Please note due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate

Good Earth

Media – Katherine Hayhoe

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s Katharine Hayhoe. She’s a climate scientist (an atmospheric scientist to be exact) and professor of political science at Texas Tech University. She’s also an evangelical Christian – the daughter of missionaries, and the wife of a Texan pastor.  That can lead to some pretty interesting conversations …

Media – Katherine Hayhoe

John Dickson (Studio)

Professor Hayhoe is a bit of a rock star in the climate world. Her superpower – to change metaphors – is the ability to talk to just about anyone about climate change. Her 2018 Ted Talk – arguing that the most important thing you could do for climate change is just talk about it –  has been viewed three and a half million times. She told Rolling Stone magazine earlier this year that she’s not so much trying to convert people to the climate cause … as show them that they already care. She’s been called a national treasure by the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. The New York Times labelled her one of America’s most effective communicators on the topic. She’s been given the United Nation’s highest environmental honour, declared a ‘Champion of the Earth’.  It was someone on Twitter who first introduced me to Catherine and suggested we have her on the show – so thanks for that … you know who you are. A year later, we eventually made it happen. And, boy, am I glad we did. It’s a fraught topic – I know that – whatever side you’re on – but Professor Hayhoe says it doesn’t have to be. I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.

 

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson:
I know you’re a pro, so I’ll just get on with the interview. Stop jabbering. Uh, you talk about climate change for a living. So what’s your elevator pitch. When you’ve got 30 seconds to say what you do?

Katherin Hayhoe:
Our planet has a natural blanket of heat trapping gases that keep us over 30 degrees warmer than we would be. Otherwise. In fact, we would be a frozen ball of ice if it weren’t for this natural blanket. So if it’s natural, what’s the problem. The problem is that by digging up coal and then natural gas and oil and burning it, we are releasing heat trapping, gasses that are wrapping an extra blanket around our planet that it does not need. And just like you would, if someone snuck into your room at night and put an extra blanket on you, you would heat up and say, Hey, I didn’t need this extra blanket in the same way. Our planet is heating up too.

John Dickson:
And what’s the problem with that?

Katherine Hayhoe:
Our planet has been warmer and cooler in the past, but for us humans, our climate over the course of human civilization has been remarkably stable, just like Goldilocks. We don’t want it too hot. We don’t want it too cold. We want it just right. But today climate is changing faster than any time in the history of our civilization on this planet and our agricultural systems, our water systems, our infrastructure, our public services, our economy, where and how we build our homes. All of this is predicated on the assumption of a stable climate. And that assumption has been accurate over the last hundreds and even thousands of years, but it’s no longer accurate today. 

John Dickson (Studio)

Christianity has a weird relationship to the climate cause. On the one hand, in theory they have more reason than most to care for the Earth — they believe it is God’s good creation, after all. On the other hand, quite a number of the faithful are … sceptical about climate change. This is nowhere more pronounced than in the United States, where a Pew Research poll found that only a third of white evangelical protestants believed climate change was the result of human activity. Two-thirds doubt it. So what’s going on here? 

Katherine Hayhoe: 
Those surveys also find that white Catholics are just as resistant as white evangelicals, whereas Hispanic Catholics in the United States are among the most concerned people about climate change and black Protestants are also quite concerned as well. So when social scientists, and this is what social scientists do when they start to disentangle that to figure out well, what’s driving that it turns out it is not where you go to church on Sunday or Saturday or not at all, that’s causing this. And you can see this from the fact that Hispanic Catholics and white Catholics end up at polar opposite ends of the spectrum. Because of course they have the same Pope don’t they? And didn’t that Pope write a full encyclical back in 2015, talking about climate change and our common home as he called it and our responsibility as Christians to care for the poorest and most vulnerable people who share this home with us. So how can you call yourself a Catholic if you don’t actually agree with what the Pope says? Well, this is what social scientists have found that when it comes to extremely politicized and contentious issues like climate change and in the United States, climate change has been at the very top of the list of the most politicized issues in the country for years. And sadly it is heading in that direction in Canada, in Australia and the UK and beyond as well. Climate change has been at the top of that list. And so for very politicized issues, it is not our theology that dictates our opinion. It is our politics and in the United States, unfortunately, there has been an increasingly strong Alliance between conservative politics and the Christian faith that began over issues of race. They continued over issues of right to life. And now they have expanded to include issues of climate change as well, to where now the number one predictor of whether you agree with simple facts that we’ve known from science since the 18 hundreds is not how educated you are, not how much science, you know, not how smart you are, and definitely not where you go to church. It is simply where we fall on the political spectrum.

John Dickson (Studio)

Regardless of where you fall on that political spectrum, Katharine says climate change is not about belief. There are undisputed facts about climate change. There are some things we simply shouldn’t be arguing about anymore. 

Rachel Hayhoe:
We scientists love to argue, and we are still arguing today, but we’re not arguing over whether climate is changing and humans are responsible because that argument was put to bed a hundred years ago. That’s how long we’ve known that digging up and burning coal and gas and oil was wrapping this extra blanket around the planet. Today. We are arguing over things like will Greenland melt in a hundred years or 200 years. will sea level rise by three feet or eight feet during our lifetime. These are the types of arguments scientists are having today. And none of them are good news.

Media – AOC

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – or AOC as she’s also known – a member of the US House of Representatives from New York’s 14th district and the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. My youngest daughter thinks she rocks! (I think she saw her in a tick tok video or something) AOC made those remarks at the beginning of 2019 and was immediately tagged by the conservative press as an alarmist. Others rushed to her defence, arguing that while we can quibble about AOC’s choice of words, the crux of what she said is true: the world as we know it might soon end. Katharine’s adamant that’s not what people need to hear. 

Katherine Hayhoe:
No, I don’t think it’s the right message either scientifically or from a communication perspective, because if the world is going to end anyways, why should we do anything to fix it? Right? Um, eat, drink, and be married for tomorrow. We die as Solomon said. And joining us now is XXX, Deputy Administrator of the EPA. Welcome. Mr Westbrook, you’ve spent most of your professional career as a climate scientist in the public sector. Yes….” 

John Dickson (Studio)

You’re listening now to part of an episode from season three of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. (It’s not quite the West Wing – but it’s pretty good). The main character, Will McAvoy is a news anchor for a major broadcaster – basically CNN – and he’s introducing his next interviewee, a spokesperson from the Environmental Protection Agency in the US).  It’s based on real events. In 2013, reports circulated that the world was about to pass a long-feared milestone: the global concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about to exceed 400 points per million. That’s a level not seen on the earth for millions of years. What you missed are the faces on the actors in the studio while the interview is going on. They are shell shocked. A guy has just come on TV to say there’s nothing that can be done. The situation is hopeless. It’s the type of news that would normally send the fictitious Will McEvoy home for a stiff drink. Except in the show there’s no follow up. It’s just left hanging … A government official announces Doomsday on national TV, … and then, we just move right along. Which, by the way, is exactly Katharine’s point about the dangers of alarmist messages: it actually creates apathy.  The world did pass 400 points per million of CO2 in the atmosphere in 2013. A few months ago, in June 2020, The New York Times reported the latest atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide: 417.2 parts per million.  So, is now the time to panic? The Yale Environment 360 Magazine (which is pretty authoritative) says there’s nothing particularly magical about the number 400 for CO2 levels. It served as a symbolic target – a red line which, when crossed, indicates a danger zone for climate change. (We’ll put a link in the show notes). Anyway, Katharine agrees. 

Katherine Hayhoe:
… but also scientifically we know that there’s no magic number or magic threshold. So if we could stay below one and a half degrees or two degrees, that doesn’t mean that everything will be okay. We are already experiencing the impacts of climate change today. Climate change is supersizing the bushfires that Australia experienced in early 2020. The wildfires that California and Oregon are experiencing now in late 2020 climate change is supersizing the hurricanes that hit the Gulf coast of the U S the typhoons and the cyclones elsewhere. It’s increasing the risk of heavy precipitation events of flooding. It’s making our droughts longer and stronger and increasing our extreme heat. Many of the impacts are already here today, but we do know that the faster we reduce our carbon emissions, the better off we will be. It’s like, there’s no magic number of cigarettes. You can smoke to prevent all lung damage other than zero. And you can’t just smoke 9,999 cigarettes. But as long as you don’t smoke number 10,000, you’ll be okay. That’s not the way it works in the same way. There’s no magic amount of carbon we can produce other than zero to still be okay. But we do know that the best time to stop smoking is as soon as possible. And in the same way, we know that the best time to start reducing our carbon emissions is now. And the more we reduce them and the faster we do it, the better off.

Media – Michael Shellenberger

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s environmentalist Michael Shellenberger being interviewed on Sky News Australia. Earlier this year, Shellenberger wrote an essay that made the front page of Australia’s national broadsheet, The Australian. The piece was titled Sorry, but I cried wolf on climate change. In it he wrote, “On behalf of environmentalists everywhere I’d like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created.” He’s also written a book called Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. 

Media – Michael Shellenberger

Katherine Hayhoe:
Well, I am a scientist. And on behalf of scientists, I would like to say that it is very likely to be worse. Not better than the science says, I can not speak to environmentalist. I can not speak to people who have degrees in global peace studies like he does, but I can speak to scientists who have been studying this since the 18 hundreds. And what we know is it is real. It is definitely human costs. The impacts are serious. And if there will be any surprises in what science knows today, those surprises are unfortunately likely to worse rather than better Greenland melting six times faster than it was in the 1990s sea level, rising faster hurricanes, getting super-sized Bush fires, burning much greater area than we imagined in February. I was having dinner with one of my colleagues who studies wildfire around the world. And he was nearly in tears over how scientifically we have underestimated the rate at which human caused climate change is affecting wildfires.

 

John Dickson (Studio)

It was almost exactly a year ago today that the Gospers Mountain ‘megafire’ started in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, my home state. It was called “The Monster” and it was Australia’s biggest ever bushfire started from a single ignition point. All it took was a series of unseasonably hot days in October and a bolt of lightning. The fire raged for two and half months before firefighters could declare it contained. In that time, ‘the monster’ had destroyed an area of 1.2 million acres – that’s seven times the size of Singapore. It’s larger than the state of Rhode Island in the US. That’s just one bushfire. Across Australia last summer, in the most catastrophic bushfire season we’ve ever had, nearly 42 million acres were burned. California also set a new record in its wildfire season. 4 million acres burned, making it the state’s worst fire season. And that number will grow. As we’re recording this, the August Complex megafire in the Coast range of Northern California is still not completely contained. We’re thinking of our listeners up in Northern California and Oregon – I hope you’re safe.  

Katherine Hayhoe: 
Climate change doesn’t cause a wildfire to happen. Wildfires are ignited by lightning or by generally human accidents or occasionally by arson, but not nearly as much as the, uh, disinformation circling the internet claims. But once those wildfires are ignited, here’s where climate change comes in. Imagine tossing a match on a pile of Greenwood, what happens very little, it kind of smokes at smolders. You might get a little bit of burning, but not much then imagine if it matches, tossed on top of a pile of dry brush, it ignites immediately. It turns into a bonfire and sparks might even fly off and start fires in the surroundings. That’s the difference between a regular condition versus climate change. Climate change is leading to drier vegetation, drier conditions, such that when those wildfires and bushfires begin, they’re burning much greater area today than they used to 50 or a hundred years ago.

John Dickson (Studio)

Australia is heading into a new bushfire season right now. Lord, have mercy! In 1967, historian Lynn White wrote an influential piece in the journal Science basically blaming the Christian worldview for the state of the environment today. Could Christianity be to blame for the wildfires? For the ever-increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere? Find out, after the break.  

Break 1

John Dickson: 
Way back in 1967, the historian Lynn white wrote, um, an influential piece in the science journal where he basically said the Christian worldview is responsible for this degradation of the planet. And he said, we shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian Axiom, that nature has no reason to exist, save to serve. Man. What do you think of that? I’m striking assessment that basically Christianity is to blame.

Katherine Hayhoe: 
I would agree with that quote with just one essential modification to it. And the modification is this a selfish, ideological mindset that is justified by a misinterpretation of the Bible is responsible for the problem. So, yes, but it would only be one or two words in that quote to actually modify it. Let me explain. So in Genesis one, it says that humans have responsibility to “rada”. Every living thing on this planet. And that word was translated in the King. James version has have dominion over, and it has been translated subsequently as being responsible for, or caring for every living thing on this planet. And then in two, it goes on to talk about how we are to abide and Shamar the planet, which has the concept of taking care of, of being a guardian over of being a caretaker or a steward for. So that word Radha has been taken out of context to say, Oh, if we have dominion over the planet, then we can extract every resource this planet has, we can use it for our own good. And when we’re done exploiting the planet, God will push the index button and we’ll all go away. What that fails to take into account though is the fact that the same word RADA is used elsewhere in the Bible. And in fact, it’s even used to contrast people who rule for selfish gain versus people who are intended to be servant leaders, people who care for and protect and guard and keep what they’ve been given. So it is not a Christian ethos that has led to the problem that we’re in. It is an anti Christian ethos that have been out for number one for ourselves, for what we can get rather than caring for and loving each other, our sisters and our brothers around the planet, the poor and the vulnerable who are most effected by the impacts of a changing climate by the extraction of fossil fuels by the air and water pollution, that results as well as every other living thing on this planet too that God created.

Five Minute Jesus

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a 5 min Jesus for you … Christianity gets whacked from two different sides on the issue of the environment. And it’s sometimes deserved. French atheist Michel Onfray has said that Christianity has an ascetic streak that denigrates the body and the good earth. “Glorification of a (fictional) beyond,” he says, “prevents full enjoyment of the (real) here below.” “The religion of the one God seeks to promote self-hatred to the detriment of the body, to discredit the intelligence, to despise the flesh.” (Michel Onfray, The Atheist Manifesto [Arcade Publishing, 2005], 66-67) Of course, there have been Christians like that. The question is: Is that viewpoint logically consistent with Genesis 1—with believing that a good God graced good matter into existence, as a gift. The opening page of the Bible (Gen 1) calls the physical environment – the creation – “good”, no fewer than seven times. God made the light, and the text says “And it was good”, then the seas, and they’re said to be “good”, the heavenly bodies, the animals, and so on. They’re all “good”. And then, just in case someone missed it, the last line says “God saw all that he made, it was very good.” The apostle Paul in the NT echoes the theme:  “For everything God created is good (recalling Genesis 1), and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4-5). I can’t think of any other traditional historical writing – from Greece or Rome or from the far East – that works so hard – from the opening page – to insist that physical creation is “good”. Not haphazard, unpredictable, the enemy, accidental – No, it’s a work of wonder and artistry. It’s “good”, a cause for gratitude, Thanksgiving, as Paul says. There’s equal and opposite criticism sometimes levelled at Christianity and the environment. It’s Lynn White’s famous argument – in the journal science – that Christianity is to blame for the West’s rapacious approach to the environment. In an article titled “The Historical Roots of our Modern Ecological Crisis” he writes: “In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. Before one cut down a tree, mined a mountain, or damned a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.” (For the nerds, that’s … Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of our Modern Ecological Crisis,” Science, March 1967, 1203-1207) White has a pretty romantic view of ancient paganism. Most pagans – whether ancient Babylonians in the East or the Celts in the far west – saw creation was dangerous, capricious, possessed of forces that are not benevolent. Those forces need to be placated – through sacrifice and ritual – lest those spirit forces turn against humanity. Leaving that historial note aside, it’s interesting that Lynn White’s argument is virtually the opposite of Michel Onfray’s criticism: Christianity somehow manages to be …so otherworldly it renounces earthly resources, and then turns out to be the cause of the ravenous exploitation of the earth. Can it really be both? I think it’s neither. I don’t deny that some Christians have “exploited nature” in a “mood of indifference.” But is that logically consistent with believing Genesis 1, with believing the apostle Paul, that a Good God graced good matter into existence as a gift? I’d go further … In some ways, the Bible’s greatest endorsement of the preciousness of physical creation comes not from Genesis or Paul … but from Jesus. Jesus didn’t say anything directly about the environment, let alone climate change, of course. I don’t want to claim too much here.  But two things Jesus said and did elevate the importance of physical creation to a magnificent degree. First, Jesus studiously avoided teaching the normal pagan – Greek and Roman – view of an afterlife characterised by spirit, completely devoid bodily and environmental life. No Jesus reiterated the ancient Jewish conviction that the Creator would not abandon creation in some ghostly eternal future, but promised to renew it. In Isaiah 65 this promised future is described as a new creation, a “new heavens and a new earth”. Jesus does something similar when he calls the future kingdom of God “the renewal of all things” – that’s in Matthew 19:28. The Greek term in the Gospel is palingenesia. That’s the word “again” and “genesis” – it’s another Genesis. The creation matters so much to Christ that he promised the renewal of creation not its removal. The other thing in the Jesus story that underlines the importance of physical creation is the very punchline of the Christian gospel: Jesus rose again, bodily. All four Gospels and the NT epistles stress that Jesus wasn’t elevated to a spiritual life. He was raised in a body. The Gospels describe him eating a meal and showing his disciples his hands and feet. It’s not a mere resuscitation, either. The NT speaks of it as a renewal, a glorification of physical reality. Plenty of listeners won’t believe any of that. But my point is simpler: the Christian belief in bodily resurrection affirms the physical creation in an extraordinary way. It says that God loves material reality so much, he intends not to remove it but to renew it. From beginning to end, Christianity affirms the importance – the goodness – of physical creation. Christians have sometimes neglected this theme and denied/denigrated the good earth. Others have gone the other way, and treated creation as a thing to exploit and abuse. But both are Christian heresies, a skewing of the truth that creation is a sacred gift entrusted to our care. You can press play now.

Katherine Hayhoe:
So I grew up in a Christian home with a dad who was a science teacher who taught me not only that science is the coolest thing you could possibly study, but if we believe that God created this universe, then what is science? Other than trying to figure out what he was thinking when he did it. So going to school, I was studying astrophysics because it’s amazing to think that using just the brains God has given us, we can look at the far reaches of the universe. And there’s a long history of Christians in astrophysics, but I had almost finished my undergraduate degree when I needed an extra course to finish. And I saw this new class over in the geography department on climate science. So I thought, Oh, well, that looks interesting. Why not take it? So growing up in Canada, I ha I knew that climate change was real, but I had always mentally lumped it with environmental issues that environmentalist’s cared about. And if you’re not an environmentalist, then you wish them well, they’re the ones who worry about it and you go do whatever it is that you do. Taking this class on climate change though, completely shocked me because I learned that climate change is not only what you might consider an environmental issue. It’s an everything issue. Climate change affects our health. It affects the air that we breathe and the water that we drink, it affects how much food we have and how nutritious it is. It affects things like political instability and refugee crisis and more than anything else. What touched me is learning that climate change disproportionately affects the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. I grew up as a missionary kid in South America. So I had friends who lived in homes that were made of mud bricks or cardboard boxes. And when the rains came, I knew how it would wash away entire neighborhoods. And people had no recourse. There’s no insurance there. There’s, there’s no way to, to, to bail yourself out. If your home is gone, it is gone. And people who live on the edge of poverty are incredibly vulnerable. When the crops fail, there’s nothing to feed their families with. When the water is polluted, they suffer the impacts. So learning that I thought to myself, how can I not study this critical global issue? How can I truly be loving my neighbor if I close my eyes to this issue and go on by, we know from the parable of the good Samaritan that many people do, but I felt like I couldn’t. And the reason why I couldn’t was because of my faith. So that’s why I do what I do. And that’s why I am who I am. The reason why I am a climate scientist is because I’m a Christian, not in spite of it.

John Dickson (Studio)

The Pacific Islands cover a region of more than 300,000 square miles, incorporating well known holiday destinations like Hawaii, Fiji, Vanuatu and the Cook Islands. But for 11 million people, the Pacific Islands are home. And for almost 150,000 of them, those homes are in danger. 

Media – Pacific Islands climate change danger

John Dickson (Studio)

These islands are on the frontline of climate change. Yet, thousands of kms away, some politicians still bicker about whether climate change is having a real effect.  Despite the evidence, Katharine Hayhoe is still fielding accusations that she talks about this stuff because of her politics. In her famous TED talk, she mentioned a question she was once asked by a university student in Texas. I was dying to repeat the question …

John Dickson:
I have to ask you, aren’t you just a Democrat.

Katherine Hayhoe: 
I know why you’re asking me that question. So many people think that I am simply because I’m a climate scientist, but first of all, I’m Canadian, not American. And second of all, a thermometer does not give you a different answer depending on how you vote. Climate is changing and humans are responsible. The impacts are serious, and we need to act now where politics legitimately comes into it though, is in asking, what do we do? How do we reduce our carbon emissions? There’s a lot of different ways we can do that. There’s a lot of different technology that we can use. There’s a lot of different lifestyle choices we can implement, and those should be the subject of political debate. But the number that the mometer gives us shouldn’t be as a scientist, I can say that we need policies to cut carbon emissions because our individual actions are not enough. Even if those of us who can do as much as we can did everything we could, that wouldn’t be enough to make a dent in it. We need a system wide change. So for example, a system wide change could help people afford a plugin car who can’t afford one. Now, for example, or they could ensure that we can get our energy or our electricity from clean sources. Whereas we can’t afford to switch to a clean energy provider possibly in the place where we live. So we need policies that cut carbon emissions, right? That’s what the science says, but the science doesn’t tell how to do it. So as a human, I would say we also need policies that make sure that the poorest and most vulnerable people are not left behind that they’re not harmed by skyrocketing energy prices. I would say that we also need policy to make sure that we’re preparing for the impacts of climate change. Some of which are unavoidable because they’re already here today, as well as cutting our carbon emissions. And I would say too, as a human again, not a scientist that we need policies that have appeal across the political spectrum. Otherwise it just turns into a football every time, you know, one party gets elected, they put this in place. And then as soon as the next party is elected, they put that in place. And we saw this happen in Australia where there’s a price on carbon, and then it got taken off by the next party. So from that perspective, I think something that has at least some bipartisan appeal, um, that actually works to cut carbon. And that takes care of, uh, what the Bible refers to as the least among us. Those are the types of policies that we need. So that’s the frame that I personally use to evaluate policies. Unfortunately, imitating the proverbial. Ostrich is not a viable political plan because climate change will affect us no matter how we vote a thermometer again, doesn’t give us a different answer. Sea level, doesn’t rise on one person’s house, but not the others because of how they voted. It is real. It is us, it is bad. And the sooner we fix it, the better off every single one of us, no matter who we are, where we live, what language we speak, or how we vote is going to be,

John Dickson (Studio)

Katharine’s job is to talk to people about climate change. She’s good at it, but it’s not easy. Coming up against skepticism or downright denial, again and again, she says, can be exhausting.

John Dickson:
You always sound to me, very chirpy. Um, but, uh, I, I, they’re not sometimes when you feel grief that the message isn’t getting through.

Katherine Hayhoe: 
Yes, absolutely. I feel grief. I feel frustration. And, um, I think probably one of the most discouraging things, and I’m sure you’ll understand this many people listening to where the most discouraging things to me personally is when people who identify as Christians, um, reach out to me specifically to attack me, uh, to call me, um, a handmaiden of the antichrist, um, a lie for Democrat. I know, you know, handmaid of the antichrist, Democrat, not quite sure which one’s worst there, but yes. Um, the number of people who call themselves, Christians who specifically embody, um, hatred, um, the opposite of love, um, is just absolutely discouraging. And so more than anything, I find myself asking God, why and how do people who claim that they love you? Who claim that they believe in you? How can they behave like this? But, you know, in the Bible, there’s verses showing that this is an age old human problem, you know, in the Psalms and the prophets, they say, why, why do the wicked flourish like weeds? 

Katherine Hayhoe: 
Well, we weather as if in dry ground. So the age old human problem really is, um, how our world is, is so broken and how we ourselves as humans. Um, so often replace God with false idols. We replace God with our political ideology. We replace God with a focus on ourselves. We re we let our statement of faith be written by our politics rather than the Bible. And I think it’s really a reminder to me almost every day to really make sure that I am looking to God, um, for my identity, that I am looking to my theology for my values, uh, because when it all comes down to it, that’s really where our hope comes from. And one of my favorite verses comes from Romans where it talks about hope, because we don’t find hope in the science, every new scientific result that comes out, it seems like a scarier, more depressing than the one before we don’t find hope in politics. Either people in politics are always going to disappoint us no matter who they are and what they say. But for us as believers, we know that hope has, it says in Romans hope, begins with suffering, which is kind of a strange place for hope to begin. It begins with suffering because suffering builds perseverance and perseverance builds character. And that will not disappoint because our hope is eventually placed in God.

John Dickson: 
So is that not, um, a reason not to act now? I mean, sometimes it’s thrown it believers who have an eschatology, a view of God making everything right in the future, it’s sometimes said, Oh, well then that’s a reason to sit by the beach because you know, ultimately it’s all going to be fixed. So why bother now?

Katherine Hayhoe:
Well, exactly. That’s probably one of the biggest arguments people have. And one of the biggest problems that, that eschatology has today, the idea that if it’s all going away in the future, why does what we do today Matter?

John Dickson (Studio)

‘Eschatology’, by the way, just means the theology of “last things” – what the climax of history looks like.  We’re doing a whole episode on the end of the world in a few weeks – we’ve got Richard Bauckham of Cambridge and Alissa Wilkinson from Vox (of all places).  But for now, I’m just asking whether all this “end of the world” business means that Christians won’t be active in helping the earth now.

Katherin Hayhoe:
Of course, people were people back when the new Testament was being written to. And it’s very interesting because if you read Thessalonians very carefully, it seems like they had the same problem. And so the apostle Paul wrote to them very strongly. He didn’t mince any words. And he basically, in a nutshell said, get off your rear or get off your lazy boy chair, get a job. Don’t just quit your job and wait around for the end of the world, get a job because you have things to do, um, feed the poor care for the widows and the orphans. Um, other, other places that says we are to walk in the good works that were prepared for us in advance.We’re not to worry about the future that’s in God’s hands. We’re not to worry about the past because we can’t change it anymore. We are to do what we can today. What’s in front of us here and now, because that is what has been prepared for us, no matter what we expect to happen in the future. So that attitude of, Oh, it doesn’t all, it doesn’t matter. It’s all going to end anyways. I’ll just sit back and forth with my hands. That attitude is another example of un-Christian theology that we’ve just kind of slapped a Jesus label on and made it look as if it’s Christian, when it’s not.

John Dickson (Studio)

It can feel like having a rational conversation about climate change is very near impossible. It’s too politicised. It’s too grounded in belief rather than fact. And we’re getting further and further apart. 

John Dickson: 
So this is a real problem for public discourse. You know, when, when an issue like this becomes more political than anything else, you know, one side feels the need to turn up the heat of the rhetoric. The other side turns up the skepticism dial. So the other side has to turn up the heat even more and before you know it, I mean, it’s just, well, we are where we are. Um, how do you get out of that? Do you have any strategies at the rhetorical level for, um, having a sensible conversation on this?

Katherine Hayhoe: 
You’re absolutely right. In today’s polarized environment. Whenever anything comes up that we don’t agree about, we immediately just start butting heads because we focus on what most divides us. And one side shows up, you know, with all your scientific reports and data and starts hitting somebody else, upside the head with it. And the other person obviously feels attacked by that. And so responds as if they would respond to a threat rather than to information. And that just deepens the chasm between us rather than building a bridge over the divide. I’ve found though that there is a way past this and the way past this begins with focusing on what unites us rather than what divides us. So if we are able to begin a conversation over something that we agree with first, and it could be something as simple as the fact that we love our kids, we enjoy cooking or knitting, or we live in the same place, or we believe in the same God, or we attend the same church or we belong to the same rotary club or at the same golf club or the same birding association. If we can begin that conversation with something, we agree on number one, and then number two, connect the dots to how climate change is affecting what we both already care about, whether it’s our children, whether what we believe as Christians, whether it’s the place where we live, where the things that we care about. And then step number three is to make sure that we bring up a positive, constructive solution to climate change that the person we’re talking to could agree with. Because even though most objections to climate change are couched in sciencey sounding terms. If you have a conversation with about it with anyone about it this longer than one minute long, the conversation will nine times out of 10 taken abrupt, right turn into. I don’t want to fill in the blank. I don’t want a carbon tax. I don’t want to destroy the economy. I don’t want the government telling me what to do. 99.9% of our objections to climate change have nothing to do with the science. They have everything to do with solution aversion. We think the only solutions are negative or punitive or harmful. So bonding over shared values, connecting to how climate change is affecting us here and now today, and then inspiring with a solution that actually could make a difference. It could save us money. It could help poor people. It could lead to cleaner air. It could help us be better stewards of God’s creation. Those three steps are absolutely key to constructive conversations. And I put them together into a TED Talk that people can listen to if they’re interested.

John Dickson (Studio)

Katharine is the most hopeful climate change scientist I know – which is excellent, because she’s the only one I know. She’s not alarmist. She’s calm, conciliatory and genuinely interested in finding common ground. She wants to teach us how to live in a warming world. And living requires hope. Rational hope. That partly means understanding how bad the problem is, not covering our eyes to it. But it also means knowing that by acting we can alter our future, for the environment and for the poorest of the poor (who are experiencing the effects of a changing climate). Talking about it, calmly, is really the first step. And Katharine is hopeful that, despite the polarisation, people’s minds are changing.

Katherine Hayhoe: 
Let me share a story with you though. That’s from Australia. So a good friend of mine, good colleague is John. He is also a Christian as well as a scientist who studies, how we interact with false information. John got into this because every time he would go home for dinner, his father would say, well, John, I hear there’s more polar bears now than there ever have been. How can you say that climate change is causing them to go extinct? So John would go off and find all the information, showing that yes, polar bear populations are in fact decreasing and they are threatened by climate change and he would bring it to his father and his father would just come up with a new objection. Well, John, I heard that sea level. Isn’t rising after all. I mean, look at these old photos of the Harbor, it doesn’t look like it’s any higher than it used to be. Well, depending on when you take the photo, the photo, whether it high tide or low tide, you can come up with very different pictures. So John turned into a global expert of debunking sciency, sounding myths about climate change. He went back and did a PhD on this. He created the website, skeptical science that answers 198 sciencey sounding objections to climate change. And do you think any of this convinced his father? No, it did not. But then there was a government rebate on solar panels in the neighborhood where his father lived. So his father being a shrewd, fiscal conservative crunch, the numbers figured out how much money he would save. Got the solar panels ended up saving even more money, started emailing John, every time he got his bill, John, you wouldn’t believe how much money I’ve saved on the solar panels. Now started boasting to everybody about how much money he was saving. And about two years afterwards, he and John were having dinner and he turned to John and he said, well, you know, John, of course global warming is real. And I’ve always thought so, but did I tell you my latest bill for my solar panels, how much I’ve saved and John Johnson, he nearly fell off his chair because not only had his father changed his mind, he had forgotten that he ever disagreed. And what had changed his mind, a positive, constructive, beneficial solution.

Undeceptions theme