I want to start by congratulating you
because as far as I know this is the
first time that anybody has actually
broken the box office at the Paramount
Theater. Yeah,
and if you had told me that a talk by a
climate scientist would be the one to
break the box office, I never would have
believed you.
Also, if you had told me when I first
started studying climate science that
one day climate change and immigration
would be the two most politically
polarized issues in the entire United
States, I never would have believed you either.
Yeah, I'm not sure we should
really applaud that one. Because today it is.
Climate change has beat out gun
control, death penalty, abortion even, as
one of the most politically polarized
issues. But for me as a climate scientist,
it just seems incredible because a
thermometer does not give you a
different answer depending on how you
vote.
At the same time though, recognizing
the context in which we are discussing
climate change today in the public
sphere, we can't just talk about the
science. We have to talk about it, how it
relates to all of these untouchable
topics that we're told never to bring up
in polite company - money, politics and God. So we're going to go there today. But you
can't just divide people up into black
and white, yes or no, this or that. This is
why I think this, this study called the
Six Americas of Global Warming is so
brilliant because it divides us all up
into six different groups. And here's the
fascinating thing,  the two groups we hear
the most from are two of the smallest
groups, especially the dismissive group.
Did you know that people who are truly
dismissive, I love the word name
dismissive, I like it much better than
denier. Number one is it's not loaded and
number two is it really describes what
dimissers are. Dismissives are people, here's my
official definition. Dismissers are 
people who if an angel from God appeared
in front of them with tablets of stone,
saying climate change is real in letters
of flame, they would dismiss it. So heaven
help you, if you somehow think that any
more scientific evidence will change
their mind. It will not. Well, what's the
solution to this? Often, in fact I get an
email almost every week saying often, you
know Katherine if you could just explain
the science to so-and-so, I'm sure they
would get it. Or if you could just help
me explain the science for so-and-so I
know they would get it. I just saw a
colleague on Facebook today explaining
the science to somebody in hopes that he
would get it. Here's the thing. That
assumption it's based on the idea that
we're blank slates just waiting to have
the right information written on us. If
we look in the United States, as I said
before, just about you know, there's 16
percent of people who do not belong to a
specific faith and the rest do. So that
is why there is such a deliberate and
intelligent attempt to make it part of
our culture to reject this issue because
then we feel like we have to reject our
culture and our very identity if we're
going to accept the reality of a
changing climate. That is why we see
headlines like this. When we look at
climate change concern levels in the
United States and we divide them out by
affiliation, we have all Americans and
then we have, who is the most concerned
people group? Anybody with really good
eyesight can you read that second line?
Hispanic Catholic. And then anybody with
really good eyesight can you read the
bottom line? Okay, this is where the
wheels start to fall off the bus? Right?
Because forgive me but I thought that
Hispanic Catholics and white Catholics
had the same Pope. And I kind of thought that he was this guy.
And I also thought that this is just
one of the things he said in an over
a 100- page encyclical that he wrote about climate change. Yes or no? Yes.
Global warming is caused by enormous
consumption of wealthy nations with
repercussions in the poorest places on
the planet.
So is it seeing Catholic that makes
people reject the reality of a changing
climate? No is it being evangelical that makes
them reject it? No
