where God makes man in his image so that he can be responsible for every living creature on earth, to 1 Peter 4:10: “ ‘Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.’
“We’ve been given this commandment to love others as Christ loved us,” Hayhoe said as a slide quoting John 13:34-35 flashed on the screen: “ ‘Let me give you a new command: love one another. In the same way I loved
you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.’ ” She continued: “You can see, you just go through the Bible for verse after verse. They’re not verses about climate change; they’re not verses about the environment. They’re verses about our attitudes and perspectives to other people on the planet. We are to be recognized for our love for other people.” The members of the crowd nodded along in agreement as she spoke. The year 2015 was a good one to be proclaiming this message: in June, Pope Francis sent out his 192-page papal encyclical imploring the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics to care about climate change, and in October the National Association of Evangelicals issued a similar call to action.
Hayhoe can speak honestly about suffering because of a lesson she learned when her parents became missionaries and moved the family to Colombia when she was nine. There she witnessed true poverty. Her father would travel to remote villages to speak at tiny churches, and she remembers hearing stories of landslides washing away homes after heavy rains. She now recognizes that these early memories of poverty and vulnerability have informed her work. Hayhoe was raised as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a conservative, evangelical offshoot of the Anglican Church that emphasizes reading the Bible and interpreting it for oneself. This lent itself well to science, Hayhoe told me. “My dad was very much of the perspective that the Bible is God’s first book and nature—creation—is God’s second book.”