You notice that Katharine Hayhoe doesn’t start her sentences with carbon when you first hear her speak. People are where she starts. Her vowels have a slight Canadian softness, and her patience seems almost inappropriate in a debate that has been shouting itself hoarse for twenty years. She talks about Texas water tables, farmers in Lubbock, and droughts that have lasted longer than they once did. When she brings up the Sermon on the Mount in the fifth minute or so, the room starts to change.
Really, it’s just that shift. The majority of evangelicals, who are statistically the religious group least likely to accept human-caused warming, chose to ignore climate communication for years because it followed a familiar path: graphs, melting ice, the polar bear on the shrinking floe. In between earning her degree in physics in Toronto and working as a teacher at Texas Tech, Hayhoe realized that the data wasn’t the issue. The messenger did. Furthermore, the message was frequently designed for someone who already agreed.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Dr. Katharine Hayhoe |
| Nationality | Canadian (raised partly in Colombia) |
| Current Role | Chief Scientist, The Nature Conservancy |
| Academic Position | Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Public Law, Texas Tech University |
| Education | B.Sc. Physics & Astronomy, University of Toronto; Ph.D. Atmospheric Science, University of Illinois |
| Research Focus | Regional climate change impacts, attribution science |
| Notable Recognition | TIME 100 Most Influential People |
| Co-authored Work | A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions |
| Founded | ATMOS Research (1997) |
| Faith Background | Evangelical Christian, daughter of a science teacher and church leader |
She was raised by a father who preached on Sundays and taught science during the week, which likely explains why she never came to believe that there had to be a war between the two worlds. A degree in science education was held by her grandmother. A small detail that reveals a lot about her work is that her husband, an evangelical pastor, is said to have been among her first climate converts. She is not an instructor. She listens, identifies the common ground, and then expands. Speaking in Davos is not the same as speaking in a church basement in West Texas, and she seems to know this intuitively.
It’s remarkable how disarming her strategy feels in action. Her leadership is rarely apocalyptic. Rather, she discusses stewardship—a concept that has been subtly ingrained in Christian theology for centuries—loving your neighbor, the people Jesus referred to as the least of these, water for crops, and food security. There is no hint of strategy in the way she explains things, so it’s possible that this framing only works because she truly believes it. Viewers pay attention. even adversarial ones.
Naturally, there has been constant criticism. She has been ridiculed by right-wing pundits, sent messages by online trolls that would force most scientists to retire early, and she is still viewed suspiciously by some in the evangelical community. She doesn’t seem bothered, or perhaps she’s just quietly Canadian stubborn. She appears to be openly affected by her late mentor, Sir John Houghton, the British physicist who headed the IPCC and signed his emails with “every blessing.”
She doesn’t seem to be trying to win arguments when you watch her work. She is attempting to undermine the notion that climate concern is a political issue. Something loosens in the room when she addresses a congregation and states that concern for a warming planet is an expression of Christian love rather than a betrayal of it. She would probably tell you that she doesn’t yet have the answer to the question of whether that loosening translates into policy.
Her position is so uncommon that it’s difficult to ignore. Pulpits are avoided by most scientists. The majority of pastors steer clear of peer review. The people Hayhoe is trying to reach are not those who already nod along at climate summits, and she sits in the narrow overlap. Everyone else stopped attempting to communicate with them.
