Faith & Science: A Christian Call to Climate Action ► Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Brian Stiller

Hello and welcome to evangelical 360. My name is Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and host of this new podcast series. On evangelical 360, I interview leaders, writers and influencers about contemporary issues which are impacting Christian life around the world. My hope is that it will not only be a global meeting place where faith is explored from different perspectives, but that each person listening will come away informed, encouraged, challenged and even inspired.

Today I’m honored to welcome Dr Katharine Hayhoe, a renowned climate scientist and a prominent voice in the discussion surrounding climate change. Dr Hayhoe is the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy, a professor at Texas Tech University and co-author of the influential National Climate Assessment, notably one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. Navigating this challenging world requires courage, especially as the lines between science and political opinion often blur. From my experience, dr Hayhoe stands out as one of the few voices from a Christian perspective who speaks candidly about understanding the science and exploring actionable solutions. I’m so pleased to welcome Dr. Katharine Hayhoe to evangelical 360.

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Brian Stiller

Katharine, you’ve had a remarkable young history in becoming such a spokesperson for climate change. But it would be of great interest to us to know how all this began, as you’ve become this global spokesperson.

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Well, it all began with the fact that my dad was not only a speaker and a teacher in our local church, but he was also a science teacher, and in fact, my grandmother who raised him and his seven other siblings had a degree in science education. So I learned from a very early age that, first of all, what is science other than figuring out what God was thinking when he created the universe in the first place, and also the amazing joy and wonder of science. I mean, who doesn’t want to understand why the sky is blue or why grass is green or why polar bears have black skin? So I grew up with this wonderful perspective that I think is often lacking in Christian circles, which is that the Bible is God’s express or God’s written word. We all believe. But if we truly believe that God created this incredible universe we live in, then what is science other than studying God’s expressed word? So, based on that perspective, I was actually planning to become an astrophysicist, and in fact my undergrad degree from University of Toronto is in physics and astronomy. But as I was just finishing my degree, I needed an extra class to finish my breadth requirements, and I looked around and there was this brand new class on climate change and I thought well, that looks interesting, why not take it Now?

I had grown up as a missionary kid in Columbia, so I’d seen firsthand the devastation that floods and droughts and other disasters wreak on people. But I hadn’t connected the dots between how climate change affects not only the environment, but how it affects people, and I realized that not only does it affect us all, it doesn’t affect us equally. The people who’ve done the least to cause the problem, especially the poorest and most vulnerable people. Whether in our own city today or on the other side of the world, they’re the ones most affected. So we believe as Christians, that we are called to love others, and in fact, jesus told his disciples in the book of John that they’re to be recognized by their love for others. And as this global crisis unfolds and as the poorest and most vulnerable are suffering the impacts the most, what is climate change, I asked myself, other than a failure to love? So the reason I became a climate scientist was, quite literally, because of my faith. I believe that we are called to love others, and today, addressing this global issue is demonstrating love for others, especially those Jesus called the least of these.

Brian Stiller

How did climate science become such a major international concern? What were the triggers that moved a global consciousness?

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Well, many people are surprised to learn that the science of climate change is very old. In fact, we’ve known since the 1850s not the 1950s, the 1850s that digging up and burning coal and gas and oil produces carbon pollution that builds up in the atmosphere, wrapping an extra blanket around the planet. And just as you would if someone snuck into your room at night and put an extra blanket on you, you’d wake up sweating saying, hey, I didn’t need this extra blanket. In the same way, our planet is running a fever because of this extra blanket that we’re wrapping around it. So by the 1890s, scientists knew enough about the basic physics of the atmosphere, the same physics that explains how stoves heat food. It’s all the same science to calculate how much warmer the world would get as we doubled or tripled the level of carbon pollution in the atmosphere.

By the 1930s, scientists were actually measuring the fact that the planet was starting to warm and in fact, by the 1960s, scientists were sufficiently worried about the impacts on people and the economy that they took the step of formally warning a US president and that president was Lyndon B Johnson back in the 1960s. But even then it wasn’t an issue at the forefront of people’s minds because we weren’t seeing the impacts. It was not until the late 1980s that we started to see the actual impacts on our lives and as humans we are very much out of sight, out of mind. People, right, we think you know, if it’s not affecting me in my life, if I don’t see any impact, who cares? But by the late 1980s we were starting to see the impacts. Scientists were measuring sea level rise, they were measuring global temperature change and we were starting to see what I call global weirding, which is our heat waves and our floods and today our hurricanes getting much stronger and more dangerous because of a warming world. So in 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed, which is a body of all the scientists in the world who study climate change, who produce regular reports on what’s happening now. By 1992, every country in the world just about had signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in which they promised to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system, because this is our only home. And then they started to hold these regular meetings that they have in November every year, the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

So when people started to realize action was necessary, then the companies who were responsible for most of this problem, most of the coal and oil and gas companies. They were like, well, what’s going to happen? I mean we could transition to clean energy or we could just spend a little bit of money convincing people. This isn’t real. I mean, look at the tobacco industry. They successfully delayed action for at least 20 years by convincing people that this person, who they dressed up in a white coat, says that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. So they literally hired some of the same people who had just recently lost their jobs in the tobacco industry to muddy the waters.

Climate science is almost 200 years old. Climate denial is less than 40 years old. People didn’t start to say are you sure this is real? Have you really checked? Couldn’t it be volcanoes? Oh, more CO2 is good for us. It’s plant food? Oh, you scientists are just making it up to line your pockets. None of that started until the 1990s and it was deliberately started by those who had the most to lose for climate action. So, unfortunately, that is the world we find ourselves in today, brian, where in many high-income countries, including Canada and the US and even the UK and Australia, whether people agree with 200 years of science has almost nothing to do with their level of education or how smart they are, and it has everything to do simply with where they fall on the political spectrum.

Brian Stiller

Where is the world in terms of its macro degenerations?

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

The big challenge we have is that we’ve built our entire economy and our society as if we lived on a flat, infinite planet where there’s always more to go in, and whatever we produce in the way of waste or pollution or garbage, we can just put it somewhere where it doesn’t bother us. But you know, we don’t live on a flat, infinite planet. We live on a round planet with 8 billion people. And so what? Right now, we are confronting a pollution crisis where just, for example, breathing in the particulates from burning fossil fuels so I’m not even talking about climate change, I’m just talking about air pollution, breathing in the particulates and the smog we see in the air. It’s responsible for more deaths every year than the number of people who have died since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Yet how many headlines have you seen about that? Compared to COVID deaths, one out of every six premature deaths around the world is because of pollution of our air, our water or our soil. That’s the price we’re already paying. Then there’s the biodiversity crisis. Since I was born, 70% of the animals on land have disappeared, from insects and pollinators and bees to large mammals. I’m not talking about species extinctions. I’m talking about just the number of animals. Now you might say, why does that matter? Nature doesn’t need us, we need it. All the air we breathe, all the water we drink, all the food we eat, everything we have comes from nature. We couldn’t live on a bare planet of rock. If we could, we’d probably have moved to Mars. God created the life on this planet and made our life dependent on it, and in Genesis 1, it says God gave us a responsibility to care for every living thing on this planet, not just for the sake of its own altruistically, but because God knew our own life depended on that. So we’ve got this biodiversity crisis too, and then we have climate change.

So with climate change, what we have to realize is that the average temperature of the planet over the history of human civilization on this planet was as stable as that of the human body. Over the last few thousand years, the average temperature of our planet has gone up and down by a few tenths of a degree, and that’s the same amount that our body temperature goes up and down by over the course of a day. But over the last hundred years it’s gone up by 1.3 degrees Celsius, that’s over two degrees Fahrenheit. So imagine if your body is running a 1.3 degrees Celsius fever. You’re taking some medicine, you’re calling the doctor, you’re wondering who coughed on you. You’re maybe taking a COVID test.

I mean, you feel it. You feel that fever. So that’s where we sit. Today, we are running a fever of 1.3 degrees Celsius and what we’re seeing is that fever is supersizing our extreme weather events. Now where does climate change come in? We know we’ve always had hurricanes. We’ve always had droughts and floods and heat waves and wildfires, but we know that the warmer the world gets, the worse these get. So what climate change is doing is it’s loading the weather dice against us, putting us all at risk.

Brian Stiller

Are we at a tipping point?

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Well, that’s what we scientists are worried about. That’s what keeps us up at night, because we know that, as far as we can look back in the history of the planet, we’ve never seen this much carbon going into the atmosphere this quickly. The speed at which we humans are affecting this planet, our home that God has given us, is unprecedented, and we know that in the past, when climate has changed, is unprecedented. And we know that in the past, when climate has changed, when it reached a tipping point, big changes happened, like the Arctic becoming ice-free in summer, or ocean circulation shutting down, which transports heat around the world, or the Amazon jungle switching from a forest to a grassland, and many of these changes would be irreversible. We haven’t reached them yet, but we know that the further and faster we push our planet beyond where it should be today, the greater the likelihood of these very dangerous tipping points. It’s not about saving the planet. The planet will be orbiting the sun long after we’re gone. It’s about us us humans and all the living things on which our own life depends. That’s what’s at risk.

Brian Stiller

As a climate scientist, what is the major issue that you’re facing today?

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

As a climate scientist, I know that climate is changing. Humans are responsible, the impacts are serious and there are solutions if we act now. We have known these things for decades and there is a consensus across all scientists who study this issue that we need to do something about it. So you might say well then, what new science are we studying or what are we most worried about today? Well, what we’re doing today is we are able to now put a number on just how much worse climate change is making a given wildfire season, how much more greater areas being burned, how much more likely a heat wave is or a flood, how much stronger or more damaging a hurricane is. This field of attribution actually helps us put dollar signs on the very real human and economic cost of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, heat waves and more. We are also studying what’s going to happen in the future, depending on the choices we make, because the biggest uncertainty in the future is us, with 8 billion people on the planet, most of whom still depend on coal, oil and gas for their energy, which is driving most of this climate crisis that we’re talking about, and the longer we delay, the worse it’s going to get. And the longer we delay, the worse it’s going to get. But the good news is is our choices do matter. Our individual choices, our collective choices as a family, as a church, as an organization, a business, a school or more. Our choices make a difference, and the science literally says that. It says every action matters.

So I think the biggest challenge that scientists are confronting today is how do we show people that climate change is not just a head issue of you know what’s happening to the polar bears and the ice sheets and the ocean circulation. It’s a heart issue. It’s my family, my home, my health, the things I care about, and it’s a hands issue. We can’t fix this alone, but we can together, and really isn’t that sort of what we are as the church? We’re all different parts of the body, but we’re called to work together as a body, and so in that sort of head, hands and hearts metaphor, I really see reflected God’s design for how the church can work together as well in the world.

Brian Stiller

What are the major objections that you face as you move around North America and other places of the world with your message of climate change? What are those objections and where do they come from?

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Many of the objections we hear are what I think of as smokescreens for the real issue. The real issue is that we don’t want to fix it. We’ve been told that the cure is worse than the disease and, like we just discussed all of the pushback against the science, it just began relatively recently, in the 1990s, and it was created by the people who had the most to lose in terms of wealth and power from climate action. So the root cause of most of these objections is what we call solution aversion. But it doesn’t sound great to say, well, there’s this global problem that affects the poorest and most vulnerable people, but I don’t want to fix it, because that makes us sound like a bad person, and most of us, we don’t want to be a bad person. So our brain engages in what psychologists call motivated reasoning. We go out and we look for reasons that explain why it’s not real or why we don’t need to fix it, and so those reasons often fall into a couple of categories. The first category is what I call science-y sounding reasons. People say well, it’s just a natural cycle. What can humans do? We scientists study natural cycles, and we know that according to not just natural cycles but all natural factors, including the sun and volcanoes, and more. The earth should be getting very slowly, gradually cooler, and instead it’s warming faster and faster. All the warming is us. And then people say well, you know, if God’s in control, how could humans affect something as big as this earth? Or the world’s going to end anyway. So why do we care? And to answer those questions, we don’t go to science, we have to go to the Bible.

I alluded earlier to how Genesis talks about how humans were created in God’s image. In order to, the Hebrew word is to rada every living thing on this earth. And living things include our sisters and our brothers, our fellow humans, as well as plants and animals, and the word rata has been translated many different ways. But in the Psalms, the psalmist uses rata to describe how God rules, and it says that he will listen to the cries of the needy and the helpless and he will care for those who have no protector. I mean, that’s what rata means in God’s own words. And then all through the Old Testament it talks about God’s love and care for the most seemingly insignificant aspects of nature the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. And then in the New Testament. It talks a lot about our love and our care for others, how we’re to be recognized by our love and our care for others.

And even in Thessalonians, when people were saying oh well, christ will return soon, so I don’t have to work, I don’t have to get a job, I’ll just sort of sit back in the lazy boy chair of life and say Maranatha, come, lord, come. The Apostle Paul writes to them pretty sternly and basically says get a job. You’re supposed to be caring for the widows and the poor. There are things to be doing now, today. You don’t know the day or the time, and because of that we’re called to walk in the good works that God has already prepared for us in advance. So there’s no theological basis for folding our hands and sitting back and ignoring real suffering that’s happening today.

And then, lastly, people might say well, isn’t this worshiping the creator, or the creation rather than the creator? I say no. I think it’s fulfilling our God-given responsibility to care for all living things and to love each other, as Christ loved us. Because, like I said, what are these issues, these crises of pollution and biodiversity and climate change? What are they other than a failure to love?

So then people get to the third category not the science-y, not the theologically sounding objections, but the economically sounding objections and they say, well, there’s nothing we can do about it, it would ruin the economy. Well, you can’t get around the fact that it would ruin the economy for a couple of very large companies that currently receive $7 trillion US in subsidies every year. Last year, the oil and gas companies made more money than they’ve ever made and they’re subsidized to the tune of $7 trillion. That’s almost $1,000 per person around the world US, not Canadian. There’s no denying that it would be hard for them.

But an Oxford study last year showed that transitioning to clean energy solar energy with storage, because the sun doesn’t shine at night is now the cheapest form of electricity humans have ever known. Transitioning to clean energy would save the world $12 trillion by 2050. And the faster we transition, the more money we save. So when we look at solutions, there are solutions that are here today that are good for us, that clean up our air and our water. They help our homes be safer, rather than less safe, from the disasters we see. They invest in nature and our cities and our fields and our farms. They give us a world that’s better, not a world that’s worse, and they help us show love to the world too. So I don’t believe that there are valid objections to climate action.

Brian Stiller

Katharine, are people of faith less inclined to believe climate science?

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

We didn’t used to be, but we are now, thanks to the extent to which the United States Church has associated their theological beliefs with their political ideological beliefs, their theological beliefs with their political ideological beliefs. When I encounter people in Christian circles saying, oh well, I’m not too sure about this whole climate change thing, is it really real? Aren’t godless atheist scientists just making it up? Nine times out of 10, we can track that directly to a US source. I have a colleague in France, jean-francois Mouhaut, who works with Arasha, a Christian conservation organization, and Jean-Francois Mouhaut who works with ARASHA, a Christian conservation organization, and Jean-Francois is a historian. He used to be a professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC and he’s actually done a study looking at climate denial in the French evangelical church and he has actually shown that all the instances that he can identify track directly back to US sources.

So why the US? Well, Mark Noll has this phenomenal book called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I strongly recommend reading The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind because it shows how our faith has been co-opted for political reasons and political power systematically through the 1800s and the 1900s and has basically reached full flower today, where, in the United States, 40% of people who self-identify as evangelical don’t even go to church and, as a result, older people are leaving their churches in the United States because they don’t feel the church is speaking out strongly enough in favor of the Republican Party, whereas younger people are leaving the church because they don’t feel the church is reflecting the values, the things that they care about because of their faith. So we live in this time when the political divides not just in the US, but in Canada, australia, the UK and more the political divides are widening, and on either side there’s precious little love.

And, very sadly, a lot of Christians have decided that their statement of faith is written first by their political ideology and only a distant second by the Bible. And when you do that, then you have to adopt this whole group of political beliefs. And since the 1990s there’s been a lot of effort, a lot of money put into convincing conservatives that climate change isn’t real. But in reality, even if you’re conservative, what is more conservative than conserving our resources? What is more conservative than energy independence and not running through your budget? You know, as if there’s no tomorrow. And so even that political gap is really not authentic to true conservative beliefs either. It’s really the result of just a few people who have everything to lose from climate action against the rest of the world, which has everything to gain from a better future.

Brian Stiller

What, then, is the way forward? What can a person do, as they wander about their daily life? What can they do?

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Well, that is a very good question, Brian, and it’s a question that I have looked for the answer to, because, you know, I’m a scientist who studies the atmosphere. What do I know about human behavior and about the effectiveness of individual action? So I’ve read a lot of books and studied a lot on how does change happen? But I calculated that even if all of us did everything we could to ensure we’re using clean electricity or public transportation or electric car and eating more plant-based meals, that wouldn’t even take care of 20% of the problem. Because we live in a society where these issues are embedded into the assumption that we live on an infinite flat planet, that what’s going in and what’s going out doesn’t matter. Even if the pollution going out is killing almost 9 million people a year, we put no value on that at all. Even if climate change is devastating, wiping entire towns off the map through supersized hurricanes or floods everywhere, from Nepal and Vietnam to the United States, we put no value on that. We have to change the system. But if we look back in history, our society has changed before.

Slavery used to be not only accepted but celebrated, if you can imagine that, as a fundamental economic basis for society. Yet we live in a world where, thankfully, slavery has been abolished in most countries. I recognize that human trafficking, human slavery still exists, but not at the scale that it did before. And when those changes happened, it wasn’t because the King of England woke up one day and just said oh, I think we should abolish slavery, let’s pass this legislation. And in South Africa, you know, apartheid didn’t end because they’re like oh, it’s Friday, we should just end apartheid. You know civil rights weren’t enacted in the US, women didn’t get the vote from. You know somebody just saying ah, you know, again it’s Mother’s Day, let’s give women the vote. That’s not the way it happened. In every single one of those instances, people not rich, famous, wealthy people, but just people who had the courage of their convictions, and in many of those cases, as you all know, the courage of the convictions powered by their faith, by love, by the care for others and for a passion for justice they were the ones who used their voices to advocate for change. And it took a long time, but it happened.

And so when people ask me today what’s the most important thing I can do, my answer has nothing to do with what you eat, what you drive or what you do with your garbage.

My answer is have a conversation about why this matters and about what we can do about it together, as a congregation, as a family, as a business, as an organization. What can we do to make a difference? Because data shows that most of us around the world are worried about this issue, but we are not having conversations about it, we’re not making that head to heart connection, showing why it matters to us, and we’re not connecting our heart to our hands, what we can do about it. So that’s why, as I mentioned, my favorite verse is the verse in Timothy, where it says God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love and a sound mind. So it means that we can act instead of being paralyzed. We’re empowered to act out of love, with a sound mind, to do what we’re called to do, to share God’s love with people, and so I truly believe it’s an opportunity for the church today.

Brian Stiller

Katharine, as we close, your life is an interesting story of a person who has an interest and God uses in remarkable ways. What would you have to say to someone listening and wondering what choices they might make for life?

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Well, that’s something I have thought a lot about over the years, Brian, because I felt like you know, my husband’s a pastor, my parents are missionaries. You know I’m doing science. That’s sort of like second best, I thought for a long time. But I’ve really come to realize and really be convicted, I think, of the fact that this is a calling. What I’m doing are the good works that God has prepared for me in advance, and that is what each of us are called to do.

And some of us might be doing it in something that’s easily recognized as ministry. Some of it might just we might just be doing it in the home with our children. We might be doing it practicing it might just we might just be doing it in the home with our children. We might be doing it practicing it as teachers, as medical professionals, as business people. So what God has called us to, the abilities that God has given us, the heart and the desires that God has given us, the Bible says that he’s given us a new heart and we can trust that heart. God has actually given us these desires and these abilities, and so when we use these abilities for his glory, we could be using them in any field to care for others, to love others and to further his message of love and care for the world. So thank you for asking that question, and that’s something that really really means a lot to me.

Brian Stiller

Ah, Katharine, thank you so much. You’re the best.

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Thank you. This is such a pleasure and you know. Any other time you want to talk, just let me know.

Brian Stiller

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