http://thinkprogress.org/clima...tar-showtime-series/
BY KILEY KROH ON APRIL 14, 2014 AT 11:11 AM
On a recent Washington, DC evening, a few hundred people gathered to catch a sneak peak of Showtime’s new star-studded series on climate change. The surprisingly action-packed first episode of “Years Of Living Dangerously” featured big names doing bigger things: In one scene, Harrison Ford helicopters over the scorched forests of Indonesia. In another, Thomas Friedman interviews rebel fighters in war-torn, drought-ridden Syria. But when the audience stepped out into the unseasonably warm night, people were buzzing about one person they’d never seen on the big screen before.
An evangelical Christian, married to a pastor, living in conservative West Texas, and widely regarded as a top-notch climate scientist, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is a rare breed on paper — in person, she’s even rarer. Deftly moving between topics like science, religion, and gender with equal parts insight and levity, Hayhoe is an unassuming force of nature.
“I’ve never heard of anyone like Katharine Hayhoe,” actor Don Cheadle remarks before meeting her in the episode.
Science has been a guiding force in Hayhoe’s life for as long as she can remember. One of her earliest memories comes at just four years old, lying on a blanket with her father, a science educator, out long past her bedtime so he could show her how to find the Andromeda galaxy with binoculars. Family vacations involved driving from Canada all the way to the Outer Banks in North Carolina to catch a glimpse of Haley’s comet, simply because that was the only place you could see it. “That kind of gives you a picture of the level of commitment,” Hayhoe laughed.
As the brother to six sisters and father to three daughters, Hayhoe describes her father as “gender blind,” meaning she was never hindered by the feeling girls often have “that science is too hard or isn’t a girl’s thing.” When she was nine, her family moved to Cali, Colombia, where both of her parents taught and worked with the local church. Raised by missionaries and teachers, Christianity has always been a fundamental part of Hayhoe’s life — something she simply never saw as being at odds with her passion for science.
While attending graduate school, Hayhoe met Andrew Farley, a Ph.D. student who was a member of the same Christian student group. Even when Hayhoe moved back to Toronto to work as a consultant after completing her master’s degree, the two remained good friends. After a couple years, Farley and Hayhoe ended up getting together and the two were married in 2000. Having known each other for years, “we just assumed that we had most of our values in common,” Hayhoe recalls, but “it wasn’t until after we got married that we realized how different we were.”
One of the ways we realized we were different … was that he didn’t think climate change was real.
“One of the ways we realized we were different, besides the fact that I did not keep butter in the fridge and he did,” Hayhoe said, “was that he didn’t think climate change was real.” After pausing for the surprise she knew would follow, Hayhoe offered an explanation: “I, growing up in Canada, had never really met anybody that didn’t think it was real and he, growing up in Virginia and going to southern Baptist school, had never met anybody who did think it was real.”
Farley and Hayhoe found themselves at an impasse. They both respected the other person, not only as researchers and academics, but as people who shared the same deep faith. If those things were true, then they had to talk about it. Eventually, Farley came around, but it wasn’t easy. “We are both first borns who love to argue and will not back down,” Hayhoe said. In all, Hayhoe guesses Farley, her first climate change convert, took about two years to convince — though she notes “it wasn’t like we talked about this every day.”
“A lot of my political opinions are Republican,” Farley tells Cheadle from the couple’s kitchen table. “The politics, the questions about God, and then the climate change — it’s all just become this ball of sound bites and people can’t parse it out.”
The tipping point for Farley? When the two went to the NASA website, downloaded global temperature data, and plotted it on their own computer. “It was clearly going up,” Hayhoe said, so “he had to decide, was NASA, the organization that put people on the moon, involved in some worldwide massive hoax or were they telling the truth?”
The same data, simply plotted, makes an appearance in the Showtime episode. “We see that temperature and carbon dioxide track together,” Hayhoe tells Cheadle, running her finger along the jagged line to the sharp uptick at the end. “We also see that right now we are way out of the ballpark.”
In hindsight, Hayhoe recognizes that the hours spent debating climate science with her husband were critical to sharpening her understanding of the fundamental science behind climate change and, perhaps more importantly, her ability to communicate it to a doubtful audience.
The science is there, it’s been around and it’s not getting through so what’s the point of publishing another paper or 10 more papers?
Climate science wasn’t always Hayhoe’s chosen path. When it came time to go to college, she dove straight into her favorite subject, astrophysics. Looking to fulfill a course requirement, she saw a class on climate change and recalls thinking, “Why don’t I take that? It doesn’t sound too hard.” Not only was she immediately blown away by the fact that climate science was grounded in physics, but even more so by the urgency of the problem, “and this was way back in the early 1990s.”
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so says the party of 'faith based politics'.
