How to Talk to Religious Climate Science Deniers

An evangelical Christian climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe, appears to maybe have figured a way to speak to some Christian climate science deniers. Hayhoe is a director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Her schedule is booked for months with appearances in classrooms, churches, TV studios and conservative colleges, where she has been accused of “spreading Satan’s lies.” The Washington Post writes:

And on a Monday morning last month, the prophet performed a miracle: She got a ballroom of climate activists to applaud fossil fuels.

“What was life like before the Industrial Revolution?” Hayhoe asked during a keynote address at the Citizens’ Climate Lobby conference in Washington, D.C. “It was short. It was brutal.”

“So I realized that I am truly and profoundly grateful for the benefits and the blessings that fossil fuels have brought us.”

And then her audience of 1,500 began to clap. They were clapping for fossil fuels because it was cathartic to acknowledge that, for all the damage done, coal and gas and oil had been gifts to mankind. And they were clapping for Hayhoe, whose tribute to energy was part of a story she told about establishing a rapport with employees of an oil-and-gas company in Texas. Her skills of communication do seem miraculous by the standards of modern climate politics: She can convert nonbelievers — or, to put it in her terms, make people realize that they’ve believed in the importance of this issue all along. She knows how to speak to oilmen, to Christians, to farmers and ranchers, having lived for years in Lubbock, Tex., with her pastor husband. She is a scientist who thinks that we’ve talked enough about science, that we need to talk more about matters of the heart.

For her, that means talking about faith.

“We humans have been given responsibility for every living thing on this planet, which includes each other,” Hayhoe said at the conference. “We are called to tend the garden and be good stewards of the gifts that God has given us.”

You might say that the climate problem, while understood through science, can be solved only through faith.

Faith in one another.

Faith in our ability to do something bold, together.

“I’m not an evangelist,” she continued. She sees herself more like Cassandra, who predicted the fall of Troy but was not believed, or Jeremiah, whose omens were inspired by selfish kings and cultish priests in ancient Jerusalem.

“We are warning people of the consequences of their choices, and that’s what prophets did,” she said, over plates of samosas and grape leaves, and “you get the same thing that prophets have gotten throughout history.”

“A prophet is not valued in their hometown,” said her lunch date, Jessica Moerman, paraphrasing the Gospels. Moerman, 33, is a fellow member of a tiny club: Christian climate scientists married to evangelical pastors.

“No, they’re not,” Hayhoe said, laughing. She gets a steady stream of hate on social media and the occasional death threat. But she reminds herself that hate comes from anger, and anger comes from fear — and fear does not come from God, according to the Apostle Paul in his letter to Timothy.

We speak of climate change in terms of belief, as if the science is actually a faith. And we think of scientists as godless clinicians, as if the principles of inquiry nullify the utility of prayer. In the United States, nearly 40 percent of university scientists have a religious affiliation, according to new research by Rice University professor of sociology Elaine Howard Ecklund; for scientists working outside of universities, that percentage jumps to 77. And many agnostic or atheist scientists still see themselves as spiritual, according to Ecklund and Christopher Scheitle, assistant professor of sociology at West Virginia University.

Religious people who deny climate science are generally spurred not by theology but by an assumption that climate science is based on political beliefs — namely, liberal ones. Converting nonbelievers on political grounds seems next to impossible.

Her argument that it is futile to argue climate science on political grounds or on the basis of godless science seems to be correct, at least for Christians who deny the science. Maybe her approach to communications will change some minds.

Despite the article's contrary assertion, most science-based people do not act as if the science is a matter of spiritual faith. Nor do most think of scientists as godless clinicians, or that the principles of inquiry nullify the utility of prayer. How science got to be conflated with spiritual belief is, more likely than not, a matter of decades of ruthless special interest, political and religious propaganda.

Maybe Hayhoe can reach some minds that are reachable only through appeal to religious faith. If so, more power to her. If she fails, then at least she tried and she cannot be faulted for that.

B&B orig: 7/16/19