811: How Science Moms are Protecting the Places We Love from Unnatural Disasters

24:41And now we know as scientists that we're not going to get that better future. if we don't fix climate change. So we're all in this together. Yes. How can our listeners get involved? So let's talk a little bit about the Active Man campaign. I think it's really interesting. It's sparking conversations. What are some ways that our listeners can jump in and support this movement and just learn more about it? So let me explain what that is. We've been talking earlier about how we have a lot of information in our heads. Like a lot of people are sort of worried about what's going to happen to the future of the planet and the future of humanity and the ice sheets and the polar bears and the Amazon.

25:17But we haven't made that head to heart connection. We don't understand what's happening where I live. Well, these days, nature is making that connection for us. And it is making it primarily through what I call not global warming, but global weirding. In other words, wherever we live, it's as if we have a pair of weather dice and we always have a chance of rolling a double six naturally. That's like a heat wave, a drought, a flood, a storm, wildfire. But as the world gets warmer decade by decade, it's like it's sneaking in and taking one of those numbers on our dice and turning it to another six.

25:55And then now these days, we even have some sevens and eights on our dice. And so we're getting heat waves that start earlier and last longer and that are way hotter than we've ever seen before. We're getting heat waves in some places in winter, like Australia just had a record-breaking heat wave in their winter. Antarctica is having heat waves. We're seeing wildfires. I'm from Canada, if you can't tell by the way I talk. We're seeing wildfires that are burning huge areas, many times bigger than we've ever seen before. We're seeing hurricanes that are dumping way more rain than we've ever had before.

26:29We've seen floods getting more frequent. We've seen these disasters getting to the point where people used to call them acts of God. But today, these disasters, the way our weather dice are getting loaded against us, the way global weirding is happening where we live, they're acts of man now. We're the ones who are causing these incredibly damaging disasters to happen. And across the United States, nine out of 10 Americans would agree that they have been personally affected by extreme weather over the last few years. So this is the biggest head-to-heart connection that's happening. Wherever you live, I can tell you how climate change is already affecting the extreme weather where you live, and it's affecting your home, your ability to get around.

27:15It's hugely affecting your insurance rates. I have a colleague with a young kid who lives in South Florida, and she was telling me that her home insurance just doubled in the last year. And she does not live in a seaside mansion. She lives in a normal-sized home with a normal-sized family, normal-sized income. And pretty soon, we can't even keep up with these disasters. And they're affecting the price of the food in our grocery stores. They're affecting the quality of our water. They're affecting the air that we breathe. They're affecting every aspect of our lives. And so that's what active man is about.

27:48It's about showing us that our decisions are the ones that are doing this to ourselves. So for example, where do you live? Duluth, Minnesota. Okay. Duluth, Minnesota. you might be like, well, that's very far north. You know, it's almost on the border with Canada, right? Isn't a little global warming a good thing up there, like longer summers, nicer weather, less snow? Well, in Duluth, you've got 11 rivers going through the city, right? And over, I think it was over 10 years ago, there was a massive flood. In fact, in some places in Minnesota, people's home insurance has gone up by 300 % or more just because flood risk is increasing.

28:26How is that connected to global warming? Warmer air holds more water vapor. So when a storm comes along today, there's a lot more water vapor for that storm to sweep up and dump on us than there was 50 or 100 years ago. So the flood risk in Duluth, Minnesota, as well as Toronto, Ontario, where I'm from, has gone off the charts. And it's even worse when you've got rivers going through because then all the water from further away is coming through the city as well. So Duluth suffered some incredible floods. And as a result, the city has actually invested in creating what they call these riparian zones, which are green areas of vegetation and nature that absorb flood water along the rivers instead of having homes that can be damaged.

29:06But at the same time, we know that if we don't fix climate change, you can do all the riparian zone restoration you want, and it isn't going to be enough to protect people. So that's just one example of how climate change is making these acts of man, so to speak, worse in Duluth, Minnesota. Okay, it is officially that time of year. And if you run a business, you know, the holiday rush is no joke. I've done more Black Fridays than I can count at this point. And let me tell you, orders at 2am, inventory updates, refreshing my site, hoping it can keep up. It never stops being intense. That is exactly why I use Shopify.

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31:58We met donkeys, goats, and pigs, and the kids got to pick peppers in their greenhouse. Watching them run around the farm, getting their hands dirty, and laughing the whole time was such a joy. It was peaceful. It was full of those little moments that literally just make you pause and feel connected. That trip reminded me why I love using Airbnb. It connects you to places and experiences that really stay with you. If you've ever thought about hosting your home on Airbnb, it doesn't take much. Whether it's your entire house or just a spare room, your space could offer that same feeling to someone else and even earn you some extra income.

32:35Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com forward slash host. It's amazing. And it's so interesting because really, even when we look at the language again, it's just a shift in ownership, right? It's easy to blame it on something else like an act of God, but even just taking the ownership brings it back to I can actually influence it. And I think that's so huge. And it's so interesting to me, like even living in Duluth last winter, we had the mildest winter of all time. We hated it. There's no snow. I'm like, we live here because we actually like the snow. And it's just impossible to ignore.

33:15And I think that's what's really interesting is, especially I believe for my generation, so many of us still have that back of the mind, like a hundred years from now mentality, but we're literally seeing it and living it. And I think too, as parents, naturally you experience it even more. My kids were so disappointed. They got ice skates for Christmas and they couldn't even get out on the lake because there was water on it. And so it's like, as parents, I feel like it hits you even deeper of like, we didn't get to take our snowshoes out this last year. We didn't get to go cross country skiing.

33:48My brother bought snowmobiles. They didn't even get to use them. And so it is interesting, not only impacts in just what you can do in the weather, but experiencing the lack of experiences due to the weather as well. Oh, totally. I mean, I'm Canadian. So I grew up with an ice rink in our backyard. Yes. My second first memory after my dad showed me how to find a galaxy was going to his hockey games when I was like three years old. So that's a big part of our life is learning how to skate. And the number of days we can skate outside versus inside. I mean, you know, normally you just flood all the tennis courts and that's where people skate in the winter.

34:26Well, you can't even do that anymore in a lot of places. Our lifestyle is changing and what we wanted to teach our children, what we learned from our parents, it's changing for us. And imagine how much more it's changing for indigenous people who live up in the Arctic Circle. And then there's those types of losses of things that we care about, but then there's also things that affect our health. Like, for example, you and I probably remember, you know, growing up, my mother never checked me for ticks. Like I would spend all summer running through the woods as much as I could in Southern Ontario.

34:55And I never worried about ticks. My husband grew up in Virginia and every night his mother would check him for ticks, which of course carry diseases, right? Well, fast forward to today, I was up in the same place where I grew up at our cottage in Ontario with my son. and he came running to me and he's like, I think I have a tick. And I looked and it was a tick. He's like, oh my gosh. He's like ripping off his clothes because of course kids know everything these days from social media. He's like, do I have any other ticks? Because now they carry Lyme disease. I mean, Lyme disease wasn't even on the list of diseases recognized by Health Canada 10 or 15 years ago because we didn't even have it anywhere in Canada.

35:34And now it is all through Minnesota. It's all through Wisconsin. It's all through Southern Ontario. And those ticks are moving north because of climate change. The colder winters aren't cold enough anymore to kill them off. So there's crazy stuff happening, even in places where you wouldn't even think are susceptible. And then I live now in Texas. Texas already has more sixes on its weather dice than any other state. But Texas has more billion dollar weather and climate disasters now, thanks to acts of man, than we've ever had. Hurricanes are stronger. Wildfires, we had the biggest wildfire in Texas record just this past January in the winter.

36:13The heat in the summer is getting so extreme. Our whole family has gotten heat stroke multiple times, even though we have these like huge yetis. And I just force everybody to drink like gallons of water in the summer. And we don't spend time outside in the summer between like 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. It's crazy how things are changing. And one of my fellow science moms, Joellen Russell, she is originally from Alaska and now she lives in Arizona, which is ground zero for extreme heat. She has to wake her kids up before dawn because that's the only time they can play outside in the summer safely. I mean, it's just crazy what's happening and how it is intimately affecting our lives and our kids' lives.

36:52It is not a future issue anymore. It's here and it's now. Can you talk, one thing that I love when you share about is talking about just different communities and how they're differently impacted. And I think it would be important to go deeper because it's easy for us to think of, well, how does it affect me? Right? That's naturally where our brains go. But one of the things that I've loved learning from you is just the different socioeconomic impacts and things that we might not even be considering about others in our communities and the impact of climate change. Can we go a little deeper on that?

37:27Oh, yes. I mean, that's, like I mentioned, that's what made me become a climate scientist. When I realized that climate change affects us all, but it doesn't affect us all equally. And the people who are most affected are the ones who did the least to cause the problems. So keeping with the idea of parents and kids, let's just start there. Yeah. So we know that pregnant women are disproportionately affected by the pollution from burning fossil fuels, the air pollution that we breathe in. as well as being disproportionately affected by rising temperatures and by these extreme weather disasters that are getting worse, global weirding.

38:05So for example, exposure to pollution actually decreases the effectiveness of IVF, for example, by a factor of five. Air pollution disproportionately impacts young children and the elderly. Young children because their lungs are so small and They're breathing in so much of it. We're seeing that when you shift school buses over from diesel school buses to electric school buses, within just a matter of weeks, childhood asthma goes down by 30%. And then it continues to drop over time. Having gas stoves. Now, I love to cook with the best of them. And my gas stove was one of my favorite things, I just want to say for the record.

38:46But when I read the research that, frankly, it horrified me that as I'm an atmospheric scientist, I study the air. I didn't even know that gas stoves produce so much indoor air pollution, even when they're off, that I had a gas stove for most of our life. It wasn't until about eight or nine years ago that I started to see the new research on gas stoves and air pollution and the impact on kids. And how children are six times more likely to have asthma if they grow up in a home with an indoor gas stove. So I switched to induction. And at that time, there was a lot of misinformation about how I couldn't use my cast iron, the crucifix stuff that I love that I asked for for my wedding and I use every day.

39:27But it turns out you can use all of that. I can use everything. So that's all good. Not to mention you can boil water faster and there's no air pollution. Yeah. So all of that disproportionately affects kids. And as soon as I found out about that, I posted it on my Facebook page. And I have a newsletter every week called Talking Climate, where I talk a lot about this type of stuff too. And I posted it. And then people were like, oh, are you serious? Like, is this really the case? Are you sure? And I was like, well, yeah, I think the research is pretty clear. Yeah. So I posted again a couple of years later, and this woman commented on my post.

40:00And she said, I didn't know anything about it either, but I had a son who had terrible asthma. We had already ended up in the ER with him multiple times. And, you know, your heart just breaks when you think about that. I'm very fortunate that my son doesn't have it. My sister had asthma growing up. And so I know what it looks like to have to be struggling to breathe, to have to carry inhaler with you all the time, to be, you know, running to the ER. You know, as a sibling, it's traumatic enough. As a parent, it's even worse. And so she said her son, she'd already been to the ER multiple times with her son.

40:29and he was only about five or six years old at the time. She said she saw my original post. They immediately switched. And you might say, well, isn't it super expensive? You can get a two burner inductive stove for 60 bucks at Ikea. So we're not talking super expensive anymore. She said they immediately switched and she said they haven't been to the ER since. And so I'm just like, okay, leave climate change out of the picture. From that perspective alone, Do we not have every reason to get ourselves off the dirty and polluting ways of getting energy that helped us back then? But we don't need them anymore.

41:05We have clean ways to get energy and use energy today. So that's just kids. Now, let's just move up slightly to our cities. It turns out that in our cities in North America, when we have a heat wave, and those heat waves, again, they're getting worse. They're getting stronger. They're coming earlier. They're lasting longer. Low-income neighborhoods can be up to 15 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than a high-income neighborhood in the same city. The number one reason is lack of green space and trees. That's the number one reason. And why don't poor neighborhoods have trees and green space? Often it's because of historic racist practices called redlining, where people couldn't get mortgages or they couldn't get low-interest loans or the city didn't invest in parks.

41:51and boulevards and green spaces in those areas. So as a result, they're hotter during heat waves, air pollution's higher because trees actually filter the air pollution out of the air. They don't have places to go with their kids outside. You know, if you're outside for 15 or 20 minutes, it actually changes your brain chemistry. It helps with our mental health. It provides us a place to spend time outdoors. So, and green space, it soaks up rain when it floods. Whereas if you just have concrete, then all that water goes and it floods your homes, it floods your streets. So it turns out that greening low-income neighborhoods, first of all, reduces air pollution, reduces the heat burden, which reduces the impact on people's health, reduces the impact on their air conditioning bills, enhances their physical and their mental health.

42:41And in fact, at the Nature Conservancy, where I serve as their chief scientist, we just finished a multi-year study in Louisville where they looked at the impact of greening a low-income neighborhood on heart health. And it turns out that we were collaborating with the medical school at the university, and they discovered that the simple act of planting trees in low-income neighborhoods actually decreased inflammation, which leads to a whole host of issues, both mental and physical, as well as heart issues. So, I mean, there's just so much inequality that there's some amazing solutions to. And then of course, we have the whole inequality between countries where, you know, we talked about these disasters, these acts of man that are getting worse where we live, whether Minnesota, Florida, or Texas.

43:26But if you look globally, which countries are suffering the worst? It's countries like Mozambique, countries like Afghanistan, countries that are already living on the edge that don't have the resources like basic healthcare or clean water or enough food. They're the ones that are being affected most. So those are all the whole range of inequalities we're dealing with. And I mean, not just as a parent, but as a human, doesn't it just make you want to be like, yes, we got to fix this, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's all so fascinating. And I think it can just feel overwhelming. And so, Catherine, help us to feel hopeful and to feel encouraged and inspired into action.

44:07Because I think at the end of this episode, that is all we can do. And so what would you say to somebody who's listening to this and they're like, this feels so hopeless. Like, where do we go from here? Because honestly, I think that is next to the thought that this isn't going to happen for a long time. That is the next feeling. And so where do we go from here? So I feel like we are all standing there at the bottom, looking at the top of Mount Everest. Yes. And I enjoy hiking with the best of them, but I am not a mountaineer. I am not what you would call like an athlete. I have no ambitions of climbing Mount Everest in real life.

44:47And I'm not sure I would make it, to be totally honest. But it's like, we're all standing sort of collectively at the bottom of Mount Everest. And we're looking at the top and we're like, there is no way we're going to get there. Well, how do you get there? You get there one step at a time. And all of us have the ability to take one step. And if we do things together, we have the ability to take more steps. And here's the thing. We don't have to do this alone. It's not like every human being on their own without reference to anybody else has to get at the top of Mount Everest. We just have to figure out collectively how to do it.

45:26And I know that collectively we can. How? Because we've actually done something like that in real life. And we've done many other things in real life. Take that to the social change that we're talking about that we need. You know, 100 years ago, most of us, women, we couldn't vote, right? Many places we couldn't vote. In fact, in some countries, people couldn't even vote when I was born. That's how crazy it is. But now we can vote, and often we just take that for granted. But it's not because the president of the U.S. woke up one day, who was a man, of course, and said, oh, women should really get the vote.

45:58Like, that's not why women got the vote. You know, slavery didn't end because the King of England woke up one day and was like, oh, slavery is so unfair. It really should be abolished. No, civil rights were not enacted because the people in charge were like, oh, you know, it's crazy that we have this ridiculous system. Why don't we just fix it? And apartheid didn't end because the ruling party in South Africa said, oh, it's Friday. We should just, you know, give people racial equality. Like none of these things happen because the leaders just decided spontaneously one day they should happen. they happened because very ordinary people, people who were not wealthy, they were not influential, they were not like, they were not even the Albert Einsteins of the world.

46:38They were just people who had the courage of their convictions and they knew that their voice was the most powerful thing they had. So they used their voice and some of those people we know. So we know the names of Martin Luther King Jr., right? We know the names of Susan B. Anthony. We know the names of Nelson Mandela, but they were thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people who marched with them, who used their voices with them in the places where they were, because we all have friends, we all have neighbors, we all have co-workers or colleagues, we all have people who are part of these same organizations as us.

47:11They use their voices to advocate for a better future. And we don't know who most of those people are, but we live in their shadow today. And those people were ordinary people who were convinced that a better future is possible and did everything they could to advocate for and to paint a picture of what that better future looked like and what we need to do to get there. And we live in their shadow today. And I know that we are those people ourselves. And what we do matters and the people who come in the future, they will live in our shadow. So what will we do to make a better and different future for them?

47:47I love that the science can be boiled down to this simple statement. So there's this big scientific body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And it's thousands of scientists from around the world. They produce these giant reports with like 10-point font and a million scientific references. And I don't recommend actually reading them because, I mean, unless you really love the science, in which case do. But they boiled down the whole thing where they had this huge report that looked at what's going to happen in the future depending on the choices we make. you know if the world gets warmer by one degree or one and a half or two or two and a half what's going to happen and you might say well that doesn't sound like a lot but those levels are actually equivalent to how our human body feels as our human body increase temperature increases by one one and a half two three or four degrees the global temperature is as stable as that of the human body and so we're currently running a two degree fahrenheit fever globally that means our planet feels just like we do if we're running a two degree fever we feel achy we're taking Tylenol or wondering who coughed on us or taking a COVID test or going to the doctor, wondering what we ate.

48:51So the whole conclusion of that giant report was this. Every bit of warming matters, which means every action matters and every choice matters. And so we as individuals have so much power to not only make decisions in our personal life and then talk about them to make them contagious, but we have the power to use our voice individually, in person and online, to join a climate action group, start with science moms, why not? To use our voice where we work or where we study or where we worship and to use our voice with our elected officials at every level to say, this matters. We all want a better future.

49:28What can we do together to make that happen? I have absolutely loved this interview so much. Thank you so much for your passion. Thank you for breaking it down. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for your facts. Like this was so incredible. And I'm just so, I'm really, really thankful. Where can everybody find out more about you, connect with you, get involved with Science Moms, check out Active Man. Give me all the places. Oh, so many places. So you can find first of us online at activeman.com or and sciencemoms.com. and then my own website, just my name, katherinehayhoe.com. You have to spell it with two A's though.

50:11There you go. Then you can find us on social media. So you can find Science Moms on social media and there's lots of resources that you can share also on social media because that's a way to use our voice. I'm on social media too. Like I mentioned, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Facebook, LinkedIn. I have a newsletter every week called Talking Climate and it every week shares good news in green, not so good news in red. So you can skip that if you need to, but I feel like we need to understand why this is a problem. And then in blue, it's got what you can do to make a difference. And there's so much available.

50:48I have a book called Saving Us because it's not about saving the planet. It's actually about saving us. If you want to know how to have conversations and where we find hope in this world that just seems full of doom and gloom all the time. But if you start these conversations with people around you, don't start again about the polar bears and the ice sheets unless you are a polar bear living on an ice sheet, in which case, yes, that's exactly where you would start. But start a conversation from the heart about what matters to you. And for those of us who are parents, where better to start than with what we're most passionate about, our kids.

51:20For those of us who work in a certain industry, there is so much that we can talk about about solutions in the fashion industry, solutions in the finance industry, solutions in the banking industry, solutions in every industry. There are people working on solutions already today. In fact, the carpet industry has solutions where you can actually buy carpet that is carbon negative carpet. The shoe industry has carbon negative shoes. There's solutions all around us. And when we start looking for those solutions, and that's why I write my newsletter because people are like, well, where do you find all these solutions, Catherine?

51:53I'm like, oh, I'm going to share one with you every week. When we start looking around, they're all around us. And we have these amazing solutions. We realize the giant boulder of climate action, it is not sitting at the bottom of an impossibly steep cliff with only a few hands on it. We normally think it's this huge boulder. It's a giant cliff. And it's got like Greta Thunberg, who's this little, little girl. It's got Sir David Attenborough, who's like, what, 95? It's got Al Gore, but he's been pushing on it for like 40 years. He must be exhausted. We're like, that boulder's not moving. So why bother adding my hand?

52:25It's just a waste of time. And who has any time to waste? None of us do. I feel like our time is the most non-renewable resource we have. Carbon's number two. Time's number one. But when we look around, we realize, no, that giant boulder, it's already at the top of the hill. It's already rolling down the hill in the right direction. It already has millions of hands on it. In fact, some of those hands might be my neighbors. my coworkers, people I know, people in my industry, even, you know, people in my city council, people in my church, people at my school, it has millions of hands on it. And if I had my hand to a rolling boulder, it's going to go a little bit faster and I'm going to be making the world a better place.

52:58And bottom line is, don't we all want to be making the world a better place? Like, isn't that what helps us sleep at night? Yes. Oh, this was amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the Gold Digger podcast. I hope everyone goes and checks out Science Moms, gets involved. I can't wait to get your newsletter. I just feel like I love the breakdown and the sections. And I also just love newsletters in general. So bravo to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you for having me. This has been such a pleasure. I've got to say, I am feeling so fired up about this episode. I absolutely loved hearing from and learning from Dr.

53:36Katherine Hayhoe. I think she is a brilliant communicator. And I absolutely loved the focus on conversation and finding commonality in a world that feels so dismissive and divisive, finding the things that you love alongside other people who have that common love so that we can all come together and make a massive difference. I feel enlightened. I feel inspired. I feel ready to take action. And I hope you feel the same too. Make sure you check out Science Moms and learn more about ways that we can all come together and make a difference for this beautiful planet that we live on. And thank you so much for tuning in to another amazing episode of the Gold Digger Podcast.

54:17Until next time, keep on digging your biggest goals. Thanks for pulling up a seat for another episode of the Gold Digger Podcast. I hope today's episode filled you with inspiration, gave you information that you can turn into action, and realigned you with your true north in life and business. If you've enjoyed today's episode, head on over to golddiggerpodcast.com for today's show notes, discount codes for our sponsors, freebies to fuel your results, and so much more. And if you haven't yet, make sure you're subscribed so that you never miss a future show. We'll see you next time, Gold Diggers.

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