On a January evening in New Haven, Connecticut, Discover teamed up with NBC, Citizen Science, Yale University, and the National Science Foundation to convene a town hall meeting on the implications of rising global temperatures. The frigid weather outside was not helping the cause. Just weeks earlier, record amounts of snow had buried the Northeast, leaving millions of people snowbound. Most climate researchers 
regard epic snowstorms as perfectly consistent with the predictions from their models: Warmer temperatures lead to wetter air, which in turn can lead to more snow. But for many Americans, the blustery weather cast doubt on warming claims: How could the planet be heating up when it’s freezing outside? The confusion underscored the difficulty climate researchers face in communicating their findings to the public. A Gallup poll conducted in March indicated that 
18 percent of Americans doubt global warming will have any impact at all—nearly twice the number that felt this way three years ago. Even scientists stand divided on the best way to deal with the threat. Should we tax carbon emissions? Push for radical efficiency standards? Is it possible to address global warming without harming the economy?

Inside Yale’s Kroon Hall, four panelists tackled these questions from widely varying perspectives. Billy Parish cofounded the Energy Action Coalition, the world’s largest youth climate-advocacy organization. Linda Fisher is the chief sustainability officer at DuPont, which has increased profits by reducing its emissions and selling more environmentally friendly products. Rajendra Pachauri is chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007, and director of Yale’s Climate and Energy Institute. And Katharine Hayhoe, a professor of geosciences at Texas Tech University, is an evangelical Christian who addresses common misconceptions about climate change from a religious as well as scientific perspective. NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw moderated the event in front of an audience of college and high school students—people who will spend the next few decades living with the consequences of the policy decisions we make right now (click here for video of the event).


THE PANELISTS

LINDA FISHER is the chief sustainability officer at DuPont, one of America’s oldest chemical companies and the source of modern marvels such as neoprene, Teflon, and Lycra. Fisher, a lawyer, guides the company’s safety, health, and environment programs. Before joining DuPont, she spent 12 years at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she helped develop the agency’s first study of climate change. Fisher has also served as vice president of government affairs for Monsanto and as counsel with the law firm Latham & Watkins.

RAJENDRA PACHAURI is one of the world’s leading climate scientists. As chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize–
winning United Nations Inter­govern­mental Panel on Climate Change, he plays a critical role in providing nations with objective science on global warming. Among other positions, Pachauri also serves as director of Yale’s Climate and Energy Institute and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in India. He has written 23 books and holds Ph.D.s in economics and industrial engineering.

KATHARINE HAYHOE is an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, where she studies climate modeling and the regional impacts of global warming. She is also CEO of ATMOS Research, a scientific consulting firm that assesses the potential future impacts of climate change on ecosystems and human welfare. Her debut book, 
A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions, uses scientific information to challenge popular misconceptions about global warming.

BILLY PARISH began his career as a climate advocate after dropping out of Yale in 2002. “I felt like the world was burning and I needed to do something about it,” he says. Parish is the cofounder of the Energy Action Coalition, a consortium of 50 youth-led groups that motivate young people to advocate for a clean-energy economy. The group’s historic Power Shift conference in 2009 amassed 12,000 youth activists. Parish is also the cofounder and president of Solar Mosaic, an online platform to develop and fund solar installations, and Green Owl Records, an environmentally friendly label under the Warner Music Group.


THE CONVERSATION

Tom Brokaw: We know that 2010 was tied for the hottest year on record, but we’re sitting here now in snowy New Haven. It’s been a long, cold winter in New England and across much of America. How does this fact relate to climate change?

Rajendra Pachauri: The reality is that what we see today is not merely a smooth and steady increase in temperatures. We’re really disrupting the well-balanced climate system of the globe, and this leads to an increase in floods and droughts, heat waves and extreme precipitation.

Brokaw: Last year was also the wettest year on record. As Discover recently reported, the combination of hotter temperatures, rising carbon dioxide levels, and heavy rains may be spurring a rise in allergies and asthma worldwide. Katharine, you’ve studied the impact of climate change on specific locations around the world. What do you see as the impact on our overall health as a result of the changes going on in the climate?

Katharine Hayhoe: People are very sensitive to extremes, both cold and hot. We know that the world’s high-temperature extremes are increasing, while some of our cold-temperature extremes are decreasing. Back in 2003, Europe experienced a huge heat wave. The death toll from that event reached 70,000 people in three weeks. We’ve had similar heat waves in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest. In the future, we will see those heat waves recurring more and more frequently. By the end of the century, if we continue on our current path, we could see heat waves like the one in Chicago in 1995 occurring three times every summer.

Brokaw: It is the underdeveloped countries and the emerging nations that are really being hit hardest by all of this, isn’t it?

Pachauri: Absolutely. We just don’t have the health-care infrastructure in a number of developing countries. Just consider the breeding of mosquitoes and the diseases they carry. Farming is another big consideration. There are about a billion people, largely in the developing world, who are dependent totally on rain-fed agriculture. With changes in precipitation levels and the availability of water, their livelihoods and their ability to stay on the soil that they’ve been tilling will be affected badly. What are they going to do? They’re going to stream into towns and cities to pick up any kind of job that they can get. There will also be illegal immigration. These problems will not remain confined to certain parts of the world; they are going to become global problems that could rise to the level of a crisis.

Audience question: How will climate change affect the cost of health care?

Pachauri: The cost of health care will certainly go up because the incidence of disease will go up. That’s why we have to look at the balance in terms of what is cheaper: Can we reduce emissions of greenhouse gases today so that we can stabilize the earth’s climate, rather than adapt to the impacts of climate change and incur much higher costs over a period of time? This is an economic issue quite apart from an ethical and equity issue. Decision makers and the public at large have to consider this very carefully.