- Funding for the secret life of scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

(air whooshing) (Gently chiming bells ) - I study what climate change means for us in the places where we live.

Whether we live on the eroding coastline up in Alaska, whether you're a farmer in the Central Valley of California or in the heart of the Great Plains.

I figure out what climate change means for us.

And what we see is two important things.

We're gonna have to start again because I should have made that part quicker.

(laughs) (beeps) I study what climate change means to us in the places where we live.

How does it matter to us?

What's already affecting us today?

And what does climate change mean in the future?

What we see are two important things.

First of all, climate is already changing, and second of all, the magnitude of future changes depend on of choices that we make now and in the next decade.

Was that 30 seconds?

(laughs) (gentle music) (air whooshing) (gently chiming bells) One of the first times that we went to church in Texas, I met a couple and we were introducing ourselves.

They asked, "What do you do?"

I explained that I study global warming and they said, "Oh, that's wonderful.

We need somebody like you to tell our children the right things, you would not believe the lies that they're being taught at school.

They told us that, "the ice in the Arctic is melting and it's threatening the polar bears."

And I said, well, I'm afraid that that's true.

(laughs) There's often a perceived conflict, between science and faith.

It's a little bit like coming out of the closet, admitting to people that you are a Christian and you are a scientist.

My husband, he is the pastor of an evangelical church, and many people would approach him to ask him questions about climate change.

If anything, there's even more questions in the Christian community, because we are targeted by so much of the disinformation that's going on.

So that's why my husband and I decided to write a book together, a scientist and a pastor on what a faith-based response to this problem looks like.

With climate change, much of our response to this issue is emotional.

The fear of how our lives would be irrevocably changed if we uprooted our entire economy.

And how our rights to enjoy the luxuries of energy and water might be ripped away from us.

Well, as a Christian, we're told that God is not the author of fear, God is love.

When we're acting out of fear, we're thinking about ourselves.

When we act about love, we are not thinking about ourselves, we're thinking about others.

Our global neighbors, the poor and the disadvantaged, the people who do not have the resources to adapt.

And so I believe that we are called first of all, to love each other, and second of all, to act.

(gentle music) Am I a climate change evangelist?

The evangel means good news.

Climate change is not really very good news right now but at the same time, I think it is good news to know that we have choices.

And by making wise and responsible choices now, we can ensure that we protect the things that we care about the most on our planet.

For the benefit of the people who we know personally and those who we don't.

(gentle music) (air whooshing) (gently chiming bells ) 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 heat wave, every knows what that heat wave felt like.

And so what we can actually do is calculate how frequently you expect that heat wave 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.

Into transition, to clean, renewable sources of energy.

And if we can do that, my job is done.

(gentle music) (air whooshing) (gently chiming bells) Climate change, because it's about more than just temperature.

It's about everything that we're familiar with that we're used to changing.

(upbeat music) That having a relationship with the God of the universe is one of the most incredible experiences you can ever have.

The ones from way back in the dust of time, two, 3000 years ago, without any of the instruments that we have today.

Scientists figured out incredible things like the distance from the earth to the sun.

Gotta go with Billy Graham Billy Graham transcends politics.

My father, he first introduced me to science and showed me that it could be really cool and fun.

I'm from Ontario, you can't ask that.

(gentle music) The grandfather of climate science, Sir John Houghton from England is also an evangelical Christian The amount of disinformation being targeted at the very community that I am part of.

It's hard to have a favorite scientist in pop culture because usually when you see scientists in the movies you cringe.

(laughs) That climate change really is happening and most of it really is because of human activities.

(gently chiming bells)