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66: Hayhoe, Let's Go! (An Interview With Climate Scientist Katharine Hayhoe)
541 Plays3 years ago
Katharine Hayhoe was the lead author on the 2018 US Climate Assessment report, and has spent her time since then spreading the word about climate change. She was always faced with the difficult task of convincing people who had stakes in things that would be affected by acknowledging the information in her report. In her newest book, “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World”, she discusses the challenges associated with these conversations, at both the micro and macro level. So who is Katherine Heyhoe? How has she learned to get people to acknowledge the reality of climate science? And is she the best, or worst, person to strike up a discussion about how the weather’s been? All of this, and more, on this episode of Breaking Math. Papers Cited: -“99.94 percent of papers agree with the scientific consensus.”
More info: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0270467617707079
This episode is distributed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International License. For more information, visit creativecommons.org.
Intro is "Breaking Math Theme" by Elliot Smith. Ads feature "Ding Dong" by Simon Panrucker
[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch, Meryl Flaherty; Katherine Heyhoe, Elliot Smith]
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Transcript
Introduction to Climate Communication with Katherine Hayhoe
00:00:00
Speaker
Dr. Naio is the lead author on the US Climate Assessment Report, and has spent her time since writing this report on spreading the word about climate change. She was always faced with the difficult task of convincing people who had stakes in things that would be affected by acknowledging the information in her report.
00:00:15
Speaker
In her newest book, Saving Us, a climate scientist case for hope and healing in a divided world, she discusses the challenges associated with these conversations at both the micro and macro level. So who is Katherine Hayhoe? How has she learned to get people to acknowledge the reality of climate change? And is she the best or worst person to strike up a discussion with about the weather? All this and more on this episode of Breaking Math, episode 66, Hayhoe, let's go.
00:00:50
Speaker
I'm Sophia. And I'm Gabriel. And I'm Meryl. And you're listening to Breaking Math. With us, we have on Dr. Catherine Aho, who you may know from the introduction. Catherine, welcome.
00:01:02
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for joining us.
The Role of COP26 and Climate Policy
00:01:06
Speaker
I actually just saw you a couple hours ago on YouTube on the live and then I wrote to Laura and said, here's our interview. And she said that you are booked from that time until now. I'm amazed at how busy you are. How do you keep your energy to keep doing these amazing interviews?
00:01:24
Speaker
Lots and lots of chocolate. Okay. As dark as possible. Okay. I actually had a conversation about this at Starbucks because I'm always plugging our show. And I said, what if they have a Starbucks drink named after Dr. Hayhoe? So I'm going to see about that. It'll have to be a chocolate bar instead. Oh, a chocolate bar instead. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Something called the, I don't know, Hayhoe, let's go triple espresso or something like that. So totally. I would drink that every day. Nice. Are you, are you coffee or are you more tea?
00:01:53
Speaker
Well, I'm actually more tea. I have a huge cupboard full of tea and it has to be black, but there's all kinds of different teas that are black. But I do drink coffee sort of like mid-afternoon if I need something to keep me going. And with us, also, we have on someone we've been wanting to have on the podcast for a few years now. Well, he kind of has been on the podcast for a few years. It's Elliot Smith, not the other one, who wrote the theme song for our podcast. Welcome, Elliot.
00:02:18
Speaker
Thank you very much. And Elliot, we invited you because, of course, earlier I challenged you to write a couple of songs that would be good representations of the climate change conversation. And you more than delivered. We have probably five musical parodies all squeezed into about two minutes. So we'll get to that at a later part in the episode. So that's very, very exciting. Thank you for joining us.
00:02:38
Speaker
So I suppose what we'd like to start off with is a very, very recent event. I know that recently there was the event COP26. I have a section on my outline. I would love to hear about your experience with COP26. I included to talk about the good, the bad and the ugly and everything and your take on it at this point.
00:02:58
Speaker
Well, I'll tell you what was the most interesting thing about it. And it was the number of people who were there representing almost every people group in every part of the world that you can imagine. So officially, it's where every country goes with a team of negotiators to negotiate the fine details of the Paris Agreement. And the original goal of COP26 was to negotiate the details of what they call Article 6, which is so arcane that I'm not even going to bother to explain it right now.
00:03:23
Speaker
because the main reason that everybody else was there was to say, we need more. So far, countries haven't promised enough to hold warming below two degrees or one and a half even better, and we need more promises and we need more action. I was just going to say, you mentioned these numbers, 1.5 and 2 degrees, which is, like everyone who's familiar with climate science knows those numbers pretty well, but do you want to kind of just super quick top level go over that?
00:03:51
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. So our planet is warming now faster than any time in the history of human civilization. And it's already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is just over 2 degrees Fahrenheit. And people might say, well, that doesn't sound like much. I mean, you go outside, it goes up and down by 20 degrees over the course of a day.
00:04:12
Speaker
But what we have to realize is the average temperature of the planet is as stable as that of the human body over the history of human civilization on this planet. So our body temperature goes up and down by a few tenths of a degree every day. That's how much the whole temperature of the planet has gone up and down over all of human history on this planet, which is just insane when you think about that.
00:04:33
Speaker
And now it's going up faster and faster. And so in 2015, all the countries in the world went to Paris, and that was called COP21, because it was the 21st conference of parties. And this one now, this year, was the 26th conference of parties. So at COP21, all the countries in the world agreed to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, which is about 3 and 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and below 1 and 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is just over 2 and 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit if we can.
00:05:01
Speaker
So that's where those numbers come from. And they're not magic numbers. So if we end up at 1.49, it doesn't mean everything's OK. We already see impacts today. And then if we end up at 1.51, it doesn't mean we're going to hell in a hand basket. It means we're a lot better than if we're at 1.52. And if we're there, it's better than if we're at 1.53. So every little bit of warming counts. And these aren't magic numbers, but they're the targets that the
Interconnectedness of Climate Issues
00:05:28
Speaker
world set to get there.
00:05:29
Speaker
So all the countries in the world went to Glasgow to talk about how they could get there more effectively and better because they're nowhere near there yet. But the interesting thing was 90% of the people there were not country negotiators. 90% of the people there were everyone else you can imagine. There were children and young people and parents and grandparents. There were farmers.
00:05:50
Speaker
There were Rotarians, there were artists and musicians, there were theologians and students and activists, and there were people who grow sustainable coffee and chocolate. There was anybody that you could imagine from all around the world, all there, because they understood that climate change matters to every single one of us, and they were using their voice, the most powerful force we have, to demand climate action.
00:06:12
Speaker
Yeah. In fact, I've been following you and Dr. Michael Mann, and I see there's just so many people posting about COP26. Generally, what I find is, is it fair to say a tepid optimism? I think you could say the glass is both half full and half empty, if that makes sense.
00:06:29
Speaker
So you have to realize, first of all, the magnitude of this challenge. I mean, there's no other example when every country in the world has come together for a huge global treaty, because that's essentially what this is, to agree to phase out the entire energy basis of their society. I mean, it is radical what countries are being asked to do.
00:06:49
Speaker
So before the Paris Agreement six years ago, we were heading for a four degree Celsius warmer world. Now, thanks to the pledges and promises made in Glasgow, we're heading for a 2.4 degree warmer world. It's still not where we want to be, but it is a heck of a lot better than we were six years ago. So for that, I'm grateful. But when you go to COP and you realize that there are 500 representatives of the fossil fuel industry, which just to be clear, burning fossil fuels is responsible for 75% of this problem.
00:07:19
Speaker
And only 90 companies are responsible for two thirds of carbon emissions since the dawn of the industrial era. I'm talking the 1700s. And then you have 500 of their representatives at COP, which is more than I think all the Pacific Island states sent altogether, far more. You can't help but feel discouraged that the balance of power and wealth in this world is still acting to try to keep us addicted to fossil fuels as long as possible.
00:07:48
Speaker
so that they can make a short-term profit in their quarterly returns while the world burns. Who would not be angry and frustrated at that? Would you say that workers' rights is an environmental concern?
00:08:03
Speaker
Absolutely. So the way I would put it is slightly different, which is whatever we already care about, it is 99 times out of 100 already being affected by climate change in some way, shape or form, which makes you the perfect person to care about climate change because what you already care about is being affected. So whether you care about gender equity, whether you care about poverty and hunger, whether you care about, you know, people dying from diseases that nobody should be dying from in 2021 just because they lack basic health care,
00:08:33
Speaker
whether we care about racism, whether we care about the systemic redlining of low-income neighborhoods here in North America, whether we care about the preservation of species and biodiversity. Whatever it is that we care about is being affected by climate change today.
Psychological Barriers and Communication Strategies
00:08:47
Speaker
And because of that, to care about climate change, we don't have to be a certain type of person or live in a certain type of place or vote a certain type of way. We just have to be one thing, and that one thing is quite literally a human being living on this planet.
00:08:59
Speaker
And see, that's also the thing that sometimes worries me is that, I mean, Marilyn Elliott and Gabriel Wayne here, but it seems there's a lot of people who will not be affected by climate change because of the specter of death, you know, they'll die of old age before they are affected by a lot of this stuff. And a lot of these people have the chronic problem with selfishness. And like you said, it's hard not to be discouraged. But I also
00:09:26
Speaker
I was struck by the story of how you, I believe it was the Rotary Club, how you convinced them by reformatting your presentation to not include the word weather. Do you want to chat about that story real quick? Because I think it applies.
00:09:40
Speaker
Sure. So that's actually, I think, two different stories that you're thinking of, both of them taking place in Texas. I would start by saying that we often see people as selfish and uncaring, and there certainly are some people who deserve those labels. But what I found is that a lot of people, either they're already worried, but they don't know what to do, so they just kind of shove it down. So they might look uncaring, but it's simply because they don't know what to do, but we just can't carry that burden without knowing how to act.
00:10:10
Speaker
and or feel a strong sense of psychological distance from the issue. So a lot of people, and polling data actually bears this out, a lot of people see climate change as a real issue, but one that is only going to affect future generations, or plants and animals, not humans, or people who live far away, but not me.
00:10:28
Speaker
So what's really effective is to bring it here and now and talk about how no matter where you live, and if each of you told me where you live, I could tell you exactly how you're already being affected by climate change today. So connecting the dots to talk about how we're already being affected and not just in terms of the weather, but in terms of things that matter to us. So whether you love beach vacations or you're really into beer or like me, you really enjoy skiing and you need snow to do that.
00:10:55
Speaker
or whether you're really into birding or whether you just like a healthy economy. No matter what people already care about, they already have the reasons to care. And our job is not to make them care for the same reasons we do. Our job is to help them connect the dots.
00:11:11
Speaker
between why they already care and why climate change matters. So that's what I did in the two stories you're thinking about that I tell in the book. The first story was when I was asked to speak to our local Rotary Club, and I'm not a Rotarian, so I did not know that they have this thing called the four-way test that they apply to all the decisions they make.
00:11:27
Speaker
So I walked into the hotel ballroom and they very conveniently printed out their value system on a giant five-foot banner and propped it up in the hall. And I walk in and I see the four-way test and I'm like, okay, is this the truth? Yes, climate change is the truth. Is it fair? Absolutely not. Climate change is profoundly unfair. It affects the poorest people who've done the least to contribute to the problem.
00:11:51
Speaker
Would it be beneficial to all concerned? Would it build goodwill and better friendships? Well, solutions would. So I sat down and I rearranged my whole presentation while everybody was eating their lunch into the four-way test. And when I started to give the talk, I could see that there was a lot of folded arms, a lot of sort of side-eye at the woman who'd invited me, a lot of, this is what happens when you let her invite the guests. That's not going to happen again.
00:12:16
Speaker
But as I started to walk through their value system, I could see the arms unfolding. I could see people leaning forward. I could see the head starting to nod. And at the end, I'll never forget a local banker who I had met a few times before who had always been cordial but distant. He came up to me with the most bemused look on his face I'd ever seen. And he said, you know, I never thought too much of that whole global warming thing, which is the plight Texan way of saying I thought it was a load of crap.
00:12:42
Speaker
But it passed the four-way test. So what can I do? You know, it passed my test. I'm a Rotarian. This is my test. It passed the test. I have to care. What I showed him was that who he already was, was already the perfect person to care. And in fact, it made him an even better Rotarian and even more genuine Rotarian than he already was.
00:13:04
Speaker
So another time I was talking to water managers and water managers care about water. So I decided I was going to give a whole presentation about how climate change affects water without mentioning the words climate and change.
00:13:15
Speaker
Climate variability, sure. Long-term trends, absolutely. Future projections, no problem. It was the same presentation I
Climate Change and Values
00:13:23
Speaker
would give anywhere to anyone, but I took out the words climate change. And at the end of the presentation, a woman came running up to me this time and she grabbed my hand and she pumped it very enthusiastically. And she's like, that was great. I agree with everything you said. And then she said, those people who talk about global warming, I don't agree with them at all.
00:13:43
Speaker
But this, this makes sense. Wow. So with the story that you just mentioned, one thing that I've kind of noticed is that people do tend to, so if you can avoid the words climate and change, their attitude does begin to change because they're not seeing it through the lens that they usually do. I'm wondering if there's any way that we could, you know, bridge that gap such that more people will take a more active role.
00:14:13
Speaker
I'm glad you asked that and the answer is yes. I wasn't able to talk about this in my book though because it's an experiment that we did after I wrote the book. So this is brand new hot off the presses. I teamed up with researchers at Yale University and we created a series of four very short videos, like I'm talking a minute or a minute and a half long. And each video talked about climate change from the perspective of a core value that someone who identifies as Republican would share.
00:14:41
Speaker
So often Republicans care about free market, they care about personal liberties, they care about national security in the military, and they care about Christian values.
00:14:53
Speaker
So we made these four short videos with authentic messengers, with a two-time Republican congressman talking about free market solutions to climate change, with the head of a libertarian think tank talking about personal liberties and how climate change affects them, with a retired Air Force general talking about national security, and with me as a scientist and as a Christian talking about a Christian perspective. So here's the really cool thing.
00:15:16
Speaker
They didn't put people in a room and make them watch the videos and see if it affected their opinion. They put the videos out on social media in real life. They paid to have them boosted into people's feeds in three different congressional districts on Facebook. In other words, they used Facebook for good.
00:15:33
Speaker
And they didn't even spend a lot of money. I mean, they just boosted them. And then they trapped public opinion in those districts. And guess what happened? Democrat opinions went up a bit. Republican opinions about climate change went up twice as much. Why? Because they were hearing about climate change from within the frame, like you just pointed out, the frame that they identified with. And it made all the difference in the world. And so my only question is, why the heck are we not doing this everywhere?
00:16:03
Speaker
One of the exciting things on that actually is some of my conservative friends are waking up to that issue way, way, way more, especially when they see me bringing your book around at work, and everyone that knows me is the podcaster guy, and this is generating a lot of conversations, and that really excites me. There's a guy I sit next to who is on the board of the fundraising committee for one of the next Republican candidates.
00:16:23
Speaker
who I actually used to work with, and he and I have talked about climate change. Another Republican candidate is a former weatherman. There's YouTube videos where you can see him talking about climate change up, down, and center, so he knows it. And he talks about it from a meteorological ... I'm sorry, I can't ... Meteorological. Meteorological. I'm not going to say that word. Meteorological. The perspective. Thank you, Sylvia. Thanks for billing me out there.
00:16:45
Speaker
And he talks about, you know, year by year, the records are undeniable. So I see some hope in that area. I also have some people at church who refuse to talk about it because it's all a big liberal hoax. So it's both discouraging and encouraging at the same time, you know? And are those videos that you mentioned available? I'm curious.
00:17:05
Speaker
They are. If you Google new climate voices, you will find them and you can use them. Outstanding. I'm going to add that to our notes here real quick because I had one more value that I wanted to talk to you about. Just like how you framed the conversation according to the Rotarian values, I've actually taken it upon a personal project from my own sphere of influence. I've got a lot of conservative friends. They've identified their values and you already named them.
00:17:31
Speaker
you know, national security, fiscal conservativeness. There's one that you talk about in your book a little bit, the value pro-life, and I'm not talking about anything related to abortion or women's rights, I'm talking about pro-life, like people's right to live. And that's one thing that I'd love for you to talk about how climate change is absolutely a pro-life issue.
00:17:52
Speaker
Oh my goodness. Well, that is a huge one for me personally because I mentioned earlier that climate change is a justice issue and that's why I became a climate scientist.
Military and Climate Change
00:18:03
Speaker
As you mentioned, my undergraduate degree is in astronomy and physics and I was planning to be an astrophysicist and of course that involves lots of math.
00:18:12
Speaker
But when I took a class on climate change that showed me that climate change is not only an environmental issue, it is a poverty issue. It's a hunger issue. It's a resource scarcity issue. It's even a refugee issue. It's a human issue. And the poorest three and a half billion people in the world have only contributed to 7% of global emissions. That is profoundly unfair. Yet they are the ones who are being impacted most by a changing climate.
00:18:39
Speaker
So if you just look at countries, rich countries versus poor countries, climate change has already increased the gap between the richest and poorest countries in the world by as much as 25%. And that is just profoundly unfair. But then you zoom into the individual level. How is climate change affecting people? Well, first of all, when we burn fossil fuels, it produces air pollution as well as heat trapping gases. And while the heat trapping gases are building up in the atmosphere, wrapping an extra blanket around the planet, causing it to warm,
00:19:08
Speaker
The air pollution is just sitting there and we breathe it in and it's responsible for almost 9 million premature deaths per year. That is more than double that of COVID per year. And by premature deaths, can you define that real quick, just so I know? Yes, it's people who die before they're supposed to because of air pollution. Yes. So you would not be dead if it were not for this air pollution. That's what that means.
00:19:37
Speaker
It was like like a certain number of years of life shaved off average or something, you know, you know where death charts can be But yeah, that is pretty insane about the whole justice issue thing. And that also brings me to another difficult point What if something that somebody cares about? It would be negatively impacted by
00:19:55
Speaker
helping climate change. For example, if somebody is really into the spend thrift part of military spending, for example, for like, you know, their district or something like that, I know that the United States military is the number one global polluter. So it feels like you run into like two problems there, one telling somebody to dull their sword that is already way too sharp, or two that you like, you just you run into a couple problems.
00:20:20
Speaker
You do. So the military is the largest polluter if you look at organizations. It's not the largest polluter if you look at oil and gas companies or if you look at countries. There are certainly some people, and they're not too many, but there are some people where climate solutions wouldn't benefit them. And those people are primarily the people who benefit in a significant financial way from the consumption of oil and gas. And I'm not talking about individual coal miners who are just trying to put food on the family for their table.
00:20:49
Speaker
I'm talking about the executives with the seven, eight, and I don't know how many figure salaries. I really have no idea what they look like, but I know they're a lot bigger than yours or mine. That's who I'm talking about. For the military, it surprises people to know that they are one of the biggest investors in clean energy because they know that
00:21:08
Speaker
fossil fuels present a tremendous risk, a security risk to them, a security risk in terms of what parts of the world the United States needs to keep an eye on and possibly have a presence in, and also too, a security risk when they are in full operational mode, when they have to be continually supplying fuel for all of their operations.
00:21:29
Speaker
So, I'm not trying to excuse what they do in any way, shape or form, but if somebody is very into the military, that video that we have with New Climate Voices with the Retired Air Force General, and there's also, there's a brigadier also who was in charge of the supply line in Afghanistan, and I gave a talk with him once, and man, he had some powerful stories about the risks that fossil fuels pose directly for the lives of people in the armed forces in Afghanistan.
00:21:53
Speaker
So people who are very concerned about that, there are plenty of military voices to point them to that show that the risks of continuing to depend on fossil fuels far outweigh the benefits for the military. And it makes sense for the military to be leaders in leading that transition as soon as possible.
00:22:10
Speaker
One of the folks that we loaned this book to actually was a former guest on the show, a major in the Air Force right now. His name is Major Carlo Tranisi and he actually wrote a whole bunch of questions for the outline. So there's very high involvement. In fact, there's more citations in his notes than you can shake a stick at.
00:22:25
Speaker
all about military reports on the threats of climate change as a threat multiplier, as well as various bases that will be threatened with sea level rise, and everything you mentioned.
Impact on Marginalized Communities
00:22:37
Speaker
So they've definitely got eyes on it. That's for sure. I had a quick question real quick about a previous thing. When we're talking about pro-life, one of the things that I was trying very hard to research was anything from something like
00:22:49
Speaker
I don't know, the organization Compassion International or any organization like them where climate change is definitely on their radar. Reason why I said that is... Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, I can tell you who. So it's not really on the radar for Compassion International, but World Vision is all over this. So is Tear Fund. So is Oxfam. So is the Red Cross, Red Crescent. There are a lot of organizations that get this because at the granular level, if I could just give you a couple of quick examples of how climate change affects people's lives.
00:23:19
Speaker
Let's look at what happens right here in North America. When we have a heat wave, the low-income neighborhoods that were redlined can be 15 degrees hotter than the richer neighborhoods in the same city. That leads to all kinds of health issues, all kinds of problems for people who are already vulnerable. Let's look at what happens when drought devastates farmers in Malawi. Child marriage has been outlawed in Malawi for five years already. And when it was outlawed,
00:23:45
Speaker
numbers started to go down, but drought struck and farmers couldn't feed their families anymore. And so when someone came around offering to marry their 12 year old daughter,
00:23:54
Speaker
Child marriages are on the rise now, with girls as young as eight years old being married off because their families cannot put food on the table. And climate change is exacerbating that issue. I mean, the way that climate change affects our lives just absolutely breaks my heart. We also know that air pollution affects dementia and older adults. It affects learning disabilities in children. We know that the massive floods that are occurring at West as we speak to each other right now
00:24:19
Speaker
We know that the people who don't have insurance, who don't have resources, who live in lower-income neighborhoods, lower-lying areas are the most affected. We know that with wildfire smoke that choked the air this summer, people who are already sick, people who couldn't afford to live inside or have good air filters, they're the ones who are most affected. Climate change truly is a pro-life issue, and I mean that in the sense of
00:24:40
Speaker
our entire life. Every aspect of our life is affected by climate change. And for health reasons alone, we shouldn't be using fossil fuels.
00:24:50
Speaker
That's definitely all very powerful statements. I mean, it seems like everything, the individual, the society, the world as like a giant organism. But I thought of just a small activity to kind of get the point across after reading some of your book. I was thinking me, Gabriel, Meryl and Elliot would go around just like one round and we'd say something that's important to us and you tell us how that's affected by climate change.
00:25:20
Speaker
That sounds great. Oh, gosh, I'll have to think about this. If you're ready, you go ahead. All right. Um, what is important to me? Okay. Okay. So so when we talk about, um, right now there's supply line shortages for various things. Let's just say, um, somebody who is a food connoisseur who likes, I don't know. I was talking to you personally, though, Gabriel. Me personally? Yeah. Like something that you're into and then she'll tell you. Oh, gosh.
00:25:44
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Sure. Sure. Um, Oh gosh, my hobbies aside. Okay. Well, I'm into podcasting obviously, and I'm into reading books and all these hard ones. Um, okay. Uh, my, my wife and I enjoy hiking in the Sandy in the Sandy is here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. How about that?
00:26:02
Speaker
Oh, okay. Well, that's a great thing. I don't live too far away from you. I just live across the border in Texas. I know that New Mexico has experienced devastating water shortages and wildfires as climate change is altering our rainfall patterns.
00:26:19
Speaker
So the
Education and Climate Modeling
00:26:20
Speaker
local ski hill, so Sandia and Santa Fe, a couple of years ago, they couldn't even open and that threw a lot of people out of work. Also, snowpack in New Mexico is an important water reservoir. And when it doesn't snow in the winter, that water doesn't exist and those ecosystems and those people go without.
00:26:36
Speaker
And then with the wildfires they had up by the Los Alamos area, I mean, that burned down, you know, I don't know how many hundreds of acres of forest and endangered many people's lives and their livelihoods and their health because you're breathing in the smoke. And of course, you also see invasive species moving poleward as it gets warmer.
00:26:55
Speaker
So New Mexico is such a special landscape and it's very arid and it has such unique ecosystems and unique peoples that are perfectly adapted for the climate it's had for thousands of years. And today that climate is changing faster than any time in its history and the character of New Mexico is changing with it.
00:27:15
Speaker
I think New Mexico green chili might become Colorado green chili. Actually, we'll burn down Colorado before that happens. God forbid. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Good one. Okay. Yourself, Sophia or Elliot or Meryl? Well, I was going to say, I mean, I enjoy coffee. Okay. Well, I hear you because I enjoy coffee too. And I actually spent a number of my years growing up in Colombia and South America, which is
00:27:39
Speaker
a big place that grows coffee. Well, coffee's grown on the mountains. It's grown in these fields that are sort of like this on the mountains. And as it's getting warmer, the optimal location to grow coffee is shifting up the mountain. But of course, you only own certain fields, right? And so if the optimal place to grow coffee shifts out of where you own, then your coffee isn't as good. We see that the quality of coffee is being affected, and Colombia itself has experienced a big, big change in its rainfall patterns as well.
00:28:09
Speaker
So wherever we live, we know that we have wet, dry, wet, dry, wet, dry. But as climate changes in many parts of the world, including Texas and New Mexico and including Colombia, what's happening is we're seeing wet, dry, wet, dry, wet, dry.
00:28:24
Speaker
Record-breaking droughts, record-breaking floods. Why? Because warmer air holds more water vapor, and as it gets warmer, it's accelerating the hydrological cycle. So storm comes up, sweeps up way more water vapor, and dumps it. And then a high-pressure system comes by, which is what causes drought. And because it's hotter and drier, that high-pressure system sits over you for longer, directing storm systems away from the region.
00:28:48
Speaker
So there's actual physical reasons that we as scientists understand why climate change is taking this natural pattern of wet and dry and stretching it in both directions. And that affects coffee crops. How about either of you? Sure. So I get to work, this is Elliot, I get to work with children a lot and I love what I get to do with them. And so I'm kind of curious because we want kids to be empowered and be able to do
00:29:15
Speaker
what they might be best at doing later on and to thrive. And so I'm kind of curious, how will this shape what career paths are available? How's that kind of a pie chart going to change? And will things like what I do, which is sometimes considered disposable, will certain career paths even disappear for our children?
00:29:40
Speaker
That's a great question. Well, first of all, in poor countries, when resources become scarce, when there's a famine, when there's a flood, when there's a disaster, the first thing that happens is kids get pulled out of school. So even, you know, we take for granted that we can even educate our children. But in a lot of countries, parents' abilities to educate their children is being called into question by climate change. So the ability to have any career at all other than some that doesn't require education.
00:30:07
Speaker
Here though, what we're concerned about, and I hear you too because I'm a parent and I want the best for my child too, they're growing up in a world that if we don't fix climate change, we'll be much less secure, much less safe, much less stable.
00:30:19
Speaker
It's gonna be a lot harder to have a job that, one of those jobs that we really enjoy that really only occurs when you have a society that is stable, when you have an economy that is thriving, when you have clean water coming out of the tap, when you turn it on and food in the grocery store, when you go there, when you're not just constantly scrounging to survive and get by and stay safe, you actually have the luxury of, you know, of creativity, of artistry,
00:30:48
Speaker
of caring about other people, yes. My sister's an artist too, I should say. So all of those really are on the line unless we truly have the stable world that we have taken for granted the last few hundred years. Oops, I got one. And so after all, this is a mathematics podcast. I am very passionate about math, and I'm wondering how climate change will affect the field of mathematics, if you can give us any insight.
00:31:17
Speaker
I was afraid you were going to say cats. I was mentally preparing for cats, but I'll take math for sure. That's a good question. So I would ask actually, and I hope you don't feel like I'm dodging this at all, but I would say that that fits a little bit with the answer that I gave to Elliot too. The ability to be a mathematician requires a stable society with a stable educational system.
00:31:42
Speaker
with a really sophisticated set of job opportunities where, again, it's not about subsistence. It's not about just making sure you got food on the table and a safe place to live. You are actually examining the mysteries of the universe with mathematics. And in order to have the ability to do that, we need that stable society just as much today as we did before. I mean, if you look at some of those young girls in Malawi, for example, who are growing up in homes where their parents can't put food on the table and they're at risk of being
00:32:11
Speaker
you know, married off at age 10, they do not have the luxury to even complete an education to begin to pursue a career in mathematics. And so we are really fortunate in what we have today and I want that for everyone. I want every little girl.
00:32:27
Speaker
to be able to have the option to study mathematics or to be an every child to have the option to be an artist or a musician. I want people to be able to run podcasts and read books and talk about things and thoughts rather than just worrying about how we're going to survive because again it's not about saving the planet
00:32:48
Speaker
And it's not about the extinction of the human race. It's about whether civilization as we know it will survive. And most of the things you've asked me about depend on and require civilization.
00:33:00
Speaker
To that end, if you don't mind, I might dovetail on this. There's actually a specific math related thing in the book that actually talks right about that. So if you don't mind going to applied mathematics, Dr. Hayo, you had just said that civilization as we know it depends on us moving away from fossil fuels and radically changing things. This comes from a quote from chapter 10 in your book. This is one of two tweets that I tweeted on the Breaking Math Twitter handle.
00:33:26
Speaker
And this one was specifically about climate modeling, which is heavily involved in mathematics and a climate modeling that you were involved with in Texas that resulted in perhaps the most radical emissions reductions under Governor Schwarzenegger. I was wondering for our breaking math listeners if you could talk a little bit about what you did with that climate modeling, how you improved the resolution, what the climate modeling showed, and what the result was in terms of government regulations.
00:33:56
Speaker
Sure. So what I do is I work with climate models, which are mathematical representations of the climate system. And we use those because we don't have other Earths to experiment with. Other scientists can actually have things to experiment with, but we don't. We only have one Earth. So we build an Earth using the most powerful supercomputers in the world,
00:34:21
Speaker
And we populate that earth with the fundamental laws of physics expressed through nonlinear fluid dynamics and radiative transfer, finite differencing, and all kinds of techniques that we learned about in math go into these giant models. And we use them to ask what if questions.
00:34:38
Speaker
What if we continue to depend on fossil fuels? What will the planet look like? And not just the planet, but what will average summer temperatures in Sacramento, California look like? The answer is Death Valley. What would California's winter snowpack that provides half their water supply look like?
00:34:57
Speaker
The answer is there'd only be 10% of it left. What would the Napa and Sonoma Valley look like for growing grapes? Well, the only place you'd really be able to grow those grapes is in the backyards of some people in San Francisco. That would be it. So those are the real world questions that we can answer with math when we use math to turn the fundamental laws of physics into a model of our planet.
Scientists as Communicators
00:35:21
Speaker
And I work a lot with statistics as well because I bring in the statistics by looking at the real observations in the places that we're concerned about and I connect the global models with the real observations at weather stations and weather stations around the world using some pretty sophisticated statistics. We look at, we sort of tease out the different signals in the data and we do a lot of Fourier transform.
00:35:43
Speaker
forms. Yes, we look at a lot of probability distributions. We do a lot of mapping on multidimensional surfaces. So we do a lot of math. We use MATLAB. We use R all the time. And all of that is being used, being harnessed for good, to figure out how our choices matter to warn everybody of what's going to happen if we don't change our ways. And so one of the most interesting books I read over the pandemic, and I read a whole ton of books,
00:36:13
Speaker
was called Scientists as Prophets. And it drew connections between the Delphic oracles of old and the scientists of today as individuals who stand slightly outside society with access to specialized knowledge that basically warn society of what will happen if they continue on their current path. We actually talked a little bit about that on episode one of our podcast, Forbidden Formulas, how elitism has embedded itself into our educational system.
00:36:41
Speaker
Um, but, um, I do have a question about, uh, your work. And now that you mentioned that, uh, the tools that they use in, um, all that kind of stuff. And I know a lot of jobs, uh, can be, um, difficult and have things that aren't worth doing about them, but is it worth being in a profession where you have to use MATLAB?
00:37:01
Speaker
Well, I am going to say that within my own research group, we have a little bit of a conflict because I'm more of an R person myself. And my top number two is a MATLAB person. And so we are constantly go back, going back and forth. And we just had an issue where MATLAB is not set up to run more than a million concurrent jobs on a parallel processing system. They just didn't code it in. But we need to run more than a million jobs. And I was like, ha.
00:37:28
Speaker
If we were doing it in R, it wouldn't be a problem. And he's actually talking to the MATLAB people. We're actually trying to get MATLAB to update their own package software because it's not meeting our needs right now. But I will say that MATLAB's visualizations are generally superior to R. And I do love the way you can sort of click and expand when you're looking at a sort of a nuance of a surface. So there's arguments to be made in both directions. And I really don't want to take sides. But if I had to, I'd go slightly in the direction of R.
00:37:55
Speaker
Matlab was, I think it came out of our alma mater. Yeah, the math department. Yeah, they're always pushing Matlab on us. So so we're very familiar with Matlab, you know, both the pros and cons of it. So the cons. Okay, I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna stop doing whatever to Matlab.
Creative Communication Through Music
00:38:12
Speaker
but uh okay okay now real quick i understand that elliot may have to go soon so i am thrilled that we have an artist on our team with breaking math we love when you can integrate math and art and i'd like to give elliot the floor where he can talk a little bit about about what you worked on and your song choice and the lyrics and then we'll play some cool songs thank you so very much so and here's i'm gonna tie it in
00:38:36
Speaker
Here's why I really wanted to be on this particular episode with Dr. Hayhoe is something that struck me about what she's really good at doing is effective communication. She is a bridger of people. Yes, I used bridge as a verb.
00:38:51
Speaker
But she brings people together and music also is one of those great cohesive forces and it's also, in my opinion, a really great way to communicate and get points across in a way that's digestible and can be joyous and can be fun.
00:39:13
Speaker
You know, and I was already thinking of music, even when Dr. Hayhoe mentioned, you know, making use of Facebook and ways to get into through social media. It's really important that you can get people's attention and keep them listening. Hey, music's kind of fun. And I've always loved music parodies. And it's not just because they are protected by the Supreme Court so you can do them without having to worry about legal issues.
00:39:43
Speaker
But there were a lot of fun. I grew up with Weird Al and the like. And so just talking with Gabriel here about what can we do, I thought, why don't we get the point across, celebrate our special guest, and show how maybe parody, when you don't make it too funny, can be taken seriously. And so all those things wrapped together. That's what I wanted to do.
00:40:10
Speaker
If it's okay, why don't I play the first two and then we could maybe talk just a smidgen about why select certain songs. Yes. Listeners, if you can guess the demographics I'm shooting for, good for you. So song choice is important here. And yeah, I will play the first two and then we'll have Elliot talk about them and why he chose those songs. Okay, without further ado.
00:40:41
Speaker
Billions this year overdone, made for greedy self-interest, dirty sky ignored. All right, so here, that was just the introductory kind of a piece. And then here's one where we get to celebrate our guests and also have a little extra fun. I recycle, drive as far spearhead.
00:41:10
Speaker
Hashtag perfect planet. Let's see if these efforts work to save us. May we check and find we'll be okay. Whoa, we're back in the hot light. No, no, no. Give it all you can. Take a stand. We'll see the sweet end. Go, go, give it all.
00:41:44
Speaker
Ho! Let's go! Hey! Ho! Let's go! Before the tunnels explode And interviewers at times I can't blame my mind So let's wake up, wake up The findings are incomplete We're sitting in your heart seat Deflating cold and high heat So let's wake up Hey! Ho! Let's go!
00:42:15
Speaker
Awesome. Thank you very much. Yes. So besides the fact that one of the songs kind of has Heyo already in it, without the doctor part. But still, yes. What would you like to discuss about choosing music for effective communication about climate change? I'm curious, can Dr. Heyo identify the songs that were selected? No problem if you can't.
00:42:42
Speaker
Living on a Prayer by Bon Jovi, and then Blitzkriegbop of the Horse by the Ramones, one of my favorite songs! Woo-hoo! Okay. Yay, I hit your demographic. Well, when you called Hey Ho, you know everything from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Naughty by Nature and everything in between that says Hey Ho. And I just, I have a little beef to pick with the Lumineers because their song is called Ho Hey, and clearly they got those two words the wrong way. It's Hey Ho.
00:43:12
Speaker
And then there's carry on my wayward son, but what were the lyrics on your what was the song called on yours Elliot? Oh, yes carry on wayward son
00:43:20
Speaker
And, I mean, that one, okay, I may have picked that one because it's from one of my wife's favorite groups, too, so Kansas. And yeah, I wouldn't mind speaking them, because that one was short. And hey, I put a little science in this one. CO2 made ton by ton. Billions this year overdone. Made for greedy, self-interest, dirty sky ignored. Wow, outstanding, outstanding. Good for you, Elliot, good for you.
00:43:49
Speaker
Yeah, so I know we have one other one, one tiny little short one, and should we go ahead and play it, or is there anything else you want to say? Oh yeah, sure. Okay, and this one's David Bowie because David Bowie's David Bowie. Well, it's me, and it's a parody, but here we go. I'm kind of wishing, you talked about avoiding the word change and changes, but I had to do David Bowie's changes, so here we go.
00:44:15
Speaker
We're oh so slow, what are we waiting for? Planet's time is running out And as we live and breathe and Every kind is thoughtful Just to save this green birthplace We've got to
Resources for Climate Communication
00:44:30
Speaker
greet As we time ourselves to agree To wide severe consequences
00:44:40
Speaker
Oh, how long you'll just meet our maker? It's much too slow to do our best. So the climate changes. Burn this place in pain. Climate changes. Catastrophe with an upper hand. So the climate changes. Shining wasted gain. Carbon draining. We're going to have to start a better plan. Time to change us.
00:45:15
Speaker
Outstanding. Thank you so much, Elliott. We greatly appreciate that. Those are awesome.
00:45:19
Speaker
Thanks for letting me share. For months, I've actually been trying to put together a climate change playlist. And so I really appreciate that. One of the songs that I wanted to do on a climate change playlist, it's a cynical one, but sometimes you got to get those feelings out. You know what I mean? What's the one that came out with the recent Justice League movie, Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows? You all know that one? Oh, yes. Yes, it is depressing. But sometimes you got to get those feelings out and at least, you know what I mean? Like make art out of it. So yeah.
00:45:48
Speaker
My favorite climate change song goes the part of it goes you're bundled up now wait till you get older The media men beg to differ judging by the hole in the satellite picture the ice we skated is getting very thin The water's getting worse. We might as well swim the world's on fire. How about yours? That's way like it would never get bored. That's my mouth. That's right. That's from Shrek, wasn't it? Made smash mouth, but anyway, okay before we move on Do you guys have any other any other climate change themed songs that you like to listen to when you're in certain moods? I
00:46:15
Speaker
So aloe black has a new song out that's all about climate change. Wow. Okay. What's it called? I'm gonna find the title right now because I don't have a title at my fingertips. Okay. I heard it on Earth Day. I was actually part of an event with him on Earth Day and it was really really great. Wow. It is called Other Side. Okay. Nice. We'll have to read the lyrics to that one. Very cool.
00:46:46
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:47:29
Speaker
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00:47:43
Speaker
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00:48:09
Speaker
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00:48:32
Speaker
So, one of the things now, if we're going to shift gears real quick back into our interview questions, there was a couple of things in the book that I really wanted to talk about. I had mentioned earlier that in preparation for this interview, I had actually gotten copies of the book and given it to certain people. Our friend who, Major Carlo Trinisi, who's in the Air Force, of course,
00:48:51
Speaker
I also have a homeschool Christian science teacher who comes from a very, very conservative background. We have an extremely cordial relationship. Very, very cordial. You have a broad range of friends beyond the average. Yeah, I'm known for that. I'm known for that. I network. I network. That's what I do. And it excites me because there's just some salient points that I think are spelled so explicitly in this book. And one of them was what I'm about to read. I actually tweeted this page. And as you know, whenever I read a book, I highlight
00:49:21
Speaker
and write notes everywhere, and I do graffiti all over the book. When I tweeted this page, we had never had more social engagement on a tweet ever. I think overnight I had 120 likes and something like 38 retweets from mostly PhDs. It was really, really, it was fascinating. Now, the page was the discussion on the study that you took part in with Norwegian scientist, and I'm sorry, I don't know that I'll say his name correctly, Rasmus Benestad, is that correct?
00:49:51
Speaker
For our listeners, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that study and how it relates to an attempt to examine our own biases and trying to address the critics, but more importantly, what your findings were.
00:50:05
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So we all suffer from biases, cognitive biases, and we all engage in motivated reasoning where we use our brains to go out and find other reasons why we're right. Not what we should think, but why what we already think is right. So as scientists, we are particularly sensitive to this. And also, we always want to check everything. People often don't realize that scientists are actually extremely conservative in the true sense of the word.
00:50:34
Speaker
We want to be very, very, very, very, very, very sure about things. I don't even know how many varies that were, but I think I might need a couple more varies to really be accurate. So, so Rasmus Benestad and a number of us decided a few years ago to take the scientific studies that have been published in the scientific literature, which means they had to undergo peer review. They had to be reviewed by at least two other scientists before they were published.
00:50:59
Speaker
that found either that climate was not changing or that humans were not responsible. It was just the sun or natural cycles or something else. Now, just for context, there have been over 3 million scientific studies published finding that climate is changing, humans are responsible, and the impacts are serious, 3 million. But over the last 10 years, there were 38 studies published that concluded either that climate wasn't changing or that humans weren't responsible.
00:51:26
Speaker
So we wanted to scratch that last itch and find out, do they have a leg to stand on? Do they have a toe to stand on? Do they even have a toe nail to stand on? When it comes to saying that, you know, we haven't checked in every place or every corner, there's something we haven't considered. So we took these 38 studies and here's the crazy part. We deconstructed them.
00:51:47
Speaker
and recalculated every single one from scratch. That's like doing 38 separate studies just for one. And I'm sorry to say we didn't use MATLAB, we used R to do this.
00:52:04
Speaker
R is better. Okay. We used R and Rasmus did the bulk of the work because he is an absolute R wizard. He has written many R packages and we all followed behind checking his work because we wanted to make sure that, you know, we were actually looking at everything that they looked at.
00:52:20
Speaker
And you know what we found? In every single one of the 38 studies that we examined, we found at least one error. And in some cases, it might be a mathematical error. In some cases, it was the fact that they left out a factor that they shouldn't have left out. They made an assumption that was incorrect. They didn't calculate something the right way.
00:52:41
Speaker
In every single one, we identified a quantitative error that if you fixed that mistake, and some of them had more than one's mistake, obviously, but if you fixed that mistake, it actually brought their results completely in line with the three million other studies that have already been published. I mean, does that not just blow your mind?
00:52:59
Speaker
I mean, that's like, um, that's like one of those science things where it's like, you know, like you hope to have a P value of less than, you know, a certain amount. And it sounds like like you, that kind of thing where it's like, Oh, the P value is like the same as it is for like measuring matter. Well, not really, but cause I know the P value for that is what like 10 to the negative 15th negative 20th. Anyway.
00:53:18
Speaker
Yes. I've actually pinned that tweet, and I know that thankfully, thank you for responding to that. You responded to it with a link to the article, which is awesome. So if any of our listeners would like to read the study, it's linked on the pinned tweet on our Twitter. It's also available elsewhere. It may be behind a paywall. Is it behind a paywall? Do you know?
00:53:37
Speaker
No, we made it freely available and it was actually it's one of the most downloaded if not the most downloaded study for the journal that we published it Oh, okay Wow, that's phenomenal. That's phenomenal. Um, I had a quick question unless anybody else okay, so earlier today I was watching on my lunch break at work the the YouTube show today and you were talking about some upcoming Projects you're doing with the book including a workbook. Can you tell us a little bit about what you have upcoming with this book?
00:54:05
Speaker
Oh, yes. So what I'm doing with this book is I'm creating all kinds of free resources for people to be able to use the book. So I'm making discussion questions if they want to use the book for a reading circle. That's a great way to have a conversation is just say, hey, let's read the book together. And I'm making short videos to go with each section. So there's five sections in the book and I'm making a short video for each section. So if you have a book club and you like to watch videos,
00:54:27
Speaker
You can read the book, you can discuss it with the questions, and then you can watch the video. And then for people who want to use it in the classroom, I am also making classroom activities to go with each section of the book and an annotated reading list.
00:54:42
Speaker
So if you want the students to go and actually read some of the original journal articles I talk about, like the one that we were just talking about that I did with Rasmus, or some of the social science studies that talk about motivated reasoning and cognitive biases, or the new study I just described to you that we did with Yale University where we
00:54:59
Speaker
put those four short videos that started from a conservative frame on social media. I annotated reading lists so that people can dig deeper and they can actually engage with students in the classroom. And so that's what I'm working on. And my aim is to have it all available by January so people can start using it in the new year.
Transition to Sustainable Energy
00:55:15
Speaker
Oh, that's fabulous. I wanted to make sure to include resources on this episode because this episode is very, very close to my heart, to all of our hearts, obviously. So thank you for that. Thank you for adjusting my mic. Yes. So speaking of resources, something else that you pointed in my direction was the YouTube series, Years of Living Dangerously. You know why I love that YouTube series?
00:55:37
Speaker
Okay, outstanding visuals that are very helpful Short videos each thing is what like three to five minutes. Is that it? Are you talking about global weird? No, no. Well, there's that but there's also There's a years of living dangerously YouTube page and every video is like under five minutes, you know, that's fantastic You got Arnold Schwarzenegger had a whole they had a whole
00:56:00
Speaker
TV series that actually won an Emmy, which was amazing. That's right. But then they did something super smart was they took the long segments of the TV series and they made these super short little videos on YouTube that are a lot easier and quicker to watch. And that's what you're referring to. And those are awesome. Yes. Yes. Thank you. I'm just I'm trying to give resources. Yeah. Yeah. And I couldn't it was hard for me to find the original series. I hope I can find them all. I think they're behind another paywall or something. I don't know. I'll search. But yes, you also have your YouTube show global weirding. And I believe you're working on your final season. Is that correct?
00:56:29
Speaker
I am. Yes. We have two more videos left to do. Oh, fantastic. Oh, okay. Very cool. I have it pegged. I haven't gotten my alerts yet for the new episodes. I'll have to go back and check those out. Oh, no. Yeah. We haven't put them up yet, but we're working on them. Okay. Cool. Cool. Very good. Okay. I feel like I'm hogging the mic. Do you guys have any other questions?
00:56:48
Speaker
I just had a couple of questions about the economics of climate change. So it strikes me. I mean, Gabriel, you said you were listening to a podcast a couple of days ago where they talked about climate change doulas and stuff, and that made me think of a question. Do you want to just plug that real quick?
00:57:05
Speaker
Oh, so this was actually an earlier interview, in fact, with Dr. Hayhoe. It was on the YouTube, well, I saw it on YouTube. I don't know where all the streams. The JFK Library, there was somebody interviewing you, and she's a host of a PBS Nova series on YouTube as well. And her name, I have it in my notes, and I'm gonna say it wrong. She brought up a fantastic analogy, and I keep track of outstanding science analogies. And one of the things that she brought up was,
00:57:31
Speaker
kind of a double metaphor. He talked about the world's relationship with fossil fuels being kind of like somebody being in an abusive relationship and they just don't want to see it and they don't want to face it and all their friends are talking to them about how bad this relationship is and their own mental gymnastics just don't want to face it. And then she said sometimes people need a breakup doula if that conversation rings a bell, right?
00:57:59
Speaker
And she talked about you being America's breakup doula with fossil fuels. I thought that analogy was so rich, I wanted to plug it on this podcast. Oh my goodness, yes. She was awesome. We had such a good discussion. And of course, she's an accomplished writer and journalist herself. And so she had so many good things to say. And I love that. It's like breaking up. And you know what? Our relationship with fossil fuels was originally a good one. So fossil fuels brought us into the industrial era.
00:58:28
Speaker
Fossil fuels provided us with so many of the benefits that we appreciate today. I mean, just imagine what your life would be like with no electricity, no refrigeration, no way to travel other than your foot or horse. A woman's day then was an endless, endless day of drudgery and chores.
00:58:48
Speaker
It was very rare for women to be educated and we didn't have the vote. It was very difficult to travel. It was very difficult for anybody to be educated if you weren't upper class or middle class. It was a very, very different life before the Industrial Revolution. And thanks to the Industrial Revolution.
00:59:03
Speaker
We live twice as long now as we used to. The average lifespan in the most civilized country in the world, 200 years ago, the UK at that time, in the Western world, I should say, to be specific, was 40 years. And now our average lifetime is 80 years. And so we live longer. We have much higher quality of life. We have much better medicine. We have much more opportunities to
00:59:25
Speaker
pursue the careers that you spoke about, artistic careers, studying math, doing the things that we want to do. And all of that came about because of fossil fuels. And so when I talk about fossil fuels, and I actually have a global weirding episode that does that, I say that I am profoundly grateful for the fossil fuels and the benefits they brought us.
00:59:44
Speaker
But now it's time to end that relationship. It is time to break up with gratitude for what they brought us, but with awareness that this is not a healthy relationship at all. And in fact, now fossil fuels are actively harming us and it's time to move on to something better.
01:00:23
Speaker
What I know about people who get off of opiates is that a lot of times mindfulness exercises are a big part of it. A big part of it is acknowledging. There's all these soft skills that are used to treat what essentially is a neurochemical problem where
01:00:27
Speaker
which is clean sources of energy.
01:00:44
Speaker
You have homeostasis normally, but if you are supplied with constant zaps to your pleasure cortex, you get into a state known by some researchers as allostasis, where you expect something more and more. And I guess my question is, do you think some of the soft skills that we have learned, especially over the last 10 years about addiction, could apply to either creating media, creating approaches or campaigns, whatever.
01:01:10
Speaker
For ending our addiction to oil well I think that that's very insightful because that's another good example of something that is originally provided provided benefits very necessary benefits, but as with almost anything too much
01:01:27
Speaker
is not good. And the journalist I was speaking with before at the JFK Library event, her name is Ray McTuffee, and that she's the one who came up with the climate doula, or the breakup doula idea. I think you're right. I think that right now the issue we have is that it's not a lack of scientific understanding of the problem. We have known since the 1800s that digging up and burning coal and gas and oil is wrapping an extra blanket around the planet, causing it to warm.
01:01:57
Speaker
In the 1930s, scientists actually measured the warming of the planet. By the 1960s, scientists were so worried that they officially warned a US president, and that was Lyndon B. Johnson, of the dangers of climate change and the urgency of climate action. So why are we in the mess that we're in
Engaging Diverse Audiences
01:02:13
Speaker
today? It's not because we lack physical science. It's because we lack an understanding and an implementation of how we as humans
01:02:21
Speaker
interact with difficult, challenging, thorny issues. And we have a lot to learn from psychology, from mediation, from, I think, addiction therapy, like you said, is probably a good place to go to. There's a lot of psychologists who are studying anxiety, which a lot of people experience in relationship to climate change, and, of course, denial as well. And so in my book, it's interesting. I think the top one-star review for my book
01:02:51
Speaker
on Amazon, authors always get one-star reviews, is one where it's not from somebody who rejects climate science, it's from somebody who is so panicked that they were outraged that I wrote a book about emotions and psychology and feelings when all we need to do is act. We just need to act. We need a book that just says act.
01:03:14
Speaker
And they were outraged that I was talking about these other sort of, you know, touchy feely things when we just need to act. Well, first of all, obviously, I agree, we just need to act. But why aren't we acting? It's because of our psychology. And so that's why I'm a physical climate scientist. But in the whole book, there was only really one chapter on the physical science, maybe two if you count when I talk about what I was doing for California.
01:03:36
Speaker
But the rest of the book was all about the social science, the psychology of how we interact with information and how we confront existential threats, which in a nutshell is not well.
01:03:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's hard not to see the problem as focused away from the global worker and towards an issue of global capital. But it's really interesting to see the kind of people who can be swayed, who's doing what about it and all this stuff. And it's definitely a thorny problem. I mean, Meryl, do you have any more questions? How about you, Gabriel? Because I do have a couple.
01:04:12
Speaker
So I actually do have one. One of the reasons I was excited to find out that you were going to be on the podcast is that I'm actually a Red Raider myself. I went to Texas Tech for my undergraduate. That's amazing. Yeah, so I did math and computer engineering there. And what I'm a little bit curious about is, do you know of any climate-related work? Do you do any sort of work with those departments in particular?
01:04:40
Speaker
I do. So I actually just gave a seminar a couple months ago to the math and statistics department at Texas Tech University and for many years one of my graduate students was always from Alex Trindad who's one of the faculty there in math and statistics. I always had one of his graduate students working with me because I need somebody who has a solid grounding in math and statistics to do a lot of the work that I do.
01:05:03
Speaker
So that it's a very small world and there's so many points of connection. I love that you brought that up. So when I came to Texas Tech, I've been there for 15 years now. I was the only person doing anything related to climate science there. I was all by myself and I really struggled to find a place because the reason I ended up there was because they wanted my husband. I was the plus one who came along for the ride, so to speak.
01:05:27
Speaker
So I found some friendly faces, some people over in the biology department who were studying ecosystems and how they responded to warmer temperatures. And together we sort of built on that foundation, applied for grants, ended up hosting a climate science center, which is partially supported by the Department of Interior. And now we have a climate center at Texas Tech University, which as you know, Lubbock is the second most conservative city in the whole US, politically speaking. Provo Utah number one, Lubbock number two.
01:05:57
Speaker
We have a climate center that has faculty associates from over 50 faculty associates from just about every department and just about every college in the whole university.
01:06:09
Speaker
Is that not amazing? And I just really feel like if we can do something like that in West Texas, the heart of oil and gas and cotton country, can't we do it anywhere? And how do you do it? By doing the most important thing every single one of us can do, which is using our voice to talk about why it matters and what each of us can do to help fix it. Awesome. And I think that's a really good last thought to end none. And I do have one last minor question to ask. What is your favorite weather fact?
01:06:38
Speaker
Oh, so I love seeing amazing phenomena in the sky. And just the other day, I got to see the most fantastic set of anti-crepuscular rays I had ever seen. So crepuscular rays are rays that appear to be coming out from the sun, shooting out from the sun.
01:06:57
Speaker
They are actually parallel, but because of a trick of perspective, they appear as if they're coming out from the sun. Well, anti-crepuscular rays happen when the sun drops below the horizon, but of course the light is still refracting into the sky. And if you look at the opposite point from the sun, so the sun's below the horizon, but you look at the anti-sun point in the sky, you see these rays shooting out from it across the
01:07:21
Speaker
the sky and it's just absolutely amazing. There's so many phenomenons. If you just open your eyes and you look at the sky, you can be amazed almost every single day with what you see because nature is incredible. And what is really amazing is we can explain what we see using math and physics.
01:07:41
Speaker
All right, so Dr. Catherine Hayhoe, thank you so much for being on Breaking Math today. Elliot had to drop off early, so I am Sofia. And I'm Gabriel. And I'm Meryl. And this has been Breaking Math. If you would like, the holidays are coming up. We have a poster for sale. Just go to Facebook.com slash Breaking Math podcast. We actually sent one of these posters to Dr. Catherine Hayhoe. Two. Two of them. I accidentally gave you two in case you have any friends who may want one as well.
01:08:10
Speaker
I do that sometimes. And actually there is one last thing that I wanted to say as well. This has been an absolute pleasure. I have gotten into podcasting for a few reasons. I could talk about my conservative family members that are lost to Fox News and things that I find very, very hurtful and frankly scary.
01:08:29
Speaker
To that end, we've had some success with Breaking Math that has been remarkable locally, as well as the world over. We have contacts right now with Albuquerque Public Schools. We're in an active relationship with them to build podcasting as a platform. We have a great relationship with the University of New Mexico Communications Department and many others. I find that I'm actually called to be more of a journalist than an engineer.
01:08:53
Speaker
And as this is a passion issue for me, I'm constantly thinking about what I can do to get people having the conversation more and to what ways we can use podcasting and our partners that we're working with to do this more. I don't have a comment more than that, but we're trying and we appreciate you coming on this show. And yeah, anything that we can do with ourselves or any of our partners, just, you know, can I say, let us know?
01:09:20
Speaker
You're bugging the table. Oh, sorry. My bad. I keep walking the table. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, I'm just thrilled to have you on the show We've had dr. John cook on the show as well last year. I have his book to see his book, too Yeah
01:09:34
Speaker
Yes. So so yeah, it's great. It's great. And also I look forward to the feedback from my I don't know, like five people across the political spectrum who all read it. So I'll have feedback. I'll probably send it to Laura from all
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
01:09:45
Speaker
of them. So yeah, I guess I would love that. I love that you you have your colleague who's in the armed forces. You sent you all those notes about how the military cares about climate change because they do. And you know what I found is
01:09:55
Speaker
No matter where you are, there's always people who care. So when we start viewing governments or companies or organizations as monoliths, then we lose sight of the fact that there's people inside who want to make a difference. And there's people outside who want to make a difference. And there's people sort of connected who want to make a difference. And how we make a difference is each of us working where we are. And so even in, we talked about the oil and gas industry.
01:10:22
Speaker
and how they're so responsible for the majority of the carbon emissions. But inside the oil and gas industry, there are amazing people who are working to transform our energy industry into clean energy, using the skills and the abilities and the resources that they have inside that industry. And inside the military, there's amazing people who are working to turn that ship around and make it independent and clean energy. And inside the government, there's people. And inside churches, there's people everywhere really working to make a difference. And when we're able to focus on what we have in common rather than what divides us,
01:10:51
Speaker
I feel like that's where we can really make progress in the world. And that's, it sounds like exactly what you're doing with this podcast, right? Yes, indeed. At least I hope so. That's the hope. We're going to keep trying. And if I could just say, I'm so impressed with Pumpkin. She just sat there so quietly right there. Whereas my cat was being a total past. He was like pulling down cords and everything. And he just finally decided to go to sleep, but I'll pull him over here to say goodbye. Just a second. So here's Dr. Riebel.
01:11:25
Speaker
If I were at home I would have a cat but I do not no cats here not in the studio I'd love to have one but oh well Yeah, so cool very good