Saving Us

by Katharine Hayhoe

  In 2016, the Garden Club of America released a statement expressing their concern over climate change, and their commitment to educating people about “causes and constructive responses.” Each year now, they reach out to climate scientists like me to give them the latest update on what we’ve learned and how they can help.

  Climate change also affects the food we grow. Greens like lettuce could face unfavorable growing conditions and more extreme weather events that make contaminants like E. coli easier to spread. And warmer temperatures could imperil the water supplies needed to grow bananas, the world’s most popular fruit, as well as citrus fruits and olives. As temperatures warm, conditions become more favorable for many of the pests and diseases that already destroy between 20 to 40 percent of the world’s crops every year.

  It’s not only food, either; your favorite beverage might be impacted, too. Warmer temperatures and higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affect the composition and fermentation of grapes. This is already happening in iconic wine-growing areas of France, from Languedoc to Bordeaux; and it’s affecting beer, too. Warmer temperatures have decreased the yield of hops and altered beer quality in the Czech Republic, which is famous for its lager. In 2015, twenty-four breweries, including Guinness and New Belgium, signed a Brewery Climate Declaration, calling attention to the risks climate change poses to their industry. And some organizations are going further: SAB Miller, the parent company of familiar names like Grolsch and Miller Genuine Draft, is experimenting with cassava root as a replacement for barley malt in warmer growing areas.

  Prefer hot chocolate or coffee? Shifts in rainfall patterns are already affecting cacao harvests, and warmer temperatures increase evapotranspiration, essentially squeezing the water out of the soil and plants that produce chocolate. Coffee giants from Nespresso to Lavazza are concerned about climate change impacts on the millions of small shareholder farmers who grow beans around the world. They are launching programs to build resilience and even provide customized insurance to cover farmers’ climate-related losses due to disease, mold, drought, and more.

  By now, you might see a pattern, and some ways into conversation through things that people love and you do, too. Do you like gardening, beaches, or birds? Beer, coffee, or wine? Outdoor experiences, sports, or activities with your family? If so, then you have something to talk about.

  GO BEYOND THE SCIENCE

  Many scientists have particular difficulty figuring out how to connect with nonscientists over climate change. I think that’s at least in part because being a scientist isn’t just a job or a career for most of us. It’s more like a vocation or a calling, a fascination and a lifelong quest for knowledge.

  We scientists connect with one another over that shared love of science without even consciously recognizing we’re doing so. But when you think, breathe, and live science, it can be hard to decipher what else you care about. As a result, when giving a talk at a university or to an academic audience, I typically field a dozen or more questions that are all variants of “How can I connect with anyone over anything other than science?”

  After a Christmas event in Washington, D.C., a NASA researcher approached me, overwhelmed with concern about how climate change is affecting our world and how he sees this in the data, firsthand. “But how do I talk to my friends about this?” he asked. “They don’t see it like I do.” I asked him what he enjoys doing with his friends, and he said they love getting together to cook. He comes from South America, one of many regions where climate change is increasing the risk of drought as well as affecting specialty crops and people’s livelihoods. All of these would be relevant things to bring up at his next dinner party, I said.

  A young woman who worked for a science organization sought me out, wondering how to broach the topic of climate change with her grandmother. “What do you like to do together?” I asked. “Knit,” she replied. I love knitting, so the answer came easily. I suggested she look up the “warming stripes” for the place where her grandmother grew up. Warming stripes are a visual representation of how temperature has changed in any given location over time. The creation of British climate scientist Ed Hawkins, warming stripes consist of one stripe for each year. If it was a colder year, it’s blue. A normal year is white. A warmer year is pink, and a hotter year is red. People have turned the warming stripes into knitting patterns that start off mostly blue at one end—usually around the late 1800s or early 1900s—and then shift to bright red as they head toward the 2020s. “What if you knit a scarf together,” I said, “and ask your grandma to tell you about memorable years, and how she’s seen conditions change over her lifetime?”

  After speaking at a university in California, a scientist told me he’d been reaching out to local churches. He was convinced, as I am, that getting churches on board is part of the solution—but he hadn’t been getting any traction. What should he do?

  “Start with the denomination or the type of congregation you have most in common with,” I suggested. “Where do you attend?”

  “Oh, I’m an atheist,” he said blithely.

  “In that case, stop!” I replied. “You are not the right person to have that conversation; that’s why it’s been falling flat.

  “Instead, connect with people whose values you genuinely share. So, what do you enjoy doing?”

  “Well, science,” he said, as a scientist always will.

  “Yes,” I said, “of course. But what else do you do? Do you hike or run, sail or surf; are you a member of the Rotary Club or any community organizations?”

  “No,” he replied, “and no, and no.”

  After going through about ten different options, something finally occurred to him.

  “Well, I am a diver,” he said uncertainly, not convinced it mattered. But when I smiled encouragingly and nodded, he warmed to his theme. “I dive a lot, and I’ve been doing it for a long time. In fact, I hold a few records for very deep dives.”

  “Perfect!” I said. “That’s exactly the community you can reach out to. Oceans are being affected even more than land areas due to warming and acidification, but we humans often don’t realize it because we don’t live in the oceans. You could approach diving instructors and schools and clubs in your area and offer to educate divers on how climate change is affecting the oceans and marine life and what they can do to help. They are much more likely to listen to you than to me. You are a diver, so you understand.”

  WHAT ABOUT YOU?

  At this point, if you’re a food or drink aficionado, a crafter, an outdoor enthusiast, or an ocean-lover, you may be starting to see a few ways you hadn’t explored before that you can build on to connect with others. But if you’re not one of those, and not a particularly religious person either—or even if you are but that’s not a part of your world that you’re wanting to have conversations in—then you might be thinking, “That’s all well and fine for you, Katharine, but this still doesn’t help me.”

  It will, though: because being a person of faith, or an athlete, a gardener, or a wine connoisseur, someone who knits, or someone who loves snow, aren’t the only frames that work. Depending on who you are, whom you’re talking to, and what you both care about, there are all kinds of approaches that will work for you. The only condition is that you have to be genuine. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not.

  If you’re still struggling with this concept and how it applies to you, ask yourself a few questions. Where do you live? What or whom do you love? What activities do you enjoy doing? What do you do for work? Do you come from any particular culture, place, or faith tradition? And perhaps most importantly, what are you passionate about?

  It could be the simple fact that you and the other person are both parents, or you live in the same place. Or you could bond over the fact you work in the same industry or business, or you enjoy the same types of activities. You might be an avid online gamer, like oceanographer Henri Drake, who runs a Twitch channel to talk about climate change in his spare time. You mi
ght be a hockey player like climate modeller Gabe Vecchi, who tracks how outdoor skating days are declining around Princeton, where he lives, and uses that information to talk to his teammates about climate change. How you connect with others doesn’t have to fit any mold, example, or pattern. Whoever you are, you are the perfect person to talk about climate change with others who share your interests and concerns.

  WE ALREADY CARE

  When you find out what people care about, and connect climate impacts directly to the values people have, they can see that caring about climate change is already integral to who they are. Parents care about their kids’ health, and future. Residents of a city or region care about their water supply and their local economy. Outdoor enthusiasts care about the abundance of fish, birds, wildlife, or snow, each of which requires a healthy environment and a thriving ecosystem. Military and defense experts, from Pentagon employees to four-star generals, are very worried about climate change and its potential to multiply resource scarcity and security threats around the world.

  To put it another way, none of us cares about climate change because a two-degree or three-degree or even a four-degree increase in the average temperature of the planet matters to us personally. I don’t even care for that reason, and I’m a climate scientist. We care because the cascade of events triggered by that warming affects everything we already care about: where we get the food that we eat and how much it costs; how clean or dirty the air that we breathe is; the economy and national security; hunger, disease, and poverty across the planet; the future of civilization as we know it. We’ve woven a million reasons why we already care about climate change into the very fabric of our society. We just haven’t fully realized it yet.

  Stop for a second and take a breath. That came from our planet. Then think about how every single resource we use in our lives is provided by the Earth, from the water we drink and the food we consume to the materials we use to build our houses and our clothes and our phones. All of those resources are gifts from our home, planet Earth.

  This is why, to care about a changing climate, we don’t have to change anyone’s values or try to transform them into anything other than who they already are. We just need to be people who want this planet to continue to be a safe, hospitable home for us all.

  And to share this message effectively, we need to bring our hearts to the table, not just our heads.

  SECTION 2: WHY FACTS MATTER—AND WHY THEY ARE NOT ENOUGH

  4 THE FACTS ARE THE FACTS

  “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

  FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  “What science do you and Biden subscribe to that makes this change human-caused but all the others totally natural?”

  AN ENGINEER ON LINKEDIN, COMMENTING ON KATHARINE’S POST

  “Last month we visited the Creation Museum,” our friend Mark said brightly. We were catching up over coffee after we hadn’t seen each other in a while. My husband nudged me, a silent warning not to say anything impolite: he’d already heard my opinion of the museum’s statues of humans alongside animatronic dinosaurs a few too many times.

  The special exhibit on climate change was particularly interesting, Mark said. “A World War Two airplane that crashed over Greenland was found buried under more than two hundred feet of snow,” he enthused, holding up a photo on his phone of the museum’s diorama. “So those ice cores from Greenland that scientists claim show what climate has been like for hundreds of thousands of years can’t be real. They only show the last few decades!”

  As with nearly all scientific-sounding objections to climate change, this argument seemed legitimate on the surface. Propaganda works best by wrapping falsehoods around something true (in this case, a real plane crash in Greenland). But this one was easy to debunk. Snowfall rates on Greenland’s coast are high; that’s why the plane got buried so quickly. Inland, though, where scientists drill the ice cores, there’s a lot less snow. As more snow falls on top of it, older snow gets compressed and compacted into ice, eventually sealing off the bubbles of air in it. That’s how a hundred-thousand-year-old ice core ends up being about three kilometers deep. The bubbles in it serve as records of past changes in heat-trapping gases, dust, air temperature proxies, and more. They’re carefully checked against other records from around the world to make sure they are properly calibrated by year. There’s no mistake: ice cores do tell us about ancient climate, and they also show us how unusual today’s climate is.

  * * *

  Every day I’m bombarded with objections to the evidence for human-caused climate change. Most of them sound respectably scientific, like “climate changes all the time; humans have nothing to do with it.” It’s “the Sun,” or “volcanoes,” or “cosmic rays” that are making it happen, or “it’s not even warming,” some argue.

  You’ve probably had to face these objections, too. Maybe they come from a family member, quoting their favorite politician; a colleague, citing a questionable blog; or something you run across yourself on social media that you know can’t be true, but you can’t quite put your finger on why it isn’t. Scientific-sounding objections are the number one type of objection we hear when people want to argue about climate change. Fully half the questions I receive on Facebook are some version of, “Someone I know posted this article. I know it can’t possibly be true. But can you explain why?”

  Scientists call these “zombie arguments.” They just won’t die, no matter how often or how thoroughly they’re debunked. And because they won’t die, it’s clear that, when it comes to climate change, you do have to be able to talk about some of the science. But what you don’t have to do is follow it down the rabbit hole. And you don’t have to be a climate scientist, either. The basics are extremely simple, the objections are very common and easily answered, and it makes sense to have a short response at hand.

  Not only that, but as I mentioned before, most scientific-sounding objections are really just a thin smoke screen for the real problems. Climate denial originates in political polarization and identity, fueled by the mistaken belief that its impacts don’t matter to us and there’s nothing constructive or even tolerable we can do to fix it. Again, this isn’t only a U.S. problem: an analysis of people across fifty-six countries found that political affiliation and ideology was a much stronger indicator of their opinions on climate change than their education, their life experiences, or even their values.

  But as Ronald Reagan said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” So the key when these zombie arguments surface is to have an answer, but to keep it short. Acknowledge the objection, and provide a brief response. Then pivot promptly to connecting over shared values rather than divisive arguments, from the heart rather than the head. Here’s what you need to know about the science so you can do that.

  THE EXPLANATION IS SIMPLE

  The Earth’s climate is complex. Understanding what we humans are doing to it isn’t. Think of it this way: The Earth is wrapped in a natural blanket of heat-trapping gases. Most of the Sun’s energy goes right through this blanket, as it does through a window, heating the Earth.I The Earth absorbs the Sun’s energy. It warms up, and gives off heat energy. The blanket traps the heat energy, keeping the Earth around 33°C or 60°F warmer than it would be otherwise. In fact, if we didn’t have this blanket, the planet would be a frozen ball of ice.

  So if this blanket is natural, and it’s responsible for the fact that there’s life on Earth, what’s the problem? The problem is that whenever we dig coal, oil, or natural gas out of the ground and burn it, we release carbon dioxide or CO2 into the atmosphere—carbon that would not naturally reach the atmosphere for millions of years. And carbon dioxide is one of the main gases that make up our heat-trapping blanket. Heat-trapping gases also come from deforestation, agriculture, and waste. Hundreds of years’ worth of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions have artificially increased the thickness of that natural blanket. You’d overheat if someone replaced your pe
rfect blanket with a thicker one you didn’t need. In the same way, the Earth is also heating up.

  I know that each time a bad blizzard or a cold spell engulfs us, you might think, “I sure could use some global warming right now.” But as comedian Stephen Colbert tweeted sarcastically in 2014, “Global warming isn’t real because I was cold today. Also great news: World hunger is over because I just ate.”

  What’s happening in one place on one day, or even one year, doesn’t invalidate the long-term warming of the entire planet. The truth is that no matter how cold or hot it is today, no matter what season it is, each successive decade is breaking new ground as the warmest on record at the global scale.

  THE SCIENCE IS VERY OLD

  French mathematician and scientist Joseph Fourier was the first to identify our planet’s natural blanket, in the 1820s. In 1856, Eunice Foote, an amateur scientist from New York—in a paper presented on her behalf at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—proposed that if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were higher, the planet would be much warmer. The next year she became one of the first women to read her own work at the AAAS annual meeting, and it’s a conference I still attend today.