Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Katharine Hayhoe: What Does It Mean?
Season 2011 Episode 46 | 2m 5s | Video has closed captioning.
Katharine Hayhoe: What Does It Mean?
Aired: 04/26/11
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Season 2011 Episode 46 | 2m 5s | Video has closed captioning.
Katharine Hayhoe: What Does It Mean?
Aired: 04/26/11
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
(thunder cracks) (air whooshes) (gentle mysterious music) (letters clicking) (bell dings) - When we think about climate change, usually the first thing we think about are the polar bears up in the arctic losing their ice, but it doesn't really honestly matter to most of us at the personal level.
So what I study as a climate scientist is what climate change means for us right here where we live.
What does it mean for a cotton farmer in Texas?
What does it mean for someone working in the public health department in Chicago?
What does climate change mean for each and every one of us in the places where we live?
Where I live in West Texas right now, we get about nine days over 100 degrees every year.
You remember a day that's over 100.
And when you look into the future, you see that we are gonna see a lot more days over 100 degrees.
But under higher emissions, we see conditions that are not far short of what Death Valley experiences today.
The City of Chicago had a really, really bad heatwave.
Everybody knows what that heatwave felt like.
And so what we can actually do is calculate how frequently you expect that heatwave to happen in the future, and that gives us a very vivid mental picture of what summers in Chicago would look like in the future.
My hope in doing the work I do is to demonstrate clearly, without a doubt, that the only way to preserve the best possible world is to significantly reduce our dependence on the dirty and inefficient ways of getting energy that are going to run out on us, and to transition to clean, renewable sources of energy.
And if we can do that, my job is done.
(reel clicking)