Saving Us

by Katharine Hayhoe

  When we reduce our psychological distance, what we have in common starts to become more important and more relevant than the political ideology that divides us. This is a key insight that signals a way we can alter our approach to talking about climate change and begin advocating for climate action more successfully than with the strategies we’ve used in the past.

  TALKING CLIMATE CLOSE TO HOME

  I’ve seen firsthand the amazing depolarizing power of sharing local climate impacts. A few years ago, I was brought in to help develop climate projections as part of a long-term plan for a central Texas water district. The district’s leadership team was skeptical that climate information was needed, so I was asked to give a preliminary talk before they decided on the proposed work. The introduction they gave me was a surprise: it had little to do with me or the proposed work, other than mentioning my name. Instead, it was all about my university: what a good school it was, how successful our students were, and how well our football and basketball teams were doing. As I looked around the room at all the smiling faces, the penny dropped. Nearly everyone there was an alumnus. So even though some were still somewhat suspicious of me due to my title of climate scientist, I was considered to be more trustworthy than a scientist from a rival institution because I was a member of their “tribe.” We supported the same teams. We could sidestep the polarization, just like those kids from North Carolina did with their parents. It sealed the deal.

  I didn’t take this accord for granted. Water districts are very knowledgeable about data; so throughout the project, I made sure that the water gauges and the weather stations our team were using were ones the district knew and used, too. Once we understood the historical data, we calculated the impact of a 2°C and a 4°C warmer world in terms of measures relevant to them: water supply, consumer demand, and return flows. Our results highlighted how successful the district had been at conservation efforts in the past. But they also showed that in a 4°C warmer world it would be difficult, if not impossible, to continue to provide the same amount and quality of water as they do now. In a 2°C warmer world, on the other hand, responses were costly, but within their range of viable long-term options. They could increase conservation and add some new sources to stabilize their supply during longer, drier periods.

  When the project engineers presented the final results to the board, there was an animated discussion but argument was minimal. Everyone recognized the names of the weather stations and the locations of the gauges used in the analysis. All the graphs showed historical data and future projections together so they could see how they compared. Clearly, past action had paid off, and more such action was needed; everyone agreed.

  Then possible responses were brought forward, including the question of how to communicate these findings to the people in the district. At that point, there was a long silence. One of the board members finally voiced what they were all thinking.

  “We’re in a pretty conservative area,” he said, “and this here what we’re talking about is global warming. How are folks going to take it when we start telling them this?”

  But the oldest, most senior board member was having none of it.

  “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” he said. “My granddaughter comes home from school telling me things she’s learned, like the polar bears are endangered because the ice is melting. I try to tell her that’s not true, but she won’t listen to me.”

  Heads around the table wagged sadly: the gullibility of the younger generation and the propensity of the education system to brainwash its students was evidently not a new topic.

  “But this here is different,” the older man said emphatically. “In this case we’ve looked at what our own data is telling us, and it’s very clear. The data’s the data. It’s getting warmer and we have to prepare or else we’ll be hung out to dry.”

  He pounded the table in emphasis and repeated again,

  “The data’s the data.”

  And that was the final word.

  CLIMATE CHANGE IS THE CURVE IN THE ROAD

  Climate change affects us in many different ways, depending on where we live and what we care about. But the fundamental cause of all our problems is the fact that we—both humans and polar bears—are wholly unaccustomed to, and unprepared for, climate changing this fast. Here’s how I picture it.

  Where I live in west Texas, it’s so flat that many of the roads are dead straight. They’re so straight, in fact, that you could drive along looking in your rearview mirror the whole time. Why? Because driving down a straight road, where you’ve been in the past is a reliable guide for where you’ll be in the future. But what happens if you’re driving down the road looking in the rearview mirror and you hit a curve? Let’s just say, you’ll end up somewhere you didn’t plan to be, and it won’t be good news. And that’s exactly what’s happening to us humans as we drive down the climate road today.

  Modern civilization is built on the assumption that we have a straight road and a stable climate, and that therefore the conditions we’ve experienced in the past, that we can still see in our rearview mirror, are accurate predictors of the future. Based on what we see in the mirror, we’ve parceled out our land, developed complex agricultural systems, constructed trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure, and allocated our water resources.

  Over the past few thousand years there have been small, regional-scale climate variations or wiggles in the road. Some of these had important local and even regional consequences. Sometimes they presented new opportunities, such as the Medieval Warm Period I talked about in Chapter 4. Other times, shifts in rainfall and temperature contributed to the decline of civilizations such as the Mayans in Central America, the Anasazi in the Southwest U.S., and the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization in modern-day Pakistan. But for the most part we’ve been successful at staying on the road because it was largely straight. Was.

  Today, the Earth has warmed by over 1°C (nearly 2°F) in the past hundred and fifty years. This rate is over ten times faster than when the Earth emerged from the last ice age. The planet is going to survive—it has, after all, been warmer before on geologic timescales. It is our human systems that are at risk, our cities and economies and buildings and food systems and, at the end of it all, our civilization.

  That’s why it’s past time to take our eyes off the rearview mirror and take a long, hard look at what our future has in store. Right now, it’s as if we’re all piled into a giant bus barreling down that road, heading for a very big curve. Our wheels are on the rumble strip and they’re sounding the alarm. And as Steve the polar bear scientist said: “If we don’t heed the bears’ warning, we’re next.”

  9 HERE AND NOW

  “Ours is the first generation to deeply understand the damage we have been doing to our planetary household, and probably the last generation with the chance to do something transformative about it.”

  KATE RAWORTH, DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS

  “I’ve lived here for thirty years, and the weather is just getting weirder.”

  MAN AT CHURCH TO KATHARINE

  Back in 2013, the Weather Channel had a competition for the wildest weather city in America. Lubbock, Texas, won the whole thing, besting Fargo, North Dakota; Fairbanks, Alaska; and Caribou, Maine.

  If you know weather, that’s no surprise. When you look at the number of climate and weather disasters that have caused at least a billion dollars of damage since the 1980s in every state across the U.S., Texas has had the most of them. As of 2020, it’s experienced 124 of these events in forty years. That’s an average of 3.1 per year. If you think of extreme weather as an unlucky chance event, like a roll of the dice, then Texas is already playing with a weighted pair.

  Just before Christmas the other year, I was invited to speak to a women’s group near my home. It was a popular group: seasonal baking overflowed across several tables in the dining room; every other square inch was covered in decorative wooden nutcrackers; and all the seats were filled. There was
n’t any room for a projector or slides. It was just me, perched beside the fireplace surrounded by women, a very large Christmas tree, and the nutcrackers.

  I usually rely on visual aids in my talks, whether a diagram showing how the Earth’s temperature and the Sun’s energy are going in different directions, an image of the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, or a photo of a woman in Bangladesh holding up the solar panel that helps her run a small business and send her children to school. Because I couldn’t use any this time, I decided to use the images people already had in their minds. Weather can create some vivid ones. I’ve been here in Lubbock more than ten years myself, and I’ve already got over a dozen stories of floods and droughts, ice storms and thunder-snows, hail, mud-rain, and heat waves.

  * * *

  I started by telling my own worst weather story. In October 2011, I had to catch a morning flight to a research meeting in Denver. It was still dark when I was woken by a call from United Airlines. The direct flight from Lubbock to Denver had been canceled. “But if you get to the airport by 5:55 a.m.,” she added, “you can still connect to Denver through Houston.” It was already 5 a.m.—so I threw on my clothes, grabbed my computer bag, hurled myself into the car, raced to the airport, opened my window to grab a parking ticket… and forgot to close it back up again.

  I made the flight. But later that day, a historical, record-setting, national-news-making haboob—a vertical wall of dust that you can see coming from miles away, capable of turning daytime into night and blanketing the entire city in a thick cover of dirt—rolled over Lubbock. It went right through my car, sitting in the exposed airport parking lot. The open window happened to be facing due west, precisely the direction the haboob blew in from.

  When I got back, I could not find that parking ticket anywhere. In fact, I couldn’t find anything that had been in my car when I left it. The entire interior was coated in a layer of red dust. For the rest of its life, the air vents in that car squeaked as if there were a cricket stuck in them. I’ll never forget that experience.

  CLIMATE CHANGE IS LOADING THE WEATHER DICE AGAINST US

  I then asked each woman to share her most memorable weather story. Everyone had them, and many found it hard to choose which one to share. One woman spoke of a dust storm during the 1950s so thick it turned the midday sky black; another described the infamous Lubbock tornado that destroyed downtown and twisted the tallest building right around, as it remains to this day; others shared stories about all the droughts, floods, and hurricanes they had lived through. The images their stories evoked were so vivid that I could easily picture them.

  How does this connect to climate change? Here in Texas—and in fact everywhere—climate change is supersizing many of our weather events, making them stronger, longer, and more damaging. It’s loading our weather dice against us. Two or three decades ago, we’d have been hard-pressed to identify a way that climate change was impacting the places where we lived. Today, though, no matter where we live, we’ve personally experienced the effects of a warming planet weighting our weather dice.

  Heat waves are stronger, and droughts are longer. In the summer of 2019 alone, there were over four hundred all-time-high temperature records broken, in twenty-nine countries, across the Northern Hemisphere. Climate change also amplifies wildfires from Australia to Alaska, making seasons longer and causing fires to burn a greater area. It’s supercharging our tropical cyclones and hurricanes so that they’re bigger, slower, and stronger. When California is breaking a new record every year for the largest wildfire ever, when a Siberian heatwave tops 38°C, or 100°F, and when hurricanes are dumping more than 1.3 meters or fifty inches of rain on the Gulf Coast? That’s climate change.

  So I told the women in Lubbock, that day: if you live in the Texas cities along the Gulf Coast, you care about rising seas and stronger hurricanes. And it’s not just us. Around the world, there are hundreds of millions of people who live in places threatened by rising sea levels and stronger tropical storms such as hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones. If you live in the High Plains, in this agriculture- and resource-intensive economy we’ve built in a semidesert region, you care about stronger droughts and more extreme summer temperatures. Hundreds more millions live in places that are already water-scarce, and it’s just going to get worse for them, too. If you care about any of those things, then you already care about climate change. Heads nodded: it fit with what they’d seen for themselves, and it made sense.

  Just a few weeks before, I’d been waiting in line after church to pick up my son from Sunday School when the man behind me asked me, out of the blue, “Do you think our weather is getting weirder?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “when you look at the data, it really is.”

  “I knew it,” he said triumphantly. “I’ve lived here for thirty years, and I can see it.”

  The women at the Christmas party thought so, too. Even people who aren’t sure about global warming are pretty convinced that we’re witnessing an increasing amount of global weirding.

  THE COASTS ARE OUR CANARIES

  Climate change is affecting people where I live in Texas. It affects you, wherever you live, anywhere in the world. But those on the coastlines are the canaries in the coal mine: they are the ones to whom the impacts of climate change are already most obvious. Global sea level has already risen by almost twenty-five centimeters (ten inches) since 1880. It’s rising as land-based ice from glaciers and ice sheets melts, and because the oceans are heating up and warmer water takes up more space. The trend is accelerating: sea level is rising thirty percent faster now as when the satellite record first began over thirty years ago. Like the polar bears, what’s happening today to those who live along the coasts is what will happen to the rest of us tomorrow. That’s why it’s past time to not only worry about climate change, but to start doing something about it.

  Princeville, North Carolina, is remarkable for being the first town incorporated by African Americans in the United States. It stands on the low-lying swampland the white settlers didn’t want. In the 1900s, a series of levees were built to protect it from frequent floods, but today those levees are failing. Back-to-back hurricanes put most of the town underwater in 1999, and again in 2016. “If it comes again,” says resident Marvin Dancy, who’s already rebuilt his home twice, “I don’t think I am coming back.” Many from Houston, Texas, might agree with him. Some parts of the city have experienced three five-hundred-year flood events in as many years, as urban development, sinking land, and heavier rainfall due to climate change have loaded the dice for them as well.

  Forty percent of people in the U.S. live in coastal communities. Around the world, it’s estimated that 700 million live in the low-elevation coastal zone; it’s home to most of the world’s megacities as well. Low-lying islands such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean or Kiribati and Tuvalu in the South Pacific are particularly at risk. Perched just a few feet above sea level, with the maximum height of their island nations measured in centimeters or inches rather than meters or yards, it doesn’t take much to overwhelm them.

  Simon Donner is a Canadian climate scientist who’s originally from Ontario, like me. When not biking to work at the University of British Columbia, he’s diving and studying coral reefs in the South Pacific. Stronger and more damaging ocean heat waves are increasing dangerous coral reef bleaching events. If ocean water becomes too warm, corals expel their algae, turning white. As the algae supply much of the coral’s energy, this threatens the survival of the reef. So Simon and his research group are developing a Pacific-wide database of past coral bleaching events so scientists can understand their impacts and how to best protect the coral in the future.

  In 2005, Simon arrived in the atoll nation of Kiribati to survey its reefs—just as it was hit by its worst storm on record. With a maximum elevation of just three meters, or ten feet, Kiribati is naturally vulnerable to huge storm surges that regularly occur during El Niño events. This time, though, high winds and high tides, coming from
the worst possible direction, sent water pouring over the causeway that connects the islands. Water smashed through seawalls protecting landfills, flooded homes and the hospital, and sent pigs and other livestock squealing through the flooded streets. What struck him most, though, Simon told me, was not the storm. It was the way people reacted, stoically going out to help one another patch roofs and clean debris from the road, doing what was needed so life could go on.

  The day after the storm, his friend Taratau Kirata took Simon out to his family’s land. The storm had damaged the coral rock wall they’d built, broken the legs off their bwia, an open-air sitting and sleeping platform, and eroded away most of the sand beneath, leaving a pit full of washed-up branches. But Taratau wasn’t upset. He just said, “We need to build a new one.”

  “That’s the i-Kiribati people I’ve come to know,” Simon told me, “strong and resilient, but facing the fight of their lives. The pictures we see of coastal flooding are real, but they don’t tell the whole story because now they’ve got sea level rise and the impacts of a warming ocean added to the mix.” Simon still studies coral reefs—but since then, he’s also been working with local government and communities in Kiribati, to help them understand and prepare for the effects of climate change on their islands and peoples.