A believer among skeptics
Canadian scientist aims to sway fellow evangelicals in U.S. on climate
WASHINGTON — Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a cheerful, Toronto-born evangelical Christian, has become the hottest ticket in the highly polarized U.S. debate over climate change.
Named in 2014 by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in America, she is sought out by Hollywood stars, applauded by environmentalists and fellow scientists, and a huge draw on the Christian speaking circuit because she has opened the door, if only a crack, to the largest and single most stubborn community of climate skeptics in America — evangelicals.
She has essentially become a missionary among her own people. And in doing so she has single-handedly raised hopes of a potential breakthrough in U.S. climate politics. The reasoning is simple. If you can convince evangelicals of the reality of man-made climate change, the rest of the country will follow.
“It definitely was not something that I ever set out to do,” she says, laughing.
Hayhoe, 43, grew up in Toronto. Her father is an evangelical pastor, missionary and science teacher, as is her mother. She studied science at the University of Toronto.
Until she moved to the U.S. to continue her studies at the University of Illinois, she said, “I never met anybody who didn’t think climate change was real.”
Then she married Andrew Farley, a PhD in linguistics, who grew up in a household of evangelical Baptists in Virginia where he attended Christian schools and where nobody believed that the burning of fossil fuels was altering the climate.
It was only after she married that she realized her husband thought that what she did for a living was a hoax.
“Here’s someone who is really smart, who understands data, who understands research, who I love and I’m married to, who doesn’t think that what I’m doing is real,” she recalled thinking.
It took two years of discussion and research — mostly on his part — to turn him around. (His conversion eventually resulted in the 2009 book A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions, coauthored with his wife.)
For Hayhoe, the job of converting her own husband was a wake-up call. It launched her on her own mission to convince evangelicals that man-made climate change is real. She had to do what most scientists hate doing and aren’t much good at. She had to leave her lab and confront the public about the seriousness of climate change.
Polls show that almost half of Americans still don’t accept the reality of man-made climate change. The highest proportion is among evangelicals.
In 2006, she and her husband moved to the panhandle city of Lubbock, Tex., a city of 239,538 residents and 127 churches, where they found positions at Texas Tech University. “Not only were there quite a few people in (the United States) who didn’t think climate change was real but most of them lived in Texas,” she said. “And the biggest concentration are in west Texas.”
Hayhoe became Texas Tech’s first director of its new Climate Science Center, which, perhaps significantly, is part of the department of political science.
She specializes in the impact of climate change on human systems (cities, agriculture, industry, public health etc.) and the natural environment and was the lead author of a government research report on the impact of climate change on the U.S.
As a believer in climate change, some people initially shunned her. Yet, as an evangelical scientist from Canada — and a woman — she soon became a curiosity. Lubbock women’s groups invited her to speak. Service clubs followed, then schools and churches.
Climate science was not the issue, she said. The debate was over faith. She faced Christians who believed that God’s absolute power eclipsed anything that mankind could do to the planet.
Hayhoe countered with scripture stating that while God created the Earth, he gave mankind dominion over it and Christians have to play an active role as its protector and not just its exploiter. Add a pinch of basic climate science and that’s essentially her message.
“I had to be a whole person not just a scientist and I had to share with them why I cared about climate change,” she said. “And for me my faith was a big part of that and for people here their faith is a big part of that.”
The word got out and before long Hayhoe had to meet increasing demands to talk to evangelical and other Christian communities.
Hayhoe said political partisanship has taken over the church.
“Being a Republican has become synonymous with evangelical to the extent that people’s politics are actually guiding their faith instead of their faith guiding their politics,” she said.
Hayhoe admits she has no idea whether she has made inroads into faith-based communities.
But, she says, “I see my responsibility not as changing people’s minds but as offering them the information they need to change their minds.”
I had to be a whole person not just a scientist and I had to share with them why I cared about climate change. And for me my faith was a big part of that... KATHARINE HAYHOE TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY