Podcast Episode: Katharine Hayhoe | Global Weirding

Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist. And she’s a Christian. You may have noticed that climate change is not a topic that is often brought into the church because it often seems to divide people more than bring them together. But Katharine wants to change that. Her science doesn’t come in spite of her faith but because of it. She sits down with Jim Stump to talk specifically about some of the common misconceptions about climate change, the science of how we know about past climate changes, and the effects we see in the world today. She ends with some practical solutions and a call for rational hope.

We were so pleased to finally be able to host Katharine on the podcast! Hope you enjoy.

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Listened to this while driving today. Dr. Hayhoe does such a great job expressing how we as Christians need to be active in creation care.

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It was a great episode.

The concept that God wanted us to help rule over this creation with him and care for the planet is one of the things that drove me to get interested in ecology and use that paradigm as the lens through which I do landscaping.

Climate change is also why when looking at native trees I try to find some that has a distribution range that greatly overlaps my location with a strong southern foothold to that in successional designs I can use those trees knowing they can handle the warmer weather better. I still make sure to include the others that are near their northern most range as well. It’s hard, but I have been getting ready to go out and get seeds from trees in their northern most range that ends around me that are growing in hotter than normal microclimates in hopes that their genetic material is slightly more adaptive to warmer weather. We can start now and allow future breeders to selectively breed them to handle that.

It is sometimes really crazy as a scientifically inclined Christian in the Bible Belt talking about climate change with other Christians. One thing that helps me is to find issues they care about that they can see directly affecting them and focus on those as opposed to just the climate aspects of it.

In stead of bringing up the problem of deforestation helping to contribute to climate change I bring up the fact that when we were kids we could carry our shotguns half a mile in any direction and March off into the woods and go hunting. Nowadays you cannot. Almost every local place requires you to pay someone thousands of dollars to use their land for hunting. They see that as less forests are available for wild life there is less forest to hunt in.

For the record I don’t hunt and was never into it as a kid.

When it comes to using natural gases from local resources I bring up things like how the BB spill is still causing damage to the coasts and first few miles of the water ways.

Lots of secondary arguments that can help convince someone to stop things that also contribute to climate change.

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