The Current - Where are we in the fight against climate change?

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

We’re in the last week of the climate summit in Brazil, where misinformation and disinformation are a key focus of the conference. It comes against the backdrop of the grim forecast that emissions are not going down quickly enough to avoid climate disaster. We talk to Katharine Hayhoe, Canadian climate scientist and professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University, about the moment we're in right now in the fight against climate change and whether people are disengaging from the issue.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. We are in the final week of the COP Climate Summit in Brazil. That country's president, Lula de Silva, opened the conference by talking about what he called a battle for truth. And in fact, misinformation and disinformation are a key focus of this conference. The backdrop to all of this is a grim forecast. Emissions are not going down quickly enough to avoid climate disaster. Here is the UN climate chief, Simon Steele. The science is clear.

We can and must bring temperatures back down to 1.5 degrees Celsius after any temporary overshoot. Lamenting is not a strategy. We need solutions. Still, there are growing concerns that rich countries have lost the enthusiasm for the fight and a sense that a growing number of individual citizens may be disengaging from the issue of climate change. Catherine Hayho is a Canadian climate scientist, professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University, and the chief scientist for the Canadian Conservation Organization, Nature United.

Catherine, good morning. Good morning, Matt. How are you? It's great to talk to you again. I'm really delighted. You have seen many, many conferences come and go. How would you describe and characterize the moment that we're in right now when it's comes to the fight against climate change? That's a great question. This is number 30, as you can tell by the name, COP 30. And it's been since 1992 that every country in the world agreed to limit dangerous human interference

with the climate system. Unfortunately today, in 2025, we are seeing the results of that dangerous interference. We're seeing it in our extreme weather events being supersized, like the wildfires we have in Canada, the hurricanes that just hit the Caribbean. We're seeing it in the impacts on everything from our economy to our supply chains to our health, we are facing a situation that is a crisis. And what the science says is that every bit of warming that we can avoid by reducing our emissions will have a difference. I want to talk about whether we have the stomach to take that on in a moment. But I mean, there's also this, I said in the introduction, like a storm of miss and disinformation, that those who are trying to think clearly of a climate

change you're facing. How important is it that folks at COP are focusing on that, on focusing on mis and disinformation? Well, to my knowledge, it's the first time that this has really come up in the COP process. And that's important because for the last decade or more, the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report, where they survey business and industry and economic leaders around the world asking them what the biggest risks to humans are in the future. For the last decade or more, mis and disinformation has been at the top of that list. And the second thing on that list has been extreme weather events being supersized by climate change. So the fact that this has finally only come up at the cop process is, you know, it's about time.

Because as a climate scientist myself and somebody who is online quite a bit, I face mis and disinformation every single day, sometimes hundreds and even, in extreme cases, thousands of comments with mis or disinformation claiming that climate is not changing or humans aren't responsible or the impacts aren't serious or there's nothing we can do about it. The U.S. President, Donald Trump, in a speech to the United Nations, said that climate change is, in his words, the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world. How has climate denial and misinformation change? I mean, is it just because you have people like Donald Trump in an enormously powerful position saying that, or is there something else that's going on?

Well, we've known since the 1850s that digging up and burning coal and gas and oil, fossil fuels. It's producing heat-trapping gases that are building up in the atmosphere, wrapping an extra blanket around the planet. It's been more than 60 years since scientists were so concerned about the impacts on humans that they took the really unprecedented step of formally warning a U.S. president, that president being Lyndon B. Johnson, of the need to reduce emissions for the sake of avoiding the impacts on humans. But it wasn't until the late 80s that you and I, the average person, started to actually, noticed this. That was when, you know, Time magazine had a cover on the warming planet. That was when

prominent scientists like Jim Hansen from NASA testified to U.S. Congress saying climate change is real. In 1990, the very first intergovernmental panel on climate change report came out. And that is now the scientific basis for the negotiations at these big climate conferences like COP 30. And so that is when disinformation began, seated and paid for by those who had everything to lose from climate. solutions. So disinformation, the goal is not to actually confuse people on the science. It's the same science that we use every day to explain why planes fly and why stoves heat food. Disinformation and misinformation, which is people who don't know any better, disinformation is people who do know better and they still do it. It has one goal, and that is to prevent action as long as possible.

And the closer we're getting to actually widespread wholesale action with everything from the social tipping points of technology like heat pumps and electric vehicles to the other social tipping points of these disasters are getting a lot worse. We want people to do something about that. The harder, though, is opposed to action are fighting. And so that is the difference we're seeing right now. We're seeing the fact that people realize that if we really want to fix this, which most people in the world do and most people in Canada do, that means big changes. And that means that many who currently have the power and wealth in this world are going to see very big changes in their status. And so that's what they're fighting against. What do you see as your role

in in fighting that misinformation and disinformation? We've talked about this before and then the conversations that you have with people who, I mean, it might be hostile territory, but you go into that territory to try to talk to people. What do you see as your role, especially now in that? Well, as a Canadian, I have lived in Texas now for 20 years. And so not only in Texas, but in West Texas, in one of the most conservative cities in the U.S., and that has given me an unprecedented, I think, perspective into how people are thinking and talking about this issue. In the United States, and sadly, increasingly in Canada as well, we cannot exempt

ourselves from this anymore, the number one predictor of whether you agree with the facts of science that we've known since the 1800s, that climate is changing, humans are responsible, the impacts are serious, scientists agree, and if we, do something, it will make a difference. It isn't how educated or how smart or how much science we know. It is simply where we fall on the political spectrum. But a thermometer is not blue or red or green or orange or any other color that we associate with political parties. It is simply a fact. And so I've discovered that when we can circumvent the hot button words and really talk about, do you feel like the weather's getting weirder? Yes, I've lived here for a long time and

definitely is. How is that affecting your health or your crops or your insurance rates? Well, my home insurance rates went up 50% last year and they said it was because of all these disasters that are happening. What can we do about it? There's lots of things we can do about it, including here in Texas. We're already getting almost 40% of our electricity in Texas from wind and solar energy with storage for when the sun isn't shining. So when we can have conversations that I think of as not just the head what's happening, but the heart, why it matters to me, my family, the people and places and things I love, and the hands, what we are already and what we can continue to do more of in the future, that can disarm about 90% of the conflict.

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In the face of that, what do you make of comments by the president of COP 30, saying that rich countries have lost enthusiasm for combating climate change? Well, like I said, many do not want to confront the realities that we're facing because they feel that the solutions to climate change present a greater threat to their identity or their ideology or simply their power and wealth than actually act than the risks of climate change do. And unfortunately, in many countries, those who are currently in places of power see climate solutions as posing a greater threat to everything they hold dear than the risks, whereas for most of us, the risks pose a far greater threat. And so I think we really are at a turning point where, especially in countries where we can elect our leaders, are we going to elect a leaders who recognize this, take it seriously, and know that the climate crisis is what stands between,

all of us and a better future. Is he right, though? I mean, I'd read somebody saying that in some ways, and you mentioned this, there's hurricanes and wildfires, but that in many ways broadly, and maybe it's our leaders, but it might be us, too, that we have kind of come to this dull acceptance of those things. Oh, it's definitely us, too, because, you know, take our horrendous wildfire season in 23. Most people would say, oh, we had such a horrible wildfire season, worse than we've ever seen before in Canada. The sky was orange, breathing in the smoke choked us. It affected me.

It affected my child. We would think that that would make people more energized to tackle this issue. But if we only have the head and we don't have the heart and the hands, we don't understand how it's going to continue to affect our day-to-day lives and we don't know what to do about it. And most people don't. Most people think, well, I recycle. I eat a plant-based burger. I might have a plug-in car. What else am I supposed to do? If that's not enough, we feel hopeless and helpless. And then our defense mechanisms kick in. And we're like, oh, well, might as well just give up. So that is the dangerous point that the world is at. And it's because so much of our communication has not just been missing disinformation. It's been focused on the head to the exclusion of the heart and the hands. So that's why every week I have a newsletter called Talking Club. climate, talking climate.ca, where I share good news about climate solutions. I share not so good news about how climate change is affecting things that matter to us, our fertility rates, kids sports, backyard hockey rinks, the availability of chocolate even. And then I always share something we can do because our voices are the most powerful force that we have to change the

future. Could I just ask you one more thing on this? And I mean, there's polling that's been done in this country that shows, to your point, that Canadians care. about climate, but they care about it less than before and that those polls show the majority of Canadians are actually more focused on immediate issues like the cost of living and housing affordability. Do you understand that? Oh, I do. And of course, we should be because these are the things that we perceive as directly impacting our well-being and that of our family and the people in places and things we love. For so long, people have framed climate change as one more issue in the long line of issues that we care about. One more bucket sort of at the end of this long line of

buckets that we are trying to put all of our efforts and resources and time into to fix. And even Bill Gates did this in his latest memo. He said, you know, I care about poverty and I care about health. And I just don't have enough left at the end to work on climate anymore. Well, that entire framing is flawed because climate change is not a separate bucket at the end of the list. It's not a separate issue on our voting priorities. Climate change is the whole in every other bucket. If you care about having a safe and affordable home with insurance that you can pay for that's not going to be destroyed by a wildfire or a flood, if you care about the health of yourself and your family, if you care about the places that you grew up, that you want to be

the same for future generations, if you care about being able to afford food on the table and clean water coming out of the tap, then you care about climate change. But we just haven't made that connection. People still think it's about the polar bears, the ice sheets, and David Suzuki, and they don't realize it's actually about me, myself, my neighbor, my family, and everyone and everything I love. How do you start that conversation then? For somebody who says, you know what, the forecast, I started by saying, you know, we're going to overshoot this 1.5 degree target. We're cooked. There's nothing I can do about it. I've done everything that I possibly can. What do you say to them? Well, first of all, I say one and a half degrees is not a magic threshold.

what the science says is every bit matters. Did you know that 10 years ago, when the world signed the Paris Agreement, we were headed towards a world that was 4 to 5 degrees C warmer than the world that we were born into. Today, thanks to the actions that have been taken in the last 10 years, we are now, according to the UN, headed towards a world that is 2.8 degrees warmer. And if all of the promised actions are actually enacted, it will be 2.3 to 2.5 degrees warmer. Well, that's not 1.5, but it's a lot better than four to five. So what can we do more in addition to what has already been done to get this moving faster? And most people think that that focuses on their personal choices, what they eat, what they drive, how they live. We neglect the fact that our voices are what have changed the world before. When you look at the abolition of slavery, how women got the vote, how civil rights were enacted in the U.S. or how apartheid was ended in South Africa. Our voices are increasingly. incredibly powerful and we have not yet activated them because in Canada and around most of the world, most people are not talking about why this thing matters and what we can do about it.

Starting a conversation is the single most powerful thing that every single one of us can do today. Can I ask you just finally about, I mean, in the face of all of this, it is easy to feel hopeless and to feel like there's nothing that can be done about this. You wrote on your substack about the legacy of Jane Goodall. Jane Goodall talked about the urgency of hope and how she would never even in the face of everything that was coming at her be willing to consider relinquishing hope. What have you learned from her? Oh, I'm so glad that you brought that up.

I have had the pleasure and the privilege of actually speaking with her at a couple of different conferences. And she was so inspiring. So a couple of years ago, she actually published a book called The Book of Hope, and she has encouraged us so many times to not give up and to recognize how we can make a difference. There's something else that makes me think of Jane. She didn't say this, but someone else said, you know, we have all these movies and all these books about how people go into the past and they're worried to make one small change in the past because they understand, you know, due to the butterfly effect, they could affect, you know, they could completely radically alter the future. but somehow we never think that our actions today could also radically alter the future yet here we are jane knew that she understood that and she also understood it's not just about our head she said only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our full potential she knew that our small actions motivated by our head and our heart could make a difference and so um that week when we lost jane in my newsletter i always have a what we can do What we can do is to do what Jane told us to do. She said, you can't say you're just one person, so nothing I do matters. No, the only thing that matters is what people do.

And she reminded us to always do it with kindness. Catherine Hayho, it's great to speak with you again. Thank you very much. You too, Matt. Thank you for having me. Catherine Hayho is a Canadian climate scientist professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University and the chief scientist for Nature, You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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