Katharine Hayhoe loves talking to her Uber drivers—it’s one way she practices finding common ground on climate change with just about anyone. A Texas Tech professor and accomplished atmospheric scientist, Hayhoe was the lead author on the last three National Climate Assessments and served as a reviewer on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But she’s perhaps best known as a science communicator who connects the dots between a warming world and how we live here and now. The science is not that complicated, she says—the fundamentals of how burning oil and gas warms the planet have been well understood since the 1850s. It’s our complicated and contradictory response to this existential threat that keeps her talking to anyone who will have a conversation. The day after accepting the United Nations’ Champions of the Earth award—the organization’s highest environmental honor—Hayhoe spoke with the Observer about how climate change is transforming Texas and what gives her hope.
Texas Observer: You’ve been doing this work for a long time. The science hasn’t changed. Has your message?
Katharine Hayhoe: When I first started to communicate, I committed the classic error that just about every scientist does. I thought I had to give people more facts on how we know the climate is changing, how we know it’s humans, and what the future scenarios tell us at the global scale, because that’s what’s important to us scientists. But we really don’t have a problem with the basic science. [Instead] we don’t think it matters to us. We think the impacts are distant, or only matter to future generations. And we don’t think there’s any constructive solutions.
