Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

"I really like Katharine Hayhoe as a communicator. She is a climate scientist as well as an evangelical Christian and a Canadian who lives in Texas, so she covers a lot of ground. This book was written on the back of a TED talk she gave that almost four million people have viewed. She is someone who uses all of the channels and mechanisms that she can to get the word out, which I heartily approve of. It’s not a literary book. I would say it’s a how-to manual, in a sense. It could be subtitled ‘how to talk to people about climate change’. One of the things she says that has stayed with me the most is also the simplest, which is that the most important thing any of us can do about climate change is talk about it. In this book, she shows why that’s important and how to go about it. To explain why it’s important, she refers to a classification system put together by two researchers, Tony Leiserowitz and Ed Maibach, on what they call “ Global Warming’s Six Americas “. Instead of thinking about climate ‘deniers’ and climate ‘believers’, they have done research that divides members of the American public into six groups when it comes to climate change, ranging from alarmed, to concerned, to cautious, to disengaged, to doubtful, to dismissive. That’s a lot of groups. The percentages of people that fall into the groups has been changing, but essentially the people who are alarmed and concerned are growing and people at the other end are dropping. What Katharine Hayhoe says is, ‘Sometimes you have to know when you can’t engage. You’re never going to convince the dismissives, but they’re only 7% of the population, so forget about them. The good news is that 93% of people can be engaged with in some way.’ That’s her starting point, that it’s not about polarization. It’s not about us, or them. It’s about this spectrum. And if we think about moving people along the spectrum, any bit that we can move them along is a good thing. She’s very practical. It’s not about absolutes. It’s about meeting people where they are. Right. And if you’re meeting with members of the Texas Water Development Board, who are politically very conservative, talk about water data, because that’s going to speak to them. Or if your grandmother is a knitter, you can knit a scarf with her that has the warming stripes on it and talk about the warming stripes. It’s really founded on a deep and yet very practical empathy. Ask yourself, ‘What does this person care about?’ and connect with them on that. “The most important thing you can do is talk about climate change” For Hayhoe, I think that’s based on a Christian faith, that to be a good Christian is to evince love and caring for others, and notably others who are poorer and less well off than we are. But of course those values aren’t only held by Christians. So we need to think not just about people in our local communities, but also about the impact that climate change will have globally. But she’s very resolute about keeping it close to home. Part of the reason that people have been paralyzed in terms of how to act on climate change, she suggests, is because it seems abstract and distant. She’s really a genius, I think, at finding points of common values—which are always going to vary, they won’t all be the same—and continuing to find the energy to find those points of contact. That, to me, really is very inspiring. This comes back to the problem with issues that are seen as scientific. Certain people want them to be disposed of by facts. What Hayhoe shows in this book, over and over again, is that facts aren’t enough. They’re not irrelevant. She’s very clear that when it comes to the kinds of conversations you might have with people on this spectrum, you might start with a very brief and factual rebuttal of certain myths and arguments that might be put forward against climate change. But she says not to spend too long on that, and not to get distracted by it. Very quickly, what you need to do next—which is much, much more important—is show what people can do. Give them practical responses that they can take so that they’re not confronted with so-called facts that leave them feeling impotent or angry. The facts are preliminary and necessary, but completely insufficient not just to motivating action, but generating this shared set of values that are necessary to achieve common political will on so many issues. Sometimes you have to know when you’re not the one to make the connection. You have to meet people not just where they are, but where you are. So find out what matters to you: if you love having dinner parties, have people over to dinner and talk to them about where the food has come from, or if you love gardening, connect with other gardeners…In a way, there’s really no excuse for not doing it. It’s a very optimistic vision of engagement, I suppose, but I think we need the example of that kind of optimism because it’s so easy to be paralyzed by a sense of overwhelming pessimism. Katharine Hayhoe is not naive about the challenges we face, both in terms of the physics of climate change and the politics of climate change, the tribalism that confronts us when we try and act. But she has been able to show not just the positive outcomes of this kind of approach, but the scale of the outcomes that you can achieve. She gives the example of someone in Wandsworth, in London, who heard her say that the most important thing you can do is talk about climate change. He sent her an email saying that he had taken that to heart and had recorded the number of conversations he’d had, and the conversations that those conversations had begotten, and it was more than ten thousand. A big part of the impact of this is that we need to keep sharing, we need to keep motivating each other with these good news stories. In a way, what she’s showing is that addressing climate change is partly a communications issue. I have a lot of sympathy with that view. It happens that she’s an excellent climate scientist as well as an excellent communicator and that gives her a kind of authority. But I think if we take seriously what she’s saying, hopefully we’ll need the authority of climate scientists less and less going into the future, and we can all be advocates for our own portion of the planet, as it were. It’s not just the climate scientists who speak on behalf of the planet, it’s potentially each of us."