Climate change should be the number one problem to be solved

Climate change is the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. Raising awareness and motivating as many people as possible to take action is the first step to solving it. 

So thinks Katherine Hayhoe,[an1]  Canadian atmospheric scientist. Katherine is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Public Policy at Texas Tech University, as well as Director of the Center for Climate Science at Texas Tech. In 2021, Hayhoe joined The Nature Conservancy as chief scientist.

Professor Hayhoe’s research focuses on the development and application of high-resolution climate projections to assess the future impacts of climate change on human society and the natural environment.

In 2019, Dr. Hayhoe was named to Foreign Policy‘s 100 Global Thinkers list for the second time and received the United Nations Environment Programme’s most iconic award, being named Champion of the Earth in the Science and Innovation category.

In her latest book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, published in September 2021, Hayhoe argues that when it comes to raising awareness about climate change, we need to find shared values to connect with collective action.

Katherine Hayhoe spoke at the Future Trends Forum Building a net zero world, giving a keynote speech and answering questions from the experts gathered there.

If you want to see Katherine Hayhoe’s lecture where, among other things, she points out the most effective way to mobilize the population against climate change, you can watch it here:

Climate change has been known about since long ago

That fossil fuels affect air quality and climate has been known since the early 18th century. Professor Hayhoe names some of the people who have been pointing this out over the years:

• Joseph Fourier, in the 1820s, was the first to point out the greenhouse effect.
• John Tyndall, in the 1850s, discovered that gases such as carbon dioxide and methane block infrared radiation, causing the greenhouse effect.
• Eunice Foote, also in the 1850s, who anticipated John Tyndall’s experiments by three years, who has so far been considered the discoverer of the CO2 effect in the atmosphere.
• Svante Arrhenius, in the 1890s, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903. In 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) will increase Earth’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
• Guy Callendar, in the 1930s, who, in 1938, published that the 10% increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, observed from 1890 to 1938 (48 years of industrial revolution based on coal combustion), could be related to the warming trend observed in the same period.

Climate change is faster now than ever before

In any case, what has also been found is that climate change is accelerating over the last few decades: In the last century alone, the temperature has risen by 0.7 degrees Celsius, about ten times faster than the average rate of warming of the ice-age recovery. Moreover, models predict that the Earth will warm by 2 to 6 degrees Celsius over the next century. When global warming has occurred several times over the past two million years, it has taken about 5,000 years for the planet to warm by 5 degrees. The projected rate of warming over the next century is at least 20 times faster.

Hayhoe says that global warming itself is perhaps not the most worrying thing, but what is beginning to be called global weirding, i.e. unpredictable and increasingly frequent extreme weather events: droughts, fires, dust storms, ice storms or hurricanes, for example.

She substantiates this with figures obtained by scientists. For example:

• Last year’s floods in Germany were 9 times more likely due to global warming.
• Large fires in the USA and Canada are 150 times more likely due to the same cause.

Fighting climate change: it’s not about saving the planet, it’s about saving humanity

Global warming endangers human survival. When we talk about “saving the planet” we are neither being rigorous nor giving the problem the importance and urgency it has.

Climate change affects basic human needs:

• water quality and quantity,
• air quality (as expert Bill McKibben also pointed ou[an2] t, pollution is responsible for nearly 10 million deaths a year),
• food quality,
• biodiversity.

It also affects major human-made infrastructures. Cities and transportation networks are in danger of disappearing as a result of rising ocean levels.

Finally, as McKibben also pointed out, there is a dangerous connection between fossil fuels and geopolitical threats capable of triggering wars and increasing inequalities between regions.

In short, Professor Hayhoe emphasizes that climate change affects all aspects of society and the economy and must be the number one problem to be solved. The areas affected are illustrated in the figure below:

Source: Urgent action is needed to protect human health from the increasing effects of climate change

How to engage society in the fight against climate change

Whoever you are, and whatever you do, you can and should be aware that if you don’t fight climate change, all other aspirations are irrelevant.

How do you get people from all walks of life to take action?

It was thought that by highlighting the data and the consequences, society as a whole would become aware. But this has not been the case.

Nor has the strategy of using fear of consequences worked. The more fear is transmitted to society, the more they reject it and the more inaction they take. Quoting neuroscientist Tali Sharot, Hayhoe notes, “Fear and anxiety will cause us to withdraw, to freeze, to give up, rather than take action.“

Most people are concerned about climate change, but don’t know exactly what to do to fight it, or how to join some kind of action or initiative.

The solution comes by providing solutions that people can join. In other words, talking about climate problems that affect us personally and in which people close to us can identify with and, at the same time, propose actions to mitigate those problems.

To propose actions, you must get the people involved to see results, to feel that they can make a difference, otherwise they will not be motivated.

And the first action Hayhoe proposes is to talk about climate change. To quote George Marshall, British environmental activist, founder of Climate Outreach and climate communication specialist: “‘TALK’ is the fertile ground in which cultural change begins; in its absence, it is impossible for a group of people to solve a problem.”.

When conversation happens, solutions emerge. At any level: family, professional, regional.

There are many things that can be done at the individual and local level. And what is needed is to spread them and make them known to as many people as possible. This is one of the missions of The Nature Conservancy, where Hayhoe is chief scientist.

Hayhoe invites you to review all the solutions that currently exist to combat climate change in the Drawdown project. The message from this expert gives hope: if people continue to join the climate movement, humanity will solve the enormous challenge before it.