IT’S A WARM summer evening, and a young girl—four, maybe five, years old—lies on a blanket staring through binoculars at a star-studded northern sky. Her dad, a science teacher, is next to her, pointing out the galaxy Andromeda.
“As far back as I can remember,” Katharine Hayhoe says, “my father was teaching me about the natural world, having us memorize the bird species we’d see or looking for rare wildflowers or peering through the giant telescope that we dragged with us on most of our family vacations.”
Family vacations usually revolved around astronomical events, like the time in 1986 when they drove to the Outer Banks in North Carolina to see Halley’s Comet.
She admits her father, Doug, “is a little obsessed with the stars.” The family cottage bears that out—intense astronomy discussions come up unbidden, and his stargazing nights on the dock are legend.
Equally obsessed with astronomy at a young age, Katharine pursued it with a degree in physics and astronomy at the University of Toronto. She decided to study climate change after becoming aware of how deeply it affects the world’s poorest, most marginalized people. After earning her Master’s and PhD in atmospheric science, she consulted with industry and government to help them understand climate impacts, and now her day job is as professor in the political science department at Texas Tech University teaching about climate science, impacts, and solutions.
That passion for climate-change educating has made her a celebrity—in both science circles and the Christian faith community. As part of that community, she’s uniquely positioned to address the
