LUBBOCK, Tex. — A member of Katharine Hayhoe’s church asked her a question after services a couple of weeks ago: “Do you feel our weather is getting more extreme?”

Time was, the question might have been the start of an argument with Dr. Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University here. Instead, it led to a friendly discussion of the kinds of things they had both seen: Because of climate change, the always shifting weather in West Texas was showing greater extremes, including more severe drought and fiercer inundations when storms came.

When she started her work spreading the word about climate change in Texas, very few people in the Lone Star State believed it was happening, and even fewer believed that people were causing it. Since then, acceptance has grown: A 2013 poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that seven in 10 Texans agree that climate change is real, though fewer than half said humans were the major cause.

The evidence of changing weather patterns is not just in the news, but all around them: More than half of those in the Texas survey said they had personally experienced the effects of global warming.