The science around climate change is clear, which leads many to wonder why the will to limit global warming has lagged behind.
“The no. 1 thing that we are missing is a sense of efficacy,” Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said at Yahoo Finance's All Markets Summit (video above). “We don't think that anything we do will make a difference. But the world has changed before. And when it changed, it was when individual people use their voices to talk about how the world could be different.”
The challenge is not in convincing people that climate change is real, she explained. It's spurring action among enough people to change the status quo.
That notion is in line with polling data on Americans' attitudes on climate change. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 72% of U.S. adults acknowledge that global warming is happening, but only 35% of adults discuss global warming at least occasionally.
“We have known since the 1800s that digging up coal, back then, and oil and gas, today, are producing heat-trapping gases that are wrapping an extra blanket around the planet, causing it to warm,” Hayhoe said. “What are we missing? We don't understand how it affects us, why it matters to us here and now today in ways that are relevant to each one of us. And we don't know what to do about it."
Climate change's effect on communities
One of the ways climate change is affecting communities is through extreme heat, according to Christian Braneon, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
By mid-century, 1.5 billion people living in urban areas worldwide will be exposed to extreme heat, Braneon said. He stressed that the urban poor, in particular, will be disproportionately affected.
“A lot of people don't realize that the deadliest weather hazard in the United States is actually extreme heat,” Braneon told Yahoo Finance. “Heat waves are becoming more intense. Heat waves are lasting longer. Heat waves are causing folks to be hospitalized and causing folks to have a lower quality of life.”
'Heat islands' within cities also inordinately impact communities of color. Researchers have found that historically redlined neighborhoods are 5 degrees hotter on average than those that were not, according to the New York Times.
“I think if we focus more on the folks that are actually the victims from climate change — and we have a lot of confidence from global climate models in terms of what's going to happen in terms of heat and heat waves — we can kind of get folks' attention, because we all kind of have a connection to extreme heat,” Braneon said.