TOKENS PODCAST: S3E10
An interview with Katharine Hayhoe, one of the leading climate scientists in the United States, and author of a soon-to-be-released book entitled Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Katharine and Lee discuss the supposed dichotomy between evangelical Christianity and climate science; the truth about some common climate change myths; and how Katharine, as an evangelical Christian herself, receives hate mail and death threats on an almost daily basis, and yet sees Christians as the perfect people to care about stewarding their responsibility to look after creation.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Dr. Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University, where she is the director of the Climate Science Center. She is also the CEO of the consulting firm ATMOS Research and Consulting. In 2021, Hayhoe joined the Nature Conservancy as Chief Scientist for the organization. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto where she earned her Bachelors of Science in physics and astronomy. She continued her studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she received her masters degree in Atmospheric Science as well as her Ph.D. To date, my work has resulted in over 125 peer-reviewed papers, abstracts, and other publications and many key reports including the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Second National Climate Assessment; the U.S. National Academy of Science report, Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia; and the 2014 Third National Climate Assessment. On September 16, 2019 Hayhoe was named one of the United Nations Champions of the Earth in the science and innovation category.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Katharine: For the last decade climate change has been the number one most politically polarized issue in the United States.
Lee: That's Katharine Hayhoe, one of America's leading climate scientists, and, perhaps surprisingly, an evangelical Christian. Her challenge to the supposed dichotomy between evangelicalism and climate science makes her a provocative character.
Katharine: I get hate mail and attacks, and sometimes even threats on a daily basis. I get people who are Christians telling me that I'm not trustworthy or that I'm not really a Christian.
Lee: So here we are again today, breaking down a false dichotomy: The illegit mutually exclusive choice, between a so-called biblical faith and accepting the consensus of the findings from climate scientists.
Katharine: Christians have so much to contribute in terms of both having responsibility for God's creation and caring for the poorest and most vulnerable.
Lee: Our fascinating, and I would be so bold as to say even incredibly informative and smart interview with Katharine Hayhoe, coming right up.
Part 1
Lee: Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, where she directs the climate center, hosts the PBS digital series Global Weirding, and is writing a book now to be released in September of 2021, entitled Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.
Welcome Catherine.
Katharine: Thank you for having me.
Lee: Delight to have you with us.
So you're an evangelical Christian. And a climate scientist. So you believe in climate change?
Katharine: I do not.
And that's one of the most frequent questions I get. So I remember a few years ago we had some visitors at our church, my husband is the pastor of the church, and we went out for lunch with them afterwards. And I remember when the man found out what I did, he leaned across the table and said, do you believe in climate change?
And I said, no, and there was a, you know, puzzled silence afterwards. And he said, well, you know, why not? And I said, well, because as the Bible tells us in Hebrews, that faith is the evidence of what we do not see. It is what we hope for. Whereas science is exactly the opposite. Science is the evidence of what we do see here and now.
So I don't believe that climate is changing. I look at the data and there's 26 and a half thousand independent lines of evidence in God's creation, telling us that yes, the planet is warming. And ever since the 1800s, we scientists have been asking why, and we've been systematically crossing off all the natural suspects today.
It's not volcanoes. It's not natural cycles. It's not the sun. It really is us humans. So it's the sound mind that God gave us, and it's his creation that's telling us that, yes, this thing really is real.
Lee: Now I would imagine that you holding those two things so closely together, your ease with even quoting the Bible and theological constructs along with your learning and understanding and research about climate change. It has to create some troubles for you. Do you get critiqued a lot or do you receive a lot of difficult feedback from folks?
Katharine: I would say that I get hate mail and attacks, and sometimes even threats on a daily basis. Daily. I get everything from people who are Christians telling me that I'm not trustworthy or that I'm not really a Christian or that I'm Satan's handmaiden. I've heard that one a few times. And then of course I get people, you know, saying things that, you know, I'm not even going to say in public here with you, but this happens on a daily basis.
And I track who this comes from and it is absolutely just heartbreaking to realize that a lot of the attacks I get, which come via email, social media, other things like that. Almost half, not quite half of them come from people who explicitly identify as Christians. And I just feel like, have we missed where Jesus said in the gospels, by your love for others, you will be known. That is how people will recognize you as my disciples.
Lee: Yeah. So what do you think then has contributed? What are some of the sources of the contribution to the polarization in which so many Christians see climate change as a threat? Or the notion of what you're saying about climate changes with threat.
Katharine: For the last decade and more climate change has been the number one most politically polarized issue in the United States. It is also somewhat politically polarized in most other rich countries, but in poor countries, it is not politically polarized at all because they are living through the impacts here and today.
How did it become so polarized? Does a thermometer literally give you a different answer, depending on how you vote? Does the physics that we've understood since the 1850s, that explains how digging up and burning coal and gas and oil is producing carbon dioxide, which is a powerful heat trapping gas, which is wrapping an extra blanket around the planet that our planet doesn't need it and was not designed to have, does that physics somehow differ depending on where we fall politically? Of course not.
So, where does the political polarization come in? It comes in because this scientific knowledge that climate is changing. Yes, humans really are responsible today. We have checked. It's not like past changes. This is different. And the science also tells us the impacts are serious. Well, that demands a response. That demands, well, what should we do about it?
And unfortunately, the number one thing that we have to do is stop producing so much heat trapping, gases that are wrapping an extra blanket around our planet. 75% of those gases come from burning coal and gas and oil. And so a lot of very wealthy companies decided quite some decades ago, back in the 70s, that when their scientists told them what was happening, they said, you know, it's a lot more affordable for us to literally just invest in think tanks to sow denial. To get a lot of Christian organizations on our side which they did. And to say this isn't real, those liberal, atheist, godless, tree hugging, scientists are just trying to make this up to line their own pockets. You need to believe the people who are the captains of industry who say that everything's totally fine. Sure. 8 million people die every year from air pollution, from burning fossil fuels.
You heard that right. 8 million people. Yeah. And two and a half million so far when we're speaking today have died from COVID in the past year and a half. And don't get me wrong, one premature death is too many deaths. Each death, I believe grieves God's heart and should grieve our hearts too, as God's children. But somehow. We've completely missed the conversation on 8 million people dying from air pollution from fossil fuels every year.
And in the United States, the Christian Church has been co-opted into a right-wing political ideology, which Billy Graham warned about decades ago. He said any Alliance with the far right wing is to the detriment of the church because they don't share your values. They don't share your faith. They just want to use you.
Yet somehow we've become aligned as Christians, which is one side of the political spectrum to the point where many of us in the United States. And again, this is really unique to Christians in the U.S. and it happens to Protestants and happens to Catholics. Both of us, we are writing our statement of faith with our political ideology rather than the Bible. And when the two come into conflict, we are going with our political ideology. We are going with the world, over God's word.
Lee: So I want to ask you something kind of to reflect on something from a personal perspective for a moment. So you're receiving even daily critiques and you're grappling with this reality, that, for decades now. The church in America, or at least a large part of the evangelical and or Catholic Protestant churches have been co-opted by these powers that be.
How do you process both that sort of critique and these sorts of social, political realities personally? That's a lot of weight to be carrying. It's not just the weight about the prospect of the damage of climate change. It's the weight about socio-political realities that I would imagine has to feel heavy on you sometimes.
Katharine: It definitely does.
The way I address it when speaking with people is I think of the verse in the book of James, where it says, you're like the man who looked at yourself in the mirror and then went away and forgot what you look like. So with other Christians, I'm not out to change people's politics or their ideology or how they vote or anything like that.
I just want to hold up a mirror and say we are children of God. And as children of God in Genesis 1, it tells us we have a responsibility for every living thing on this planet, which includes our brothers and sisters as well. Throughout the Bible, especially the old Testament talks about God's love and care for what might seemingly be the most smallest and insignificant aspects of his creation.
Throughout the New Testament. It speaks eloquently about care for the widows, the orphans, the poor, those who are most affected by the impacts of a changing climate. Those are the ones who we're to care for and to be recognized by our love for. And then at the very end of the Bible in revelation that literally says, God will destroy those who destroy the earth. So I very much see myself as holding up a mirror, reminding people of who we really are.
And some people will refuse to look in that mirror. They will turn away and continue to gaze into the political ideology that has captured so many of us like the false idols, the golden calves of Moses's time.
But for many of us, we have a new heart. We have already been transformed by God.
We are renewing our mindset so to speak. We have new hardware, but we're renewing our software. Our mindsets are continually renewed as Christians and will never be fully renewed. I believe till we reach heaven.
For those of us who have the Holy spirit living in us, as we believe who have that new heart who have been created by God as someone to love others.
When we hold up that mirror, we see ourselves again. And so for some of us, it might affect, you know, what we say, it might affect how we vote. It might affect what church we go to, but it doesn't have to. What it does lead us to is true repentance, which in the Bible, interestingly, repentance is typically used in the New Testament as coming to faith.
So repenting of our sins and accepting Christ. And what that means is turning. So you were on this pathway and you decide to turn to a different pathway. So repenting is not necessarily the sackcloth and ashes of the Old Testament. It's more just saying. Hey, I was on the wrong pathway here, and I'm going to turn, I'm going to go on the right pathway.
And that means that I'm not going to pretend that God's creation and scientists who are Christians are lying to us. I'm going to say it's real. And I'm going to also start asking people in my church, in the place where I work, maybe the school I attend, as well as our elected leaders in our city and our school board and our state and the country.
I'm going to start asking them, hey, you know, as a Christian, this is what I care about. This is what I see happening. What could you do to help fix it in a way that's consistent with our values?
And let me just give you one concrete example. A couple of years ago, I was invited to speak at a Christian college. And there was significant pushback before I arrived saying you know, you're going to bring this woman on campus to tell us we need to fix climate change? We all know she's going to say the only solution is abortion. And I was horrified when I heard that. We all know the only solution is abortion. So she's, so why are you even having your come?
And, and first of all, I would say that the whole idea of population control is one: it is imposed on poor women in poor countries where high birth rates is simply a symptom of grinding poverty and lack of access to basic healthcare, such that if you want to have two or three surviving children, you have to have 10.
I mean, no woman wants that. And so lifting women out of poverty, educating them and empowering them is the number one most effective thing to allow the birth rate to drop naturally as it has as countries develop. But second of all, here's what I thought. I thought, you know what climate change is, the ultimate pro-life issue. Isn't it? Because it affects the extraction of fossil fuels. The processing of fossil fuels, the combustion of fossil fuels, the air pollution from fossil fuels and the climate change from fossil fuels. All of those five things disproportionately affect women and children. So I decided I was going to give a whole talk on how climate change was the ultimate pro-life issue.
Of course, like we mentioned before, 8 million people die from air pollution every year. And if we care about the unborn, if we care about children, if we care about maternal health, if we care about life, not just from conception to birth as unfortunately is the reputation of many pro-life advocates. But if we truly, as Christians care about life from conception to death, we'd be out at the front of the line demanding climate action because it is who we are and it is who God has made us.
Lee: Yeah. And this has been one of the ways in which you've tried to cross this supposed dichotomy between evangelicals and embrace the climate science, right? That you appeal to people's values, rather than trying to argue them to see the facts that you want them to see. You appeal to their values, and then that gets them to move perhaps on the path you desire?
Katharine: Well, exactly because so often we feel, no matter what we think about climate change, we feel that to care about it we have to be a certain type of person. And in the States, that person would be a Democrat, a liberal. Somebody who probably lives on the coast, not in the middle of the country.
And so there's this whole perception that you can only care about climate change, if you're a certain type of person. And so what I want to say is no. I say, you know, why are we letting only part of the discussion be dominated by people talking about solutions when Christians have so much to contribute. In terms of both having responsibility for God's creation and caring for the poorest and most vulnerable.
So who we are again, is already the perfect person to care. And if we don't realize that, or if whoever we're talking to doesn't realize it. We don't have to change who they are. All we have to do is show how they're already the perfect person to care.
They already have every single reason, every single value to care. And in fact, repenting. And I use that word again, just in the sense of changing our mind, turning our pathway, agreeing with what God's creation is telling us and saying, how can I love people? How is this an opportunity to show love that makes us an even more genuine expression of who God has already created us to be?
Lee: So now climate science often gets framed in some high profile political speech as an alternative religion. What do you think is going on with that sort of rhetoric?
Katharine: Oh, it does. And when we say high profile political speech, I want to be very clear. It is coming from right-wing politicians. It is coming from Ted Cruz who says, you know, climate change is a religion, not a science. It comes from Lindsey Graham who says the problem is Al Gore was the one who turned this into a religion.
And then if you go to the internet, you can of course see mashups and memes of Al Gore preaching in the church of climatology. So, and I've even seen church signs saying, you know, we worship father God, not mother earth. And what this is, I'm going to be totally honest. This is very, very clever messaging that is designed to manipulate us.
That's what it's designed to do because as Christians, we know that we're constantly warned against false prophets. We are told in the Bible to be aware of the wolves, dresses, sheep, and to be aware of false prophets. So if people say, okay, here's all these Christians that are a really important part of my voting block. I don't want them to listen to what those scientists are saying, even though, you know, 50% of us scientists in the United States actually call ourselves religious people. We ascribed to a specific religious tradition. Most of us, Christian, 50%, 70% of scientists in the U.S. are spiritual people.
And that they believe there's more to life than what science tells us. But if people want to say, oh, don't listen to those scientists. What is the most effective way to tell Christians not to listen to scientists who study God's second book as I think about it, nature. Tell them that the scientists are godless liberal atheists who are trying to set up a false church.
And that automatically most Christians will be like, oh, I want nothing to do with that.
Lee: Right, right.
Katharine: So, that's where that comes from, but let's just backtrack again. What's the reality? The reality is Genesis 1:1 tells us to radah creation. And that Hebrew word radah, and I'm no linguist. So I apologize for my mispronunciation. But that Hebrew word radah is used elsewhere.
And we can actually look at what that means contextually. So rather than interpreting it as domination and extraction of all resources, until God will push the button and inject us all from this planet, leaving the smoking ruin. When we see radah used elsewhere in the Bible, it's in the sense of caring for the needy, protecting the helpless, being a protector or a guard or keeping.
And then of course, in chapter two of Genesis, there's Abad and Shamar, which are more along the lines of caretaking or stewarding or even gardening, it's been interpreted as. So somehow we've been sold a bill of goods that caring about this incredible planet that God gifted to us, because we know the physical matters to God.
I mean, you know, John's letters were actually written to combat Gnostic heresy and somehow the physical didn't matter. So, somehow the idea that this incredible planet that God handcrafted for life and gave to us and gave us responsibility over in Genesis 1:1. Somehow caring about that is non-Christian, we've been somehow convinced?
I feel like we haven't just been manipulated in many cases, we've been brainwashed to forget what the Bible says.
Lee: Yeah. Now this is personal for you as well, right?
Because you had to convince your husband of this.
Katharine: I, yes I and here's the thing. And so if anybody's listening to this and they're not on board or they're feeling like maybe they could be on board, but what I'm saying contrasts with what you've heard before, you got to understand, climate change is one of these issues where, how many people really understand STEM cell technology and COVID vaccines and genetic modification of crops and climate change. So these things are complicated things. And what all of us do, every single one of us, we all do this.
We are cognitive misers, which means we don't even literally have enough brain cells to be totally up to date on every issue that's being discussed in the world today. So what we do, and again, we all do this is we look for people whose opinion that we trust, who we feel like have the resources, or have done a bit more research or have had the time to look into things.
And we say, well, what do they think about something? And you know, it sounds fine. And it fits with our values. So we adopt their opinion.
So when people we trust are telling us that this isn't real and it's not serious and we don't have to act and they're telling us, oh, poor people in Africa need fossil fuels. That would be cruel to deny them that, let alone saying to people who don't have any access to oil and gas, you have to buy it from us. That's the opposite of moral in my opinion. Not to mention that, you know, today 90% of clean energy installed around the world last year during COVID was clean energy, 90%.
So, you know, we don't use horses and buggies anymore. We don't use party line telephones anymore. And in new places around the world, installing energy, they're not using fossil fuels, but let's just leave that to the side.
We're hearing all of this from people we trust. That's why we believe this. And that's the situation my husband was in. He's not a scientist. He just listened to people he trusted and they told him it wasn't real. But when he started looking at the data with me we started doing it together because I had never met anybody who didn't think it was real coming from Canada. This is a very, very American phenomenon I have to say. I mean, the World Evangelical Alliance takes climate change so seriously, and they represent 600 million evangelicals around the world. They take it so seriously that Bishop Efraim Tendero, who was their secretary general up until this past year, he was a representative from the Philippines, from his country to the Paris climate conference.
That's how seriously they take it.
Lee: That's remarkable.
Katharine: Yes, so when my husband started looking at the data and at the Bible and we were doing this together, he kind of got to the point where he said, okay, so either NASA who put men on the moon are involved in a centuries long coverup dating back to the 1800s fabricating and faking data.
Or maybe NASA's right. And at that point he should have applied Ockham's razor, which is the most likely scenario.
Lee: Well, you know, they didn't really put people on the moon.
Katharine: Yeah, and unfortunately, I'm glad you brought that up. There is a very strong link between people who believe that we didn't put anybody on the moon. People who believe in all kinds of chemtrail conspiracies about people spraying stuff in the atmosphere, affecting our brains, who believe in the QAnon conspiracy theory and who deny climate change.
There is a direct link between conspiratorial thinking.
Lee: Yeah. So looking at this from a Canadian perspective and seeing that there is, there seems to be something different about the ways in which evangelicals have been, to use your language, used or co-opted by the powers that be around this issue. Are there other sorts of things that you would note that seemed to be fueling this sort of willingness to be co-opted or this ability to be co-opted in American evangelicalism in contrast to evangelicalism of other places in the world?
Katharine: Yes. I would say that there definitely is. And this has started back at the American Revolution. There's two really interesting books that I recommend reading as a pair: one of them is by a Christian author and one of them is by a non-Christian author and they talk about the same things.
And I think it's absolutely fascinating to see the two sides of the coin at the same time. And they're both quite fair. But they both present things from their own perspective. So the first one is the classic, the The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by historian Mark Noll, who of course is an evangelical. And if anything, I have to be honest, he's a lot more harsh on us evangelicals than the non-Christian author is. Which I think is appropriate because, you know, he's inside the fold, so to speak.
And if we can't call each other out, you know, it talks a little bit about this with lawsuits in the New Testaments. Like if you can't judge yourselves, you know, you shouldn't need an external judge. Then the other one is, by Frances FitzGerald. And this one is called The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. And both of these books really show how religion and politics began to co-mingle in the United States, you know, back over 200 years ago. And they continued to co-mingle though that accelerated rapidly in the 1980s, with the moral majority. When it was actually starting to be done deliberately they continued to co-mingle. So this is not something that's happened last year. It didn't happen 10 years ago.
It didn't even happen 40 years ago. This has been happening for a very long time, but it's just been getting stronger and stronger over time. And in fact, in Mark Nolls book, he actually shows how fear of the communism and the godlessness that was sweeping Europe in the early 1900s. That was actually the fear that drove the former secretary of state to participate in The Scopes Trial.
So even though it was officially on the surface about religion and belief, in fact, one of Darwin's greatest champions in the United States was a pretty theologically conservative minister. And The Scopes Trial was very much motivated by trying to push back against the godless ideology, which, you know, I would certainly agree with pushing back against godless ideology, but they were doing so by trying to push back specifically to science and that has really sort of haunted the relationship between science and faith since that date.
Lee: Yeah. We're particularly mindful of the scopes trial here in Tennessee, obviously since it was birthed out of our hills there in East Tennessee. And just as a quick note on William Jennings Bryan that you noted there. Another thing that I've found fascinating about the irony that I did not know until recently, but that Bryan had this concern about the etiology of survival of the fittest, right? So he didn't want to see the sociological implications of survival of the fittest. And so he was one of the most left-leaning candidates for president of the United States ever. And so he was deeply concerned about the economic impact of a lot of Cy-Fair capitalism, because he thought it would run over the poor. And he thought that that was an economic manifestation of survival of the fittest. And he was very concerned about the militarism that he was seeing in Germany with World War I and so forth. And he saw, well, that's survival of the fittest writ large and militarism. And so he was very concerned about the ideological implications of survival, of the fittest, which seemed to drive him in The Scopes Trial, which is a fascinating irony when you think about where American evangelicalism has gone since then.
Katharine: Oh, my goodness. I'm so glad that you brought that up because you're totally right. So as Christians, we would agree with him that marginalizing the poorest and most vulnerable is not who we are. It's not what we believe, but today, fast forward, here. I am living in Texas. Well, Texas has a deregulated grid, which encourages private industry. It's very much laissez-faire, economics. In fact they’re sort of the poster child of that. And it certainly has led to prosperity for the state. It certainly has led to jobs and energy and things like that. But when the system fails, because there's no incentive and no mandate for private producers to install the winterization equipment or to prepare for the weather extremes we've seen in the past, which we have.
So when there's just laissez-faire, oh, do what you will. When that system fails, who suffers? It's the poorest and most vulnerable people. Those are the very ones who suffer. So ironically, what he most feared has come true today.
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
If you've not yet done so, please subscribe today to the Tokens Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And if you've got feedback, remember you can email us at podcast@tokensshow.com. Also remember you can sign up for our email list, or find out how to join us for a live event, all at tokensshow.com.
This is our interview with Professor Katharine Hayhoe, renowned climate scientist and author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.
Coming up, we'll hear more from Katharine about the impacts of climate change on everyday life, politics, and justice; we'll do some debunking of common climate myths; and we'll encounter some signs of hope.
Part two in just a moment.
Part 2
Lee: You're listening to Tokens and our interview with Katharine Hayhoe.
This perhaps was in the video I watched with you with president Obama, but you use a bucket metaphor to talk about. We have all this desire to serve the poor, but the uselessness of it in large regard, because of what we're ignoring, could you share that metaphor with us?
Katharine: Yes, absolutely. So let me start by putting it a different way. We often think of climate change as if we acknowledge it's real and important. We think of it as being at number 18 or 25 or 52 on our priority list. And then along comes the climate scientist with, you know, some cheerleading to try to push that higher up my priority list, but, you know, hey, I'm worried about my kids. I'm worried about my job. I'm worried about surviving COVID. I'm worried about all these things. And here, these people are trying to tell me, hear about climate change and I'm just like, look people, I got bigger problems. Come back later. Well, I'm a climate scientist. And as a climate scientist, I don't think climate change should be on our priority list at all.
Not at all. In fact, it's not on my priority list. Why? Because it affects everything else at the very top of my priority list. So climate change affects the future of my child. It affects the health of our community. It affects the poorest and most vulnerable people who, and, you know, growing up as a missionary kid in South America, I just saw what that looked like firsthand. Climate change affects the economy, national security. It affects the air we breathe, the water we drink, food we eat. I mean, climate change affects every aspect of life on our planet. So to care about climate change, we only have to be human. And if we're a Christian, how much more so? So that's one way to think about it is that climate change isn't on our list. It just affects everything at the top of our list. And that's why we already care, even if we don't know it. But then the other way I think about it is this: it's that we have all of these issues that we're trying to fix that are wrong with the world. There's poverty. There's hunger where people literally can't feed their children.
There are, like I said, in poor and developing countries, there's women who have seen child after child die because of lack of access to basic healthcare, clean water. And disease. We're trying to fix these issues and I'm a huge supporter of programs like World Vision and Compassion International and Tearfund and organizations like that. But they've realized, they get this. They understand that it's like a bucket with a hole in the bottom. So you're pouring all the resources you have. You're pouring your time, your energy, your money. Everything we have, we're pouring into a bucket to try to fix poverty, to try to fix lack of access to resources, disease, refugee crises.
Climate changes the hole in the bucket and climate change is getting bigger and bigger over time. So there's no way we can fill the bucket if we don't fix the hole. And that's why we care about climate change.
Lee: Yeah, that's a terribly helpful metaphor. This is one of the reasons, I suppose, that you've referred to climate change as a threat multiplier.
Katharine: It was actually a term that was coined by the military. So I think it's a very effective term to use because they understand threats. So they think of climate change as a threat multiplier. And that you often have a situation where people are already poor or they're already in an unstable political situation, like a failing state, they already have resource scarcity.
They already have many of the different issues that lead to crises. And then along comes climate change on the top. It's like the final straw on the camel's back. You know, the camel was already overloaded in many places, its legs were already starting to buckle. And then you just put one extra bale of straw on the top and that's enough to kind of precipitate a crisis.
Lee: Let's move to um, maybe a rapid question round with facts about climate change. I think anyone who is an academic would know this first one is silly, but…
Katharine: Oh, no, there's no bad question.
Lee: One of these myths that's commonly propagated is: climate scientists are just in it for the money.
Katharine: Oh, yes. That’s one of my favorite myths. It's like, oh, so the oil executives with the seven figure salaries there, they're not in it for the money. But the climate scientists who make a quarter of what business professors make at the same university, somehow those people are in it for the money. Yes. So, I actually have a little series on YouTube called Global Weirding.
And one of my favorite episodes is called “Aren't you scientists just in it for the money?” And in that episode, I actually break down what happens if you get a million dollar grant. And you'll be shocked, absolutely shocked, to hear the number that I end up with at the end. I'm not going to tell you what it is.
Lee: Probably just about nothing. Yeah.
Katharine: Yeah, pretty, pretty much. Yes. So go watch that video if you want to actually understand where the money we get for scientific research goes.
Lee: Uh, here's another myth. The climate has changed before. It's just a natural cycle.
Katharine: That's probably the most common science-y sounding myth that there is. But unfortunately when people say that they don't know what natural cycles are. And natural cycles are kind of like a teeter-totter or a Seesaw. They move heat around the climate system from East to West or North to South or ocean to atmosphere and back again.
So if one part of the world is getting warmer as it did during the medieval warm period that we talk about so often when the North Atlantic in Western Europe was warmer than average. So that was a natural cycle. But at the exact same time, if you lived in Siberia, it was the medieval cold period in Siberia because all of that natural cycle was doing was moving heat around the Euro system from East to West today.
The entire planet is warming. North, South, East, West, ocean atmosphere. Land surface ice is melting. The whole thing is warming and that's how we know it isn't a natural cycle.
Lee: Another one, climate scientists are split on whether it's real.
Katharine: Oh, that's a big one. And that's because there are, and I say this literally, I can count them on my fingers. There are five scientists in the United States who have the appropriate credentials and research experience to be called climate scientists accurately. And they for various ideological reasons.
And I know this because I buy their books and I read them. I want to know why they're saying this. So, because they are adherence to free market ideology, because they're adherence to laissez-faire economics, because they are libertarians, because of some political reason, they've decided to reject the evidence of their eyes. And as a result, they share information publicly, which they don't share with scientists because they know they'd be called on it.
They share information publicly as five scientists. Saying it isn't real, or it's not a big deal. And their story changes depending on, you know, what day it is and who they're talking to. But here's the reality. The reality is we have thousands of scientists going back to the 1850s who have very carefully checked the data again and again, and concluded that climate is changing. Humans are responsible, the impacts are serious. And we do know that we have to act now and our certainty on that now that humans are causing this is 99.99%. That's how certain we are. So just think about this. If an aircraft engineer said I'm 99.99% sure that this plane is going to crash. And he said, I've got 99% of other aeronautics engineers with me saying that it's going to crash. And then you've got one person, one other aeronautics engineer saying no, but not at all. Those people are alarmist chicken littles. They are just in it to line their pockets. Don't listen to them. Most of us would listen to who?
Lee: The 99.99%.
Katharine: Right? Most of us.
Lee: What about climate change? Won't affect me.
Katharine: Ooh, you know what?
That's actually our biggest problem, because when you ask people across the U.S. is climate changing? Over 70% of people say yes. When you say, do you think it will affect plants and animals and people in the future? About 70% of people say, yes. Will it affect people in developing countries? About 65% say yes. So we think it will affect people, in the future not now, people who live far away from us, plants and animals. And then you say, do you think it will affect you personally? All of a sudden the number drops to 40%. We don't think it matters to us. Why? Because one of the biggest reasons is whenever you read a story about it, what's the number one picture they put on the front? A polar bear or melting ice.
And most of us don't live somewhere where we see polar bears running around the streets. I have been to where they do, but you have to go really far North to see that. So climate change, the better way to think about it is that it's loading the weather dice against us.
So wherever we live, we always have a chance of rolling a double six naturally. You know, that's just the way God set up the world. There's hurricanes and heat waves. There's droughts and floods, bad shit happens. But what happens as the world warms is it's like climate change is sneaking in and taking one of those numbers on our dice and changing it into a six, and another six. So then you're living in Houston, Texas, and you're like we just had three 500 year floods in three years.
How could that be happening? Or you live in California and you're like, we just saw more area burned by wildfire in one year than we have seen burned in decades. And in fact, since they started keeping records in the 1930s of area burned by wildfire in California, a third of the area burnt happened last year alone.
Lee: Oh my goodness since 1930?
Katharine: Since the 1930s, yes.
Lee: Oh my goodness
Katharine: A third of the area was burned last year. And as of 2015, climate change had already doubled the area burned by wildfires. Hurricane Harvey. It's estimated that 40% of the rain that fell during hurricane Harvey was because of a warmer world, powering a stronger storm with more water vapor in the atmosphere for that storm to sweep up and dump on us.
So the Galveston hurricane hit the same area back in 1900 and it was devastating. So it isn't that a direct hit on Houston is at all unusual. It sadly happens all too frequently. But a hurricane that big, that slow with over 50 inches of rain in some parts of the county, that is how climate change is loading the dice against us. And that's why I really feel like global weirding is the way to think about this. It is just getting weirder. In fact, I was standing in line to pick up my son from Sunday school a couple of years ago. And the man in front of me was turned around just to make conversation. He said, do you think the weather's getting weirder?
And I said, actually I do. I've studied data.
Lee: Little did he know who he was talking to.
Katharine: I, I think he kind of did.
Lee: Yeah.
Katharine: But I keep it short. I mean, we're just standing in line. So I didn't say, I believe it is. I said, I have looked at the data and it is. We see that our weather is getting weirder. Our heat waves are getting more extreme, our droughts are getting longer and our heavy rainfall is more frequent, our hurricanes are bigger. Our wildfires are burning greater area, you know. I said, yes, it is. And he said, I knew it. He said, I've lived here for 30 years and I can tell it is just getting weirder.
Lee: Next one. It's cold outside, global warming Can't be real.
Katharine: Oh yes!
Lee: And you, and you're just coming off one of the great polar vortex storms yourself there in Texas. Right? So it's cold outside. How can this stuff be real?
Katharine: Absolutely. As Stephen Colbert said: “I just ate. So world hunger must be over.”
Lee: Well said. Yes.
Katharine: Yes. So we humans are really good at remembering weather. We all remember some crazy weather that we've lived through. But climate is the long-term average of weather over at least 20 to 30 years. So in order to actually be able to track climate and see if it's changing, we'd have to add up the temperature in every single day for at least 20 to 30 years in our heads and fit a trend line to it.
And I don't know about you, but I can't do that. And I'm a scientist. So climate is this completely non-intuitive thing to us as humans. It's sort of like the forest and whether it's a single tree, we remember a couple of trees as we take a walk through beautiful forest, but we don't remember the whole forest. We're just, our brains aren't built that way.
So that's why we often think, oh, it's cold outside. Where's global warming now?
And the reality is we still have Winter, Summer, Spring and Fall because those are caused by the tilt of the earth's axis of rotation compared to the plane of the orbit around the sun, 23 and a half degrees.
We learned about that in grade school. We still have seasons and we still have cold weather outbreaks because in fact, in Texas, we had an outbreak like this in 2011, we had another one in 1989 and people just didn't prepare. They didn't take the message to heart of how our power grid broke down and how people suffered as a result.
So we still see Winter. We still see cold, but at the same time, the entire planet is warming steadily decade by decade, over climate timescales.
Lee: When you think about the path we've trod, the continued unwillingness on the part of many to address the seriousness of what is in front of us. If we do not continue to take very serious action, what kind of world could we anticipate in a decade, two decades, 50 years?
Katharine: Yes. Well, first of all, I want to emphasize that we're starting to move in the right direction already. We often picture climate change as this giant boulder sitting at the bottom of the hill with only a few hands on it, trying to roll it up, this impossibly steep cliff. But in reality, the boulder is already at the top of the hill.
It's already starting to roll downhill and it has millions of hands on it. Many of those believers. But it's just not happening fast enough. If we were back in like Jimmy Carter days and the 1970s and climate had changed that amount back then, we had that much heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, and we saw the progress we see today. I think we'd be in much better shape.
But unfortunately we did not heed the warnings back then in the oil crisis, we continued our dependence and frankly, our addiction to fossil fuels. Kind of like smoking almost. And it's not a case of God judging us. It's just a case of God's set up the world to work a certain way.
And if you put too many heat trapping gases into the atmosphere, more than he designed the planet is going to warm up. But we're already starting to move in the right direction. I mentioned that 90% of new energy installed around the world last year was clean energy. Here in Texas, we already get 23% of our energy from wind and solar is rising quickly. The blackouts we experienced recently were. Over 87% was due to failures in natural gas and nuclear power facilities, less than 13% were due to freezing ice turbines. And anyway, turbines operated in Antarctica. It's just that in Texas they didn't buy the winterization equipment to make sure they didn't freeze.
So that's another kind of the laissez-faire economics problem right there. You know, the Texas wind producers went to the company and the company said, do you want the winterization package? And the Texas wind producers said, ah, no, thank you. So change is happening, but it has to happen faster. Why?
Because if it doesn't, we're going to pay. The impacts of climate change. If we do not act, if we continue to depend on fossil fuels and to be wasteful with our energy, to cut down forests, to engage in large scale industrial agriculture, which also contributes, that's 14% of the problem. If we do that, the cumulative cost of climate impacts on the world's economy by the end of the century will be a quadrillion dollars, which is equivalent by the end of the century, to having a COVID magnitude economic recession every year.
Lee: That's astonishing and hard to get one's head around.
Katharine: It is very hard. That's why I put it in terms of COVID because we know what that looks like. And let me just emphasize, those are just the cold, hard economic facts. Who is going to be most affected? People who live below the poverty line. COVID has actually pushed billions more people below the poverty line and climate change is doing it too.
And so really it's not just a head issue. It's not a balance sheet issue. It's not just a cold calculation, the profits and losses. It's the fact that climate change has already increased the economic gap between the richest and poorest countries since the 1960s by 25%.
Lee: So talk to us a little bit in closing about practices and hopes. I would imagine some are listening to this cheering you on and others are listening saying, haven't thought about this at all. But what sorts of practical, concrete advice might you give to people who are listening and saying, okay, well, tell me what to do. Or a college student who's listening to this and they say, I care about making a difference in the world. Tell me some things to consider.
Katharine: Absolutely. Well, let me pick up on your first word first, if you don't mind. And that's the word hope, which I think is so important. Because to me studying what's happening to our world, studying God's creation, it's really hard to see hope when you see air being polluted, and water being polluted, and ecosystems being destroyed, and climate change ticking up faster and faster, and ice sheets melting, and sea level rising, flooding people, and crop losses happening, and disasters multiplying.
You sort of feel a little bit more like Jeremiah, so to speak. Then you do have a messenger for hope. But at the same time, I believe that as Christians and Paul actually says this explicitly to Timothy, he says, God has not given you a spirit of fear. so often the dialogue around climate change revolves around fear.
On the one side, we have people painting apocalyptic visions of the future if we don't act. And on the other side, we have people painting apocalyptic visions of the future if we do act. It will destroy the economy, it will put the United Nations in charge of the world. Maybe the antichrist is behind all of this. It will take away our God given personal liberties. And so we see fear being used consistently in both directions. And as Christians, I believe we are not called to either of those extremes. Paul goes on to say three very important things. He says you have been given a spirit of first of all, power. And that's sort of an old fashioned word, but let's think about it this way. Power means you're able to act. Empowered means you're able to act. It's the opposite of being paralyzed by fear. You're empowered to act. So rather than being paralyzed, rather than being caught in inaction, we have the ability to act.
Then number two is we have a spirit of love, which means we can have compassion. We can care for others. We can consider others' needs besides just our own. And then the last one is a scientist is probably my favorite. God has given us a sound mind to make good decisions that are based on what his creation is telling us.
Katharine: And there's a cartoon that shows a U.S. evangelical getting to heaven and saying to God, okay, fine. So this climate change thing was really real and it was bad. Why didn't you tell us God? And God says, I sent you the scientists.
So, hope is essential to who we are and hope does not come from good circumstances. So the apostle Paul talked about hope and he did not have a cush life. He did not have pleasant circumstances.
He was beaten, he was jailed. He was shipwrecked. He was abandoned. He was betrayed. And so when he's writing to the Romans he says hope begins with suffering.
And we're certainly suffering now. In fact one of my respected colleagues, John Holdren, who served as the president's science advisor for many years, he said with climate change, we have three choices. We cut our heat, trapping gas emissions. We prepare and brace ourselves for the impacts or we suffer.
And we're going to do some of each. The question is just how much cause the faster we cut our emissions, the less adaptations required and the less suffering there will be. So Paul says hope begins with suffering, suffering leads to perseverance, perseverance leads to character, character leads to hope, and that hope will not disappoint because ultimately it's placed in God's hands.
It's placed in God. So as Christians, we're not called to save the world. We are called to walk in the good works that God has prepared for us in advance. And each of our good works looks different. We’re each part of the body. One person's a finger, another person's a kidney. Another person might be an ear, you know. So our good works look different.
And so I would love to, and I'm sure you would love to, if I could give you almost like a 10 new green commandments, if thou shall just do all of this thou shall be righteous and then own eyes, but that's not what we believe. We believe God already made us righteous, not through any actions of our own.
And we believe that God created us as individual unique manifestations of his heart in this world to be salt and light. I know this was a bit of a long preamble, but when you say, what should I do? I don't want to jump immediately to specific actions because it depends on who you are.
Lee: Yeah, well said.
Katharine: It depends on where God has planted you. Are you embedded in a family? Are you embedded in a school or a university or a seminary? Are you part of a church? A parachurch organization? A place of work? Are you able to engage with people at the level of your city? Using our voice to advocate for change, which is actually what my Ted Talk is about, using your voice, is I think the most powerful thing that we can do. And how do we do that? We have to talk about two important things. Number one, we have to talk about why this matters to us. Where we live and in terms of our values. So how does it matter to us? Not in terms of doom and gloom, apocalyptic scenarios, and not in terms of the polar bears, unless the polar bears do matter to you. I actually do care about polar bears, but that's not necessarily the reason why everybody does.
So talk about why it matters to you. And in my Ted Talk, I have lots of examples on talking about, you know, how I've connected with people over being a Rotarian, or over knitting, or cooking, or being a parent, or a mom, or a missionary kid, or whatever.
And then we absolutely have to, and this is where the hope comes in. We have to talk about positive constructive solutions that people are engaging in. Everything from individual solutions, like reducing our food waste, which actually has a pretty big impact as an individual. Looking at getting our energy from clean sources. Talking to our business or place of work about how they get their energy and about if they could be more efficient. Getting an organization to do an energy audit so we can be good stewards of our resources and save money and reduce our heat trapping gas emissions. Talk to people about what we're teaching our kids in our school and our Sunday school classes from a Christian perspective. For sure. Let's teach them about God's creation and about caring for the poor. Follow organizations on social media like Tearfund like, A Rocha International. They have a big presence actually in the U.S. and in Nashville. Sign up for climate caretakers, an online Christian community that sends you an email every month, telling you something to pray about in community, which is something we Christians do. Follow the evangelical environmental network. If you're under the age of 30, sign up to be a young evangelical. For climate action, there's over 20,000 of them around the country. So use our voice to engage in the body of Christ, such that we may be recognized as Jesus's disciples by our love for others.
That really is our goal.
Lee: Well, it's been a beautiful conversation with you, Katharine. We've been talking to Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, where she directs the climate center and is writing a new book entitled Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.
Thanks so much for your time today.
Katharine: Thank you so much for having me.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life, and our interview with climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.
Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and refer us to a fellow podcast listener. Got feedback? We'd love to hear from you. Email us text or attach a voice memo, and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, and Tom Anderson. Engineer Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
You're currently listening to a performance by our friend Odessa Settles, taped actually in Katharine Hayhoe's hometown, Lubbock, Texas, during a live show we did there in the Lone Star State. Wasn't That A Mighty Storm was a famed ballad about the horrific Galveston Hurricane of 1900 which Katharine mentioned in our interview. Our band for that Lubbock show comprised Jeff Taylor, Chris Brown, Scott Mulvahill, Jake Workman, Tyler Summers, and Stuart Duncan, with Jenny Littleton and yours truly on vocals with Odessa.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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