Katharine Hayhoe

As Katharine Hayhoe writes: "I'm a climate scientist: I crunch the data, I analyze the models, and I help people like engineers and city managers and water planners prepare for the ways climate change affects all of us. I'm a professor in political science at Texas Tech University, where I direct the Climate Science Center. I'm also a lead author for the US National Climate Assessment; I host the PBS Digital Series Global Weirding; and I spend a lot of time talking to people about climate science, impacts, solutions and how they connect to our values. I've been named one of TIME's "100 Most Influential People," Fortune's "50 Greatest Leaders" and Foreign Policy's "100 Leading Global Thinkers."

"These are all tremendous honors, for which I'm enormously grateful. What means the most, though, is when just one person tells me sincerely that they had never cared about climate change before, or even thought it was real: but now, because of something they heard me say, they've changed their mind. That's what makes it all worthwhile."