The Citizen Scientist

Working with community partners, Jeremy Hoffman fights climate change on the home front, while letting Virginians know the power is ours to make a difference

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As a colleague passes by, Jeremy Hoffman briefly shifts from an interview to ask her an unusual question: Will she dress as Captain Planet for an upcoming event?

The Science Museum of Virginia’s earth and climate scientist, Hoffman also educates visitors, produces videos and helps plan programs. The event in question — an Earth Day edition of the Science Museum of Virginia’s monthly Science on Tap happy hour — will feature his colleague as the superhero of the 1990s cartoon “Captain Planet and the Planeteers,” and Hoffman plans to dress as one of the five sidekicks who summon the hero to solve problems ranging from toxic runoff to industrial pollution.

It’s a fitting costume for a man who spends his days researching ways to address climate change and the challenges it poses across the state. Among those: Rising sea levels could make Tangier Island uninhabitable in 25 years, and in Norfolk, a single Category 4 hurricane could wipe out the Navy base, which contributes $13 billion to Virginia’s economy.

Besides those long-term threats, one of Hoffman’s projects shows a deadly impact already happening here in Richmond. He worked with community partners during the peak of summer in 2017 to measure the ways that extreme heat, the No. 1 weather-related killer, is affecting local residents. The findings are summarized in a paper published in the January issue of the scientific journal Climate, and on his website under the clever title “Throwing Shade in RVA.” He’s also working to expand the study statewide and replicate it in other cities around the country.

“Everyone knows it’s hotter in a parking lot than under a tree, but no one knew it was 16 degrees hotter,” Hoffman says in describing what is called the urban heat island effect.

Extreme heat is just part of a cascading system of problems caused by climate change, including poor air quality, extreme weather, flooding, drought and wildfires. Without a global response, climate change poses an existential crisis for humanity, but Hoffman insists he doesn’t lose sleep worrying. Mostly, he catches himself “daydreaming about all of the unique community science projects we could be doing here,” he says. “Not the bad stuff, but the things I’d like to do about the bad stuff.”

Hoffman remains optimistic in the face of increasingly dire reports, such as the one issued in 2018 by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that show the human race running out of time. He points to one major caveat in those reports: It’s not too late.

“We’ve done this before with CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons, known by the brand name Freon] and the ozone hole back in the ’70s and ’80s,” he says. “We collectively decided that the public health risks associated with a depleted ozone layer weren’t worth it, so we passed some laws, and here we are 30 years later with a much healthier ozone layer.”

Although the anti-vaccine movement and decades of climate denialism have given birth to the idea of a war on science, Hoffman doesn’t see it that way.

“Institutions like the Science Museum of Virginia have some of the highest levels of trust in our country,” he says. National surveys by the Pew Research Center and other organizations support his view, but Hoffman says he also sees trust in the way people respond to his work, both at the museum and in the broader Richmond region, where he’s known as a citizen scientist who helps to solve problems close to home.

For the heat island study, Hoffman found partners through an unorthodox approach. “I cold-called people,” he says, laughing. “I just picked up the phone. I still do a lot of cold-calling.” Hoffman wasn’t afraid of rejection: His proposed partners were already engaged in fighting climate change, and thanks to years of improv theater and stand-up comedy, he’s comfortable being vulnerable.

“He doesn’t just lecture, he asks questions. He’s humble, and he knows an awful lot.” —Rob Jones, Groundwork RVA

While he has called on professors at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond, he’s also looked to community organizers and activists. These include food justice advocate Duron Chavis, who runs the urban gardening project at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, and community organizers Arthur Burton and Omari Al-Qadaffi.

Hoffman worked with young people who live in some of the city’s heat islands through Groundwork RVA, a nonprofit that trains youth in green space development, preparing them for emerging jobs tackling climate change, and supporting them in making their own neighborhoods better places to live. The youth connected with the project right away, says Executive Director Rob Jones, adding, “They know what it’s like to be hot.” Jones describes Hoffman as a natural educator whose approach meshes perfectly with that of Groundwork RVA.

“We won’t name names, but often our experience is we have to create a frame for outsiders to work with our kids. With Jeremy, we get to do what we do and watch him work,” he says. “He brings toys. He doesn’t just lecture, he asks questions. He’s humble, and he knows an awful lot.”

Hoffman’s humility and collaborative spirit are part of what makes him unique, says one of his collaborators at VCU, associate professor Stephen Fong, who came to Richmond and the VCU College of Engineering in 2005, from San Diego. He describes the partnerships Hoffman has built across the city as something “you’d love to see everywhere, but it doesn’t happen naturally.” It’s driven by Hoffman’s  “background, broad base of knowledge, and his desire to benefit the greater good,” Fong says, but “it’s also the personality of Richmond that helps foster this. There’s a citywide sense that 'I live in this community, and I value it.' ”

Another collaborator on the urban heat island project, Dr. Janet Eddy, shares Fong’s sentiments about Hoffman. Surprisingly, she adds, “He’s the only scientist I’ve ever worked with,” despite a 31-year career working with vulnerable populations and her participation in Virginia Clinicians for Climate Action. “He’s doing things that medical doctors should have already been doing,” she says, noting that the heat island study has helped her provide better care to patients. “He confirmed things that I thought were happening. We’re getting a lot more heat, and it’s not cooling down overnight.”

Heat exacerbates diabetes and other health conditions, and disproportionately affects the population she cares for, which includes undocumented immigrants and low-income residents who are only now receiving health insurance through the Medicaid expansion. Many of her patients work in manual labor. “Not only are they vulnerable at work, but they go home to the red areas,” she says, referring to the heat islands identified in the study.

If Hoffman’s approach to science is atypical, so, too, is his background. Although he didn’t dream of being a scientist as a child, he points to a few seemingly unrelated occurrences that influenced him. Chief among them: a distinctive pink boulder he’d see on summer trips to visit his grandparents in Wisconsin. Hoffman wondered how it got there, and why there weren’t any others. When he found similar boulders in the woods on hikes years later, it only deepened a mystery he’d finally solve while pursuing a geology major at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

“Those big pink boulders were the ‘I was here’ graffiti on the wall of the ice sheets,” he says, referring to the glaciers that covered North America during the Ice Age. “They’d pluck out these pink boulders from the landscape surrounding Hudson Bay, carry them down to places like Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois.” The discovery piqued his interest in studying the climate, which he did as a graduate student at Oregon State University, where he obtained a doctorate in geology with a focus on paleoclimatology. He says, “The whole time I was curious about what these rocks were,  and I find out they were evidence for humongous, planetary-scale climate change.”

Other moments stand out, too, such as his first chemistry set at age 6 — “I was that kid running around my birthday party [shouting], ‘I can see germs! I can see germs!’ ”— and fishing tournaments he watched his father compete in before he was old enough to enter. Hoffman says his father could track seasonal progression by looking at water stains on boulders, lily pad size, and of course, how the fish were biting. “I developed my observational skills with my dad. Making observations, tracking things over time, it’s a very important scientific skill.”

Perhaps the experience that most shaped his focus as a scientist, though, happened during his childhood in Chicago. “I lived through one of the most dangerous climate events of the 20th century,” he says of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. He wasn’t even 10 years old, but he remembers it in vivid detail. For his family, the heat wave was a chance to set up a kiddie pool and crank the air conditioning for a neighborhood party. Not everyone was so fortunate.

“In the rest of Chicago, poverty and systemic problems led to over 700 deaths directly attributed to heat,” he says. Most of the victims were elderly, living without air conditioning in high-crime neighborhoods. “Many of them were afraid to open their windows,” Hoffman says, pointing to one of the many ways that poverty increases the danger from extreme heat.

While he was too young to understand the situation then, the heat wave left a strong impression on Hoffman, and on science at large. “We use the Chicago heat wave as an example of just how bad a heat wave can get,” he says, then quickly rattles off a list of other major heat waves that have occurred since. “Unfortunately, we’re seeing these community-altering events happen more frequently and with greater intensity for longer periods of time.”

Hoffman says the effects of heat waves and climate change can be addressed through green urban design, a focus of his work at the museum. While giving a recent tour, he points out one of his education tools: a hands-on experiment to show how easily homes can be adapted to heat and heavy rain. Using Ready Row Houses, model homes built by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Hoffman gives visitors a lesson on a topic that ordinarily might be hard to generate a lot of excitement about: stormwater management.

Using a watering can, visitors pour water over a two-story model home; nearly all of that water ends up running through a hole representing the storm drain. But for a second pour, Hoffman hands out miniature rain barrels and green sponges of various shapes, representing bushes, trees, and other greenery. Nearly all the water is collected by these improvements.

“Then we take the nozzle off, to simulate high rain events and climate change,” Hoffman says, showing how much faster water pours out. He asks, “Does your existing design hold up or not?” In the final phase of the experiment, Hoffman pulls out heat lamps, infrared thermometers and fabric of different colors, so participants can see how color and materials vastly reduce heat. Afterward, they can head outdoors with the same tools and reproduce their results in the real world.

He’s eager to help people adapt to climate change, but Hoffman doesn’t preach personal lifestyle reform as a solution to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. He lives his ideals by using transit or a bicycle to get places, but he says those small individual choices won’t curb climate change. That requires a collective approach, incorporating governmental policies and industrial buy-in.

Still, the way to get those policies enacted is through building public interest in climate change. To that end, Hoffman has designed several other programs as part of the original Environmental Literacy Grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)  that brought him to Richmond for this position in 2016. His most far-reaching programs are climate presentations produced by an in-house team of animators and writers.

His inner nerd comes out when he demonstrates the globe-like projection screen for these presentations, the Science on a Sphere, a piece of technology developed by the NOAA. “Sometimes, as it descends, I put the Death Star on there,” he says, referring to the moon-sized space station from “Star Wars.” Nearly 100 institutes have their own spheres, and schools and private individuals can download software to watch two-dimensional versions of the videos. That means Hoffman’s climate, weather and solar system presentations — with familiar Richmond landmarks such as the iconic Richmond Dairy apartments — are shown both locally and around the nation at schools, museums and on home computers.

Even visitors who aren’t interested in climate change can be reached, he says. Hoffman’s less direct strategies include a film about Mars and Venus, produced in collaboration with the astronomy team, which can segue into a cooking lesson.

“We need to celebrate the progress we have made while also demanding more of it and working together to accomplish it.” —Jeremy Hoffman

“What can we learn right now about what’s [happening] on Earth from our cosmic neighbors?” he asks, before pivoting quickly to a cookie recipe, as if speaking to a visitor who isn’t impressed by atmospheric data. “Let’s say you put too much baking soda in your recipe, you probably don’t want to eat those cookies. It’s the same thing with our planet. Too much of any one element in our atmosphere means we probably can’t survive here, at least not as humans.“

The grant that brought Hoffman to Richmond ended with 2018, but a new grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (with matching funds from the city of Richmond, Virginia Tech and other organizations) has extended his work at the museum, and he’s planning to teach a class on environmental storytelling this fall at VCU, where he’s become an affiliate faculty member. In addition to expanding the heat island study, Hoffman also is working on an index of air quality for Richmond. He suspects he’ll find a relationship between low air quality and the heat islands his earlier study revealed.

Although his findings probably will reveal more climate threats, Hoffman maintains a positive outlook. “I feel confident that we’re making real progress,” he says, explaining that his community science approach shows him just how many people are engaged in addressing climate change. He adds, “We need to celebrate the progress we have made while also demanding more of it and working together to accomplish it. Sometimes we don’t hear about the little victories on the news, but I get to live and work alongside them every day.”

Science on Tap: Planeteers!

Superhero attire is encouraged at the Science Museum of Virginia’s happy hour event on April 18 from 6 to 10 p.m., an adults-only evening of reducing, reusing and recycling in a quest to preserve the planet’s resources. $10 admission ($8.50 for museum members); food and drink are extra.