eMERGE hosted Katharine Hayhoe, one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Influential People’ to share effective ways to communicate climate change. Hayhoe identified the ‘giant boulders’ that keep us away from fixing our climate and showed the key to successful discussion is to connect over shared values like family, community and hobbies.
According to Hayhoe only 14% of us talk about this global crisis. “We can’t give in to despair,” she says. “We have to look for the hope we need to inspire us to act — and that hope begins with a conversation, today.”
A recording of our webinar with Katharine can be found on our YouTube Channel here.
About the event
Communicating climate change to motivate action has been a challenge.
The scientific community continues to provide more evidence that we need to act now. This approach can however, paralyze some into inaction.
Research has shown that there is a better way.
Katharine Hayhoe will join us in sharing what social science teaches us on how to talk about climate change. Values, ethics, and compassion, more than facts, are the key to success.
About Katharine Hayhoe
Katharine Hayhoe is an accomplished atmospheric scientist who studies climate change and why it matters to us here and now. She is also a remarkable communicator who has received the National Center for Science Education’s Friend of the Planet award, the American Geophysical Union’s Climate Communication Prize, the Sierra Club’s Distinguished Service award, and been named to a number of lists including Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Thinkers, FORTUNE magazine’s World’s Greatest Leaders and the United Nations Champion of the Earth in Science and Innovation.
Her writing has appeared in a broad range of outlets including the New York Times, Wired, O Magazine, and Chatelaine. Her TED talk, “The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it” has nearly 4 million views and her most recent book is “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World,” published by Simon & Schuster and available in Guelph at the Bookshelf.
Katharine has served as lead author on the Second, Third, and Fourth National Climate Assessments. She also hosts and produces the PBS Digital Series, Global Weirding, and serves on advisory committees for a broad range of organizations including the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, the Earth Science Women’s Network, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Katharine serves as Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy and she is also a Paul W. Horn Distinguished Professor and the Political Science Endowed Professor in Public Policy and Public Law at Texas Tech University. She has a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Toronto and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Illinois and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Colgate University and Victoria University at the University of Toronto.
To access Katharine’s books, click here!
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Saving-Us/Katharine-Hayhoe/9781982143831
To get Katharine’s book from a local book store, visit this link the Bookshelf.
Resources
- Katharine Hayhoe – Climate Scientist
- Public opinions in Canada: Canadian Climate Opinion Maps 2018 – Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
- Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (climateoutreach.org)
- Take a step with Don’t Look Up & Count Us In (count-us-in.com)
- Forget your carbon footprint. Let’s talk about your climate shadow. (mic.com)
