“Gravity doesn’t care what we believe; if we step off a cliff, we’re going down. And a thermometer doesn’t give us a different answer, depending on how we vote. Yet today, the best predictor of whether we agree that climate is changing and humans are responsible isn’t our level of education or our degree of scientific literacy: It’s simply where we fall on the political spectrum."
Former Illinois graduate student Katharine Hayhoe delivers this year’s “zero-carbon” lecture. Hayhoe is a climate scientist, a Political Science Professor, Director of the Climate Center, and an associate in the Public Health program of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Texas Tech University. She is also a principal investigator for the Department of Interior’s South-Central Climate Adaptation Science Center. Her research currently focuses on establishing a scientific basis for assessing the regional to local-scale impacts of climate change on human systems and the natural environment.
