CPSG100 Excursion Report Name of Presenter/Organizer: Professor Katharine Hayhoe, Chief Scientist of The Nature Conservancy

Title of Presentation/Talk/Event: From Global Change to Local Action with Katharine Hayhoe Date: Tuesday, October 19, 2021 - 7:00pm - 8:30pm

Name of Series (if this is part of a longer series): Smithsonian Wildlife Research Center 's (SERC) Virtual Earth Optimism Lectures

URL of Online Presentation/Lecture OR Production Company of Documentary: Katharine Hayhoe: From Global Change to Local Action - YouTube

Summary 1: Professor Hayhoe introduces her presentation by noting how many proposals for decreasing global warming are littered with language and ideas that the average person will not immediately understand. Considering that the world has never reached high global temperatures, she mentions data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Code Red report that reveals the alarming rate at which our planet is warming. Risks such as increased ocean levels and carbon emissions were concluded to worsen if intervention is not taken soon. She then presented the idea of psychological distance: the degree to which people feel unbothered from an idea, place, or some sort of phenomenon. It is then revealed that commonplace methods that promote climate change awareness (such as polar bears affected by ice melting in the Arctic Sea) backfire because they address foreign issues that do not directly affect its intended audience. Thus, people lose interest in taking action. This is supported by the results of a 2019 Yale Climate Opinion Map where it was determined that the majority of the country believes in climate change but nearly half of them believe that it would not personally affect them. Psychological proximity, a term coined by Hayhoe that essentially promotes the inverse effect of psychological distance, is encouraged to be adopted by the minds of the public. To stress this significance, a series of statistics regarding actual natural disaster events along with evidence of climate change that has occurred both locally and globally were provided. Hayhoe concludes her presentation by calling upon the general public to congregate and combat climate change.

Summary 2: I found Hayhoe's main points to be very convincing. Before she expressed any of the ideas in her presentation, Hayhoe's titles and credits under her belt gave me a clear indication about her credibility. She is an atmospheric scientist by trade and an endowed Professor of Public Policy and Public Law at Texas Tech University. As a Professor of Public Policy, she looks at future scenarios and global models to try and build strategies to reduce climate change impacts. Her profession clearly relates to the topic matter of the presentation. She has also received a number of awards and recognitions for her work including being named as one of Time&rsquos one hundred most influential people, receiving the United Nations Champions of the Earth Award, and the American Geophysical Union’s climate communications prize. In her presentation, Hayhoe’s key points are supported by an abundance of statistics and detailed explanations about specific ideas and events related to climate change.

In the presentation, the majority of these cases were connected to oceans and water in general. When discussing the possibility of sea levels rising by eight feet, she introduces the term RCP 8.5. She states how it refers to the concentration of carbon that delivers global warming at an average of 8.5 watts per square meter across the planet which will result in a temperature increase of about 4.3°C and sea levels rising by 8 feet by 2100. This corroborates with her later findings from the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. She stated that if current conditions continue, superpowers such as the USA, Russia, and Saudi Arabia will cause the global temperature to be above 4°C by 2100. Reasonable conclusions such as the 700 million people living in low-elevation areas possibly resulting in 300 million refugees displaced before 2100 can also be drawn from this. Making note of the disappearance of islands and natural species (such as bull sharks) in the Chesapeake Bay provides a perfect example of how she stresses us to act because climate change is present in our local communities (one of her main points). Describing how Hurricane Harvey could have resulted in significantly less levels of damage if climate change was not prevalent exemplifies the logical reasoning in her presentation. She describes that increasing global temperatures causes the air in the surrounding area to increase in temperature as well. Since warmer air can hold greater amounts of water vapor, there will be more damage from greater amounts of precipitation. Her stating that 75% economic damages from Hurricane Harvey could have been preventable is consistent with this reasoning.

Finally, Hayhoe being able to provide a logical rebuttal to a fallacious slippery slope counter argument only furthers the credibility of her presentation. In the question and answer session at the end of the presentation, one of the viewers made a comment about a hypothetical point of view of someone who prioritized the economy much more than the environment: if more efforts were made to improve the environment, less investments will be made to drill unnatural resources that are heavily relied on (such as coal and natural gas), which will cause economic decline. Hayhoe’s simple yet true response stating there would not be an economy to rely on if the Earth succumbs to climate change absolutely demonstrates its need.