Research Comms Podcast: Interview with Katharine Hayhoe
“My mission is not to be liked. My mission is to communicate to people that climate change is real, it’s serious, and the window of time to fix it is closing fast.” Climate scientist, communicator and activist, Katharine Hayhoe, on the challenges of making people wake up to reality.
Writing in Time magazine about his friend Katharine Hayhoe, the actor Don Cheadle wrote, ‘There’s something fascinating about a smart person who defies stereotype.’ And defying stereotypes seems to come easily to this Evangelical Christian Canadian climate scientist who lives and works in the heart of American oil country. Prof Hayhoe has for years dedicated vast amounts of time and energy to trying to raise the alarm about the impending catastrophe of climate change.
In this episode of the Research Comms podcast Prof. Hayhoe talks about the best way to engage with sceptics, how her Christian faith is the driving force behind her care for the planet, and she addresses some of the most common mistakes we make when trying to communicate the dangers of climate change.
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The below excerpt is an abridged version of my interview with Katharine Hayhoe. For the full interview listen to the podcast.
How did your role as a science communicator start? Was there a moment of epiphany when you realised that merely gathering data on the effects of climate change wasn’t enough?
Yes, there were two moments of epiphany in my academic career. The first was when, in order to finish my undergraduate degree in astrophysics, I took a class in climate science to finish my degree, and that was when I realised that climate change is not just another environmental issue, it is the defining issue of our era. It affects air pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation. It affects humanitarian crises like poverty and hunger and disease. It affects political stability, the economy, our resources, pretty much it affects every aspect of human life on this planet. And I serendipitously had the exact skill set that you need to study the climate system because the climate models we use are primarily based on the same fundamental physics that we study in astrophysics, so after about a year of soul searching I switched fields.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
I decided I wanted to do policy relevant research, so I didn't just want to do research that would be published in scientific journals alone, I wanted to do research that would give people information that they needed to make good decisions for our future; information that could be used by policy makers, by business owners to figure out how to fix this. So I was already interested in doing relevant research that could be communicated to people who needed it to make decisions but then the second inflection point was when we moved to Texas.
Up until then all of the communication that I had done was either in a scientific forum, at a conference, or a meeting, or a workshop, or it was within a professional capacity, so to a city organization, a congressional representative who was interested and who wanted the technical information to help them make decisions. But then we moved to Texas and I was the first climate scientist at the university, I was probably the first climate scientist within 500 miles of that location. And there were a lot of people who weren't too sure about this whole climate change thing but they were curious, they wanted to know.
So, when word started to spread that there was a climate scientist at the university I don't think it was more than two months before I got my first invitation to speak to a woman's group about climate change and I firmly believe that climate change is something that we all care about if we're humans living on this planet, so I said sure I'd be happy to speak to the group and I went and I realised that here were people who most of us would have characterised as, you know, “There's those deniers over there, they'll never be on board with climate change, there's no point in engaging with them.” Most of the people in the room were not what you would call ‘deniers’ or what I would call today as ‘dismissives’, people who would dismiss every piece of information they're ever given. They were people who were curious, who didn't really know, who were doubtful, who had heard conflicting information, who had questions, who were willing to listen if we could have a civil, respectful and constructive conversation.
And so that was when the second lightbulb went off, that we can make a difference by having these conversations, that there are people even in the most conservative places in the United States who are willing and interested in having that conversation, and so that was the the moment that made me realise it really is important to talk about climate change, not just to do it, not just to study it but to talk about it too.
Has your approach ever put you at odds with fellow scientists who don’t think that scientists should be activists? Would you even call yourself an activist?
That's a good question, I'm not sure about that. I know people definitely have described me as that. I’m definitely somebody who advocates for climate action, so if that's your definition of activist I would say yes. But if your definition of activist is somebody who pickets with signs and chains themselves to fences, I don't do that. And it's really interesting because that relates to one of the biggest lessons and one of the most difficult decisions I had to make when I decided to engage in public outreach and communication on climate change.
I had to decide consciously that I was willing to be labeled and mislabeled and misrepresented if that was the price of effective public communication. Because these days whenever we stick our head out of the ivory tower, there are going to be people who do not like what we have to say, who view what we have to say as a threat, and so they will attack us with ad hominems.
They will say that we are stupid or arrogant or greedy or corrupt. They'll say negative things about every aspect of who you are and what you stand for . Somebody will say, “Oh, she's not a real Christian, she doesn't actually believe what she says,” and then somebody else is saying “Oh, she's one of those stupid Christians who believes the earth is six thousand years old, you can't trust the things she says.” So, unfortunately if our main concern is making sure that we are correctly represented we're going to be spending all our time basically whacking moles like that game at the fair where a mole pops up and you whack it with a hammer and then another one pops up and you whack it with a hammer.
The reality is, if we're going to be effective we have to let go of our rights to be correctly represented and that, as a scientist, is very painful because our most valuable thing is our scientific reputation. But unfortunately in the public sphere, if you don't like what somebody's saying the best approach often today is to attack who they are and what they stand for, and so being willing to say, “You know what, I recognize that people are going to say things about me that aren't true, I don't like it but I'm just going to put that to the wayside because my mission is not to be liked, my mission is to communicate to people that climate change is real, it is serious, and the window of time to fix it is closing fast.
Have you ever struggled to marry the different identities you have, for example as a scientist who is also an Evangelical Christian who is also a climate change activist.
Yes, for a long time my only public identity was that of a scientist and it wasn't until after I started being invited to speak to women's groups, book clubs, senior citizens homes that I realised that for effective communication just being a scientist wasn't enough. Because a lot of the people I was talking to were getting to the point where they were saying “Oh okay, well what she says makes sense but she's a scientist, she cares about it because she's a scientist. I'm not a scientist, so the reasons why she cares about it are not the reasons I would care about it.” And when that penny dropped, and it took a number of conversations and a lot of questions before the penny dropped, I realised I had to do more, I had to do what is most uncomfortable for us as scientists to do. I had to tell people who I am personally, what I care about, how I'm a mom, how I would do anything for my family, how I am a person of faith and that motivates a lot of what I do.
And the most fascinating thing was that when I started to actually share with people why I cared from my heart, not just because I'm a scientist but because I'm a person who lives in Texas, ‘so here's why climate change matters to Texas’; I'm a Canadian, ‘ so here's how climate change actually affects our country’; as a person of faith, as a parent, ‘here's why I care’. That's when I saw the faces open, instead of saying, “Okay what you said makes sense but I don't care because I'm a different person,” all of a sudden they're like, “Oh I’m a parent too. So you care about this, well okay, I care about it for the same reason.” And most of all what I was seeing was that people had been assuming I was the stereotypical liberal atheist scientist, and when I said to them, “I believe in God”, and “I believe that the Bible says we’re to love others, especially the poorest and most vulnerable among us, and that's why I care about the changing climate,” all of a sudden not just the faces but the hearts opened and all of a sudden they realised that because of who they were, they were the perfect person to care.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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