A climate conversation with NOAA Education Director Louisa Koch
By Zachary Matson
In May, the Wild Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hosted a workshop for climate educators around the country. Representatives from K-12 schools, universities, museums, nonprofits and other institutions who use NOAA data visualizations and grants met for three days at the center in Tupper Lake.
Louisa Koch, who has served as NOAA’s director of education since 2006, sat down with the Explorer for an interview about climate change education, the Adirondacks and the challenges of balancing conservation and renewable energy development. The following is edited for clarity and length.
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What role does a region like the Adirondacks play in the education mission of NOAA?
Our mission is to create a climate-ready nation, which means that we’re prepared for and trying to mitigate the changing climate. It’s having a huge impact on places like this: you guys have experienced acid rain before, you know that it can really dramatically affect your community.
Climate change is a wetter world because there’s more rain. It’s a hotter world. We have to look at each community and think through what are the risks to that community, and how can the community assess what are the most valuable assets that are at risk? What do they want to do to protect them? Also joining in the bigger fight of how can we try and get this climate on a more sustainable path, get this planet back in the balance that has allowed civilization to thrive? Because we’re not on that path right now.
What role do the people at this workshop play in addressing these challenges and what do you hope they take away from a few days together?
The people here all represent important institutions that are doing cutting edge work on trying to create more resilient communities. And resilience is a really important focus because if you talk about climate change to a lot of people, particularly if you talk about the impacts, what it will mean to their communities and to things they love, it can really shut people down. So talking about resilience allows you to go through the conversation about climate change, but then move on to what are people doing about it. What can we do about it? What do we want to do about it? That’s a really important transition. Everybody here has an important contribution to that conversation.
Where do you feel like we are on this path of building a shared understanding of climate change and engaging people to take action?
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The Yale Climate School of Communications has a spectrum of the views of different Americans and how they feel about climate change. On one end of the spectrum is Denial Dan, who basically is very well informed and determined to undermine climate change science. They’re more often male, they’re very knowledgeable, and they’re very articulate. The other end of the spectrum you have Alarmed Alice, where the alarm bells are ringing.
The Wild Center surveyed their visitors and asked them where they were on the spectrum. They asked their staff where they thought their visitors were and found their staff was underestimating their visitors. The visitors don’t need to be convinced that climate change is happening.
And by the way, across the country, the Yale surveyors have been seeing the nation shift to higher levels of awareness, higher levels of concern. More and more people say they have been directly impacted by climate change. That’s so important because your lived experience helps establish your path forward and your desire to act. Both locally and nationally, we’re seeing an increasing number of people who understand the climate is changing and who understand that we need to take action and understand that later is too late. We need to act now.
If attitudes are shifting, what are the next steps?
We’re talking about too many greenhouse gases. So fundamentally, we need to reduce the number of greenhouse gases that we’re emitting into the air. That means more wind, more solar, more ability to shift power from where there’s a lot of solar or a lot of wind to communities that need power that don’t have wind or solar. We need to reduce the use of carbon-emitting fuels.
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How do we think about this balancing of on the one hand the desire to protect ecosystems and landscapes in their natural state, but also this need to produce a lot more renewable energy?
Yeah, it’s hard. And, you know, it’s why getting communities together to have these conversations is so important. We are approaching the tipping point on the stability of our climate, we risk so much by not taking action to reduce carbon emissions in significant ways. You just have to make these trade-offs. Everybody has to make them for themselves, communities have to come together and make them. You know 2023 saw a record number of weather and climate-related billion-dollar disasters. Those communities that were affected are devastated. Entire ecosystems were wiped out. So communities have to make the decisions for themselves, but the stakes could not be higher — for the Earth system as we know it. The Earth system has been stable for a long time, it’s been balanced in a way that humans have thrived. If we knock that system out of balance, it’s not clear that humans will be able to geoengineer it back into balance.
When someone graduates from high school, what should they have learned about climate change?
That humans are affecting the climate and that changes to the climate will affect humans. Once you understand that you can go deeper in so many different ways. But that’s the fundamental foundation for dealing with the issue. Which is why deniers are so dangerous.
The politics on this are constantly shifting. You are in Washington D.C. Are there a lot of deniers in positions of power there?
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We see the number of deniers going down. I just read from the youth leader from a Republican conservation group talking about the strong Republican heritage of conserving nature, of protecting nature and wanting to regain that. That is a core issue. Things are constantly shifting and I think deniers … their voices are quieter. We’re not talking about whether the climate is changing anymore. We’re talking about how it’s changing, why it’s changing and what we need to do to adapt and mitigate climate change.
People here talk about this idea of climate migrants or refugees, even climate gentrifiers. How do we prepare for that and how should communities think about that?
There’s no question that the increasing understanding of the impacts of climate change is affecting people’s day-to-day decisions. And the Adirondacks are becoming more appealing, in many ways, because of climate change. A warmer world is not necessarily a tremendous threat to a lot of people who live in the Adirondacks. The abundance of water is a huge asset. The people here have a very desirable location for other people to join. So what policies do communities choose to put forward to either encourage or discourage people coming in from other places? I do think that will be an increasing pressure. It’s not gonna be the only factor that people make decisions on, but an increasing number of people will be making decisions factoring that in. Hopefully, some of those people will be welcomed here.
Top photo: The Wild Center’s Science on a Sphere exhibit. Educators from around the country convened at the center in May to share insight into different climate education programs. Photo by Zachary Matson
Louisa Koch’s lifetime achievements and commitment to climate change education obviously are exemplary.
And yet, she says “the Adirondacks are becoming more appealing, in many ways, because of climate change” and a “warmer world is not necessarily a tremendous threat to a lot of people who live in the Adirondacks.”
Losing winter is “appealing”? Tell that to the skiers, snowmobilers, and the local stores and restaurants that depend upon their business.
Dangerously polluted air from Canadian wildfires stoked by climate change is “appealing”? Tell that to all the kids who had outdoor sports events cancelled.
The ongoing assault on the North Country by ticks and invasive plants turbocharged by climate heating is “not a threat”? Tell that to the Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program.
The loss of lake ice due to wicked climate warning also is “not a threat”? Tell that to the ice fishing derby organizers who increasingly are forced to cancel events because of thin ice.
This list could go on and on.
Climate heating from burning fossil fuels threatens all humans, and every other life form on the Earth. Full stop.
I’ll keep my gas stove, my gasoline-fueled car, my gasoline-fueled emergency generator and my gas grill. So it gets very hot here in Tennessee and that’s why I have an air-conditioner and a nice water-filled swimming pool to cool off in. And when it gets cold in the off-season I Just flip a switch and on comes the electric pool heater and my HVAC. Thank Heaven for abundant and relatively cheap carbon-based fuels, uranium and the reliable steam-electric plants that run on them.