Katharine Hayhoe

 

Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and the wife of an evangelical pastor in Texas. She is the daughter of missionaries. Her climate research has been featured in the PBS documentary series, The Secret Life of Scientists, and in articles including True Believer that appeared in On Earth magazine in 2012, and Spreading the global warming gospel that appeared in the LA Times in 2011. With her husband, Andrew Farley, she coauthored A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions (FaithWords). Katharine was named in 2012 by Christianity Today as one of 50 Women to Watch.

Katharine will be one of the speakers at the July 2017 annual conference of the American Scientific Affiliation in Golden, Colorado.

Katharine is a reviewer for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Katharine has a B.Sc. in physics and astronomy from the University of Toronto and an M.S. and Ph.D. in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois.

As an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, part of the Department of Interior's South-Central Climate Science Center, Katharine develops new ways to quantify the potential impacts of human activities at the regional scale. As founder and CEO of ATMOS Research, she also bridges the gap between scientists and stakeholders to provide relevant, state-of-the-art information on how climate change will affect our lives to a broad range of non-profit, industry and government clients.

Katherine believes that God's creation is telling us something through global warming. She has written, "that the fact that burning coal, gas, and oil produces carbon dioxide which traps heat and warms planet has been well established for over 150 years. To say otherwise is simply not accurate. Science was uncertain on this 200 years ago – it is not uncertain on this point anymore. If anyone is interested in how we know it is humans, and not the sun or natural cycles as it has been before, my TEDx talk explains this."

Watch this video in which Katherine Hayhoe appears with former President Obama and Leonardo DiCaprio.

There is no doubt that carbon dioxide traps heat and warms the planet. We should seek ways to reduce carbon emissions. However, the "catastrophic" global warming narrative ignores other factors that significantly influence climate. We will look at that in an up-coming article on Factors that Influence Climate.

Related reading: Antarctica Polar Ice Reaches New Maximum; Katharine Hayhoe's Webinar talk Talking Climate: Why Facts Are Not Enough