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Author Topic: 🚩 Global Climate Chaos ☠️  (Read 117074 times)

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AGelbert

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Re: 🚩 Global Climate Chaos ☠️
« Reply #45 on: April 14, 2014, 02:44:04 pm »
Meet The Surprising Star Of Showtime’s New Climate Change Series


 By Kiley Kroh   on  April 14, 2014 at 11:11 am

Agelbert NOTE: It's NOT surprising to me. In fact, as a Christian I believe anyone claiming to BE a Christian who denies GW is NOT a Christian at all!



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.”

Hayhoe credits this course and the professor, Danny Harvey, with opening her eyes to the importance of communicating science, particularly when it’s as pressing as with climate change. “The science is there, the science is solid … and it’s not getting through so what’s the point of publishing one more paper on climate science — or 10 more papers or even 100 more papers — if it’s not going to get through?” she realized.

Unable to decide between atmospheric science and astrophysics for graduate school, Hayhoe decided to apply for both. “Back in the day” when applications were submitted via mail with money orders, she had already applied to nine schools and had one money order left, so she basically flipped a coin and sent her last application to the University of Illinois. It was a fortuitous flip.

Unbeknownst to Hayhoe at the time, the school had brought on a new department chair, who saw her application and asked her to come visit. Don Wuebbles turned out to be the perfect person for young Hayhoe to learn from, “somebody who recognized not just the importance of the science but communicating that science.” And the feeling was clearly mutual. “Right from the beginning she was an excellent communicator,” Wuebbles said. “She not only has an excellent understanding of the science … but being able to communicate that science clearly is a special skill.”


Wuebbles dropped Hayhoe “right into the deep end, in terms of working on not just research but communication.” Marking another important turning point in her career, Wuebbles introduced her to the Union of Concerned Scientists and brought her on board for a significant research project assessing the health of the Great Lakes. Examining the climate projections they were using, Hayhoe was shocked to discover they were woefully out of date. “I realized that there was this massive disconnect between the physical climate science that develops climate projections and the people who are actually using these projections to figure out what it means for our world,” she said.


Figuring out how to deliver the best available climate science to the people who need it the most would become a primary motivation in Hayhoe’s life.


Continued in next post:

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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