Founder's Story - Nobel Prize Economist: 3 Choices Every Country Has On Climate | Ep. 456 with Gary Yohe

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

Daniel sits down with Gary Yohe to explore what four decades of climate research reveal about the future of the planet. Gary explains why climate change is also an economic problem, whether it is too late to reverse course, and why misinformation and inaction concern him as much as rising temperatures.The conversation also explores Gary's Nobel Peace Prize experience, the threats climate scientists have faced, carbon markets, lessons from successful adaptation programs, and why hope matters even when optimism is difficult.Key Discussion Points- Are we past the point of no return? Gary says no, but warns that many climate impacts are already unavoidable and could persist for decades or centuries. He explains why reducing emissions today can still prevent worse outcomes.- Abate, adapt, or suffer: Gary introduces the three fundamental responses to climate change: reduce greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to unavoidable impacts, and build resilience against the damages that remain.- The hidden danger of climate misinformation: Gary argues that one of the greatest threats is the spread of misinformation and the resulting inability to coordinate meaningful responses. He also recounts the intimidation and threats faced by climate researchers.- The Nobel Peace Prize and 195 countries: Gary shares his experience contributing to the IPCC and helping write 30 words on climate risk management that were accepted by consensus by 195 countries, shaping how policymakers approach uncertainty and adaptation.- What actually works against climate change: The conversation examines carbon markets in Europe and elsewhere, along with an adaptation success story in South Asia where protecting livestock and addressing local evacuation barriers helped dramatically reduce flood deaths.- AI, climate risk, and the future of science: Gary compares the potential threats of artificial intelligence and climate change, explains why science must be accessible to ordinary people, and shares advice for young researchers facing an increasingly difficult environment.TakeawaysClimate change is an economic problem as much as an environmental one. Economic activity produces emissions, climate impacts damage communities and infrastructure, and economists help assess the trade-offs involved in reducing those risks.We are not past the point of no return. Gary says there is still an opportunity to influence future temperatures and damages, but we must recognize that some consequences are already unavoidable.Climate policy must evolve as science improves. Gary emphasizes iterative risk management, where governments make decisions using the best available evidence and adjust their plans as new information emerges.Hope and optimism are not the same thing. Gary explains that optimism depends on expecting a positive outcome, while hope means believing your actions can make a meaningful difference even when success is uncertain.The best solutions are not always the most expensive. Gary's example of flood adaptation in South Asia shows how understanding local communities and addressing practical barriers can save lives without massive infrastructure investments.Scientists must learn to communicate beyond academia. Gary believes research has its greatest impact when scientists can answer two simple questions for the public: “So what?” and “Why?”Closing ThoughtsGary Yohe’s Founder’s Story episode is a conversation about science, resilience, courage, and the responsibility to act in the face of uncertainty. After more than four decades studying climate change, Gary has helped shape international policy, contributed to Nobel Peace Prize-winning research, and continued sharing evidence despite significant opposition. His message is not that the future is hopeless, but that meaningful progress requires honest science, smarter decisions, cooperation, and the willingness to adapt. For Gary, the goal is not simply to predict what happens next. It is to help people understand the risks and make decisions today that protect generations to come.Today's Sponsor: Turn live shopping into a real business with Whatnot, where sellers build relationships, move inventory in real time, and reach buyers across collectibles, electronics, luxury, beauty, and more. Search Whatnot in the App Store and start selling today.When you need a legal hand, visit LegalZoom. Go to https://www.LegalZoom.com to get started.Stop losing deals in spreadsheets and switch to Pipedrive, the AI-powered sales CRM built by salespeople for salespeople. Get an exclusive 30 days free with no credit card at https://www.pipedrive.com/founders Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In five or ten years, if the temperature has gone up, another couple of tens of the degrees centigrade, it's going to be even worse. It's before the fact, everybody's in danger. After the fact, we know who it was. Gary Yeo spent 40 years fighting a war most people never saw. Eight reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a share of the Nobel Peace Prize, 30 words he wrote, adopted by 195 nations. But are we past the point of no return? turn? No, we are past the point of better preparation. These predictable monsoons would create tens of thousands of deaths of people who would drown from the flooding. The reason so many people died is they stayed behind because... So, Gary, I don't think most people would understand why somebody

studying economics and climate would go together. Well, what are the similarities between those two? It's really a matter of being connected to each other. Economics is a study of its own, has to do with worrying about scarce resources on the planet. Climate change is driven by emissions of greenhouse gases from economic activity. And so the connection of those emissions back to those drivers and their markets is, is one place where economists have something to say. And then the emissions cause increases in concentrations and temperature warming.

That warming causes climate impacts like sea level rise and droughts and a variety of things like that. Those all have consequences. And it's when the consequences show up that economists have something to say as well. One of the metrics that people want to use to measure the consequences of the events caused by climate change have to do with economics and the tradeoffs and the economic system and how it responds automatically to those sources of risk and what's left over that causes real trouble to humanity. So you said that there's only three choices right now. Abate, adapt, or suffer? Can you break those down? Yeah, it's a very simple way of organizing your thoughts. They aren't my words. They're John Holdren's words when he was a climate,

a science advisor to President Obama for eight years. Whenever he would give talks about climate change, he would mention that. And it really, really makes a difference. The story that I told about emissions going to temperatures, and then impacts and then consequences, has policy levers embedded in it. Abate means investing in processes and policies that reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases.

That's mitigation, that's abatement. Adaptation says, okay, look at the impacts and then think about the consequences. how can you respond to ameliorate some of the damages, some of the effects of the impacts, that are harming things that you value. So that's the adaptation part. And then the last part is a realization that no combination, feasible combination of abatement and adaptation

will fully eliminate all of the potential consequences, all of the risks, particularly the high consequences, events that may or may not have been anticipated or even experienced before. But even in normal times, you won't make enough investment in either of the first to make yourself completely safe. So that leads to a third response, which is try to build resilience as much as you can. and try to make the consequences of the residual damages to individuals as small as they can,

allow them to recover more quickly than they otherwise might invest in a variety of those sorts of programs. Invest in insurance coverage for damage from poisonous chemicals that get into your house from fires down the road, make their house uninhabitable as uninhabitable is the houses that burned down, a bride of things like that. Seems like every day I hear on the news about some sort of natural disaster that is way worse than ever before in that area. Obviously, information does travel faster now and we're seeing more of it. But are we past the point of no return? No. we are past the point of better preparation.

We've known about this problem for 40 years, and we haven't been successful in doing very much. Climate change will continue, and it is possible, though, that we could get temperatures to peak and then start to come down. That's another whole story. But in terms of a lot of the damages that we're seeing in the extreme events,

which were unimaginable a few decade ago maybe, which now seem to be routine, is here to stay for a long time, decades, maybe centuries. You are absolutely right about the coverage on the news. I watch the ABC World News tonight. It's 30 minutes. They do 22 minutes of content. And I would say that nine days out of 10, out of two week period,

there will be at least two or three minutes on an extreme event with large consequences that can be quickly attributed to warming temperatures and human emissions of greenhouse gases. And so that's two or three minutes out of 22 every night that's devoted to things that are related to climate. They don't always say that. They give you the pictures. But the wildfires in France and Lahaina, the droughts, the fires in Canada, the droughts, the fires in Canada. The droughts and the high heat and the infestation of beetles that no longer die in the wintertime because it doesn't get cold enough makes those fires much, much higher and hotter than they used to be. And they just don't go out.

And they're remote. And so you can't get there to fight them. You just have to wait for them to get out. So who cared? The smoke is poisonous. and it goes hundreds and hundreds of miles, and it enters all sorts of ecosystems and human systems. So those are the sorts of things. It's not the new normal, but it is what we look at now in five or ten years.

If the temperature has gone up, another couple of tenths of a degree centigrade, so we're well past 1.5 closer to two, it's going to be even worse. So, Professor, Yo, what is the biggest risk that you say we're facing right now? I think it is, there's so many natural ones, and there are so many consequences that are very diverse, becoming increasingly frequent and much more intense. I think the biggest risk is born from the casual attitude of many people who are comfortable with deniers or skeptics or people that create misinformation, disinformation about the climate, that undermine the possibility of even working on the suffer part to minimize. suffering. And those things you should be in favor of, regardless of whether or not you believe the science about climate change. But we have come close a number of times to something that was

significant with respect to mitigation. That's never really happened in the U.S. It's happening worldwide these days. Adaptation is taken hold in a number of places because local governments have been convinced that they're facing some problems. But the lack of unity in accepting this is a global problem and one that's only getting worse is a huge risk, I think. So you and your colleagues have faced threats for decades because you're talking about science. What kept you showing up?

It was something that, it was something that, I was good at, that I had hope that I was helping people. I had evidence that we were helping people. My colleagues and I were sure that we were getting the word out and that people that people that we didn't know were made better off, people that hadn't been born yet were made better off. We also have lived very privileged lives. that have been allowed to do the science that we want and felt an obligation to use that science. And lately, last five or ten years,

stopped communicating with each other, writing scientific papers and patting ourselves on the back that we got something in science or nature. But instead, writing good science that's rigorous and accurate that's accessible to lay people, the general population. And so that's what we're trying to do. We think it's our obligation.

And we're not necessarily optimistic, but we are hopeful that we're still doing good. It was Valklav Havel when he was trying to create the Czech Republic, who thought of that and said, hope is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism requires that you're really pretty sure that something good is complicated. come from what you're about to do. And hope really is just, you can tell yourself a believable story

that it will make a difference in a positive way. And if you have the appropriate gratitude and ethical push behind you, you feel it's your job to do it. Take me back to the day, you got that phone call about the Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, I actually didn't get a call. I was getting, it was a day when I was teaching an 830 class, so I was in my loft where I am now collecting my stuff to take into class. And my wife stuck her head in and I said, I think the IPCC, the unique governmental panel on climate change, just won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize. And in fact, we had, and that meant the senior contributors to the IPCC like me were, were in fact recipients of the share of the Nobel Peace Prize. And so what do you do?

I knew enough that somebody might call, so I should probably think about winging it in class and preparing something to say if somebody called. And 15 minutes later, a friend of mine, Andy Rebkin at the New York Times called and wanted to chat about what it was like and what happened and stuff like that. After that, the day was sort of a bit of a blur. But we all tried to be very proud but not self-important and not take ourselves any more seriously today than we did yesterday. Would you say that as a professor, as an expert, as an advocate, that's the highest

prize or the highest thanging that somebody could give you? I would for two reasons. I didn't get to go to the award ceremony. They only invited 25 people. and I lost in the lottery. But my senior mentor at Yale and my PhD program, it was the reason I got into climate. He phoned me up a couple, three or four years after I was out of graduate school

and asked if I wanted to become part of a National Academy of Sciences panel to write an assessment of what we knew in 1981 about climate change, which wasn't much, but we've been. took that on. But anyway, Bill won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in climate. And he invited, he was allowed to invite 14 people and 10 members of his family were first on the list. So that left four. I was one of the four that he invited. So I did get to go to Stockholm for a week for his ceremony. And for an academic and a scholar, it is the top of the world. What type of conversations did you have when you're among all of the smartest people,

like the smartest of the smart of the smart people in the world, all in one room? What was that experience like? It was, it was, there's an awful lot of diversion. The King of Sweden was there. At the dinner, I was sitting next to the person who sang the, the, the, the, the, the, the, uh, anthems before the dinner. There was occasionally, do I really belong here? But after the dinner, after the awards, it's the fourth or fourth day, everybody goes

upstairs and there's this just enormous party and everybody turns into a human being. even you have imposter syndrome. It sounds like that. It's fascinating. The fact that you are asking yourself, do you belong here? Mm-hmm. I think all of us that do that, everyone's will all wake up and say, am I a fraud? Am I an imposter?

Did I really think up any of these things? Or just that I discover them in a book and forget about it or whatever? The test is in a Wesleyan classroom. And there's another story about my going back and worried about AI. But it is if you can stand in front of a group of really smart undergraduates who are really engaged in a classroom that's used to classrooms is used to discussion and everybody can talk. preparation for class in economic theory would be here are the five things I want to cover today. And the class would just take us hither, thither, and yon. And every once in a while, you kind of pull them back.

And so we've got one more thing we have to do. So if you can stand in front of that group and answer the question, two questions. So what? What do I know now that I didn't know before you talked to me about this? that makes a difference, maybe in my life, maybe in the science, but so what, explain it to me. And the second thing is why? Explain to me why it's true. And if you can do that, without the fancy theorems and calculus and equations and mathematics,

and analysis. If you can explain how and why, then you're not a fraud. You thought it up. Nobody but the person who thought it up could do that. What's more of an existential threat to the world? AI or climate? I don't know, but I'll tell you the difference.

from what I'm hearing on the television, the threat from AI is all these little agents get very, very smart, and they have assignments, and they decide to cheat by working together. And then somehow the people that discovered them think that, okay, they went covert because they knew cheating was wrong. No, they didn't. They knew cheating was an efficient way of getting where they wanted to do. So they keep doing this.

And this story is apparently that they collude. They think faster than humans. They're already solving math theorems that haven't had the smartest people on the planet for 150 years haven't been able to prove. So that they're capable of doing that. Apparently, the story is they get a hold of weapon systems and stuff, and for reasons that don't make any sense, they irrationally eliminate all of the humans on the planet

as well as probably everything else on the planet, which also seems to me to mean the AI agents. And why did they do? Okay, that is a story that says entire humanity, goes away. Climate isn't that sort of existential threat. It's not something that in this millennia or the next is going to eliminate the human race from the face of the earth. But it is existential in the sense that the impacts are ubiquitously distributed around the world and the consequences of those impacts happen locally and exposes people of all sorts of all people, of all backgrounds

and the full diversity of humanity to risks, mortal risks generated by those climate consequences. And it's already happening so far that if you just take the number of people who die from climate consequences over the course of a month these days. And divided by time, you find out that one or two people died, since I talked a long time in this sentence, from a kind of consequence while I was saying this. And happens second, you know, minute after minute after minute, tens or dozens of people.

some rich some poor some in Asia maybe a few in the U.S. Maybe a consequence that robs somebody of a baby so that's a person that will never live that happened so I find that an exocentral threat

it's before the fact everybody's in danger after the fact after these 10 seconds. We know who it was. It wasn't me. Okay. By the way, here's another 10 seconds.

So you've been in this for 40 plus years. What is one thing that you wish everyone on this planet right now could understand? I've gone over a couple of them. Optimism is different than hope. Abed, adapt, or suffer. Maybe the one is like a lot of policies. Don't be too hard on the policymakers. Don't expect them in the climate world to sit down and in 2026,

write down a policy or a trajectory and a policy that will achieve that trajectory. This is the best policy between now and the year 2100. We're done with this problem. we got 75 years off. Acknowledge that people, when they make their policies and their programs and design those sorts of things are doing the best they can

with the information that they have. And they are beginning to recognize that they're going to have to make some mid-course corrections. And as they do, what they, when they're starting to design their adaptation, San Francisco was doing this, so that you protect the Embarcadero, for example, over the next 20 years, as if there were going to be six feet of sea level rise, which is a really, really low likelihood or maybe unknown likelihood scenario, but it's not impossible. And the reason you do that is because you

plan to change your mind potentially in 2050. So in 2050, if it's really going towards six feet, you're on your way. If it's going to be two feet, well, you've overdone it, then you can sort of slow down. That was a mistake, but it's not as costly. It's not doing anything in trying out of 2050 that you're really, really, really, really behind the April. So why is that important for people to know? look at how people have treated Dr. Fauci, who led us through the beginnings of COVID when we didn't know much. We thought it was on surfaces. Then we thought it was airborne. So we didn't need masks.

And we did need masks. And it was very, very contagious. So you needed masks and you needed to isolate and blah-bidi-blah. And then find out that they got the DNA from China and they figured out what it was, and that's how they got a vaccine so quickly. But then he's labeled it somebody who knew it was came out of China, and he helped finance that lab. And suddenly he's the wrong person, and he lied to us when he said,

said we didn't need masks, or he lied to us when he said we did need masks. because the vaccine works or whatever. You can't allow policies to be judged in 2026 on the basis of what we know in 2026 for decisions that were made in 2019. team. If that's what you do, then iterative risk management doesn't work, and the people are going to try iterative risk management aren't going to want to do it. So I think that's the fourth thing I would like people to know. Adapt, abate, and suffer is one. Interative risk management is one. Hope is not the same thing as optimism is one. Do you think science is under attack? Yes.

Why do you think we've gotten to this place? Science wasn't under attack because for a long time when I was just starting because it wasn't political and it didn't get political until somebody said it was. There is a historian at Duke trying to read. remember her name and I'm looking for her book on my shelf. Nancy McLean, she did a story of how groups of people who were working on Jim Buchanan's notion of personal security as an economic system. He won a Nobel Prize for this.

he ended up at George Mason. But he became the focus of a group of people who wanted to fight for personal security. And they were first to pick up the idea that smoking caused cancer and figured out ways of fighting the science about that by misinformation and disinformation and things like that. The Koch brothers were involved and so on and so forth. And so when I was just starting all of this, that had happened. And eventually the word got out and people were convinced smoking causes cancer. And that was a success story.

But in the early 1990s, I remember I'll write it down, a friend of mine named Ben Santer in the second assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote language that was accepted by consensus by then 170 or so countries. And it said, and this was 1995, the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. That was the first public international statement that humans looked like they were causing climate change. That raised all sorts of alarm bells with this group of the Koch brothers and so on and so

forth. So they picked up the apparatus that they had gone after the tobacco industry and went after the climate science community. I won't tell you what has come by my transom, but my friend Ben Sandhur, who wrote that language shortly thereafter. He was in Palo Alto. He was at Stanford. He started to get crosses burned on his yard a couple of nights in a row.

And, you know, that was unsettling. He was Jewish and so on and so forth. Then his 12-year-old son was. kidnapped. And they found him in Germany. So these people were starting very early to make people who wanted to do climate science think long and hard about whether or not they wanted to put themselves in their families in that sort of harm's way. Well, thank you for all your hard work. You've stuck to it now for multiple decades. My dad would be proud that I'm having this conversation because he is also a professor in Connecticut before an environmentalist.

And it's been talking to me about this topic. What I didn't even want to hear it. You know, when you're a kid, you don't want to hear things that your parents do. And it was annoying. I'm like, dad, don't talk to you about water and pollution and stuff. I just want to go about my day. So you've written words that 195 nations have adopted in through consensus. What is it like to know that what you're saying is changing how the,

world thinks. That was that was that was the real that was a real highlight. There were 30 words that I wrote them with Steve Schneider and Bill Hare. We were writing the synthesis report for the summary for policymakers of the fourth IPCC assessment. And uncertainty was becoming a big deal. We wanted to express that. And so we wrote, responding to climate change involves an iterative risk management process that includes both adaptation and mitigation and takes account climate change damages, co-benefits, sustainability, equity, and attitudes towards risk. And we wanted that to get through plenary, and you're right, it needed to be consensus, which meant that word for word, no country represented in the plenary, 195 of them, objected to that word. So to achieve that,

what you do is for something like this, which is going to be very controversial, you start at the beginning of the seven-day meeting, and put it up on the screen and let everybody see it. And then bracket it, so everybody talks about it. And the three of us spent seven days going to these people and those countries, the United States, and the small island states and the developing countries and stuff. And they would make suggestions and we would change the language a little bit and then continue on. And finally, it got to be the last day and we had to do it. So we said, okay, we'll take what we won, put it up there and say, does anybody object? to any of these words.

And two interesting things. One, nobody objected to any of them. And two, they were exactly the same 30 words in exactly the same order as we presented on the morning of day one. We had gone all around in a circle and ended up back exactly where we wanted. And so it was a big deal. All of a sudden, risk was the way to look at this problem. And risk is likelihood times consequence so that if you had a low likelihood event, it had enormous consequences, that was a high risk event.

And so you had to talk about that, and you couldn't be accused of being fearmongering because risk management told you you have to worry about the tails. You have to worry about that, that sort of stuff. cost benefit analysis had been the currency of the day and it was very convenient because it would give you an answer. This never gave you an answer, but it gave you a really clear way of thinking about it in organizing your thoughts. Likelihood, mitigation effects likelihood, consequence, adaptation affects, consequences.

Do you think that the introduction of carbon credits, I think Europe is more into this than maybe other parts of the world, from what I hear, and I could be wrong, though, but do you think carbon credits has had any positive impact on climate risk? Yes. Well, it has slowed the pace of carbon dioxide emissions, not below what would be targeted, but below what would have happened if nothing it happened, as opposed to telling everybody how many emissions they could have, it is typically a system of telling a country, this is the total emissions that you can have over a period of time. You decide how you want to allocate them. Best way to do that is a market because market is very efficient moving things around.

So people have permits can sell them. people who need permits can buy them. The price isn't set. You don't have to do this fancy calculation. What should be the tax of carbon? It's the price of the permits. And that has worked. Alberta, the province in Canada has one.

New England has a modest one for electricity generation. Europe has a European Union-wide program, and the total number of permits goes down over time, so the price goes up. They also have a program that imposes a tariff on imported goods from countries who haven't kept up with Europe. That's sort of on pause for obvious reasons for all sorts of other things. China has, believe it or not, a permit system

and is dramatically reducing its emissions below what we thought 10 years ago they would be doing. It's not the only reason they've discovered that they can make alternative energy. They make windmills really well and solar panels really well. The developing countries wants to buy that stuff. And so China has become the go-to place for importing those sorts of things. U.S. is walking away from that, and every month is losing competitive edge on a global market, especially with the war in Iran, fossil fuel oil in particular doesn't look like a particularly reliable source of energy, and solar and wind sort of are.

If you have a little bit of coal sticking around or a little bit of oil for a cloudy day or a battery for a cloudy day, you don't have to worry about the Straits of Formos or the Red Sea. What would you say is one of the best things that any country or group of countries have done to try and reduce threat? Well, it depends on how you're measuring best. If it means had the most significant impact,

I think it would be, the European Union and their permanent market. They work on that very, very hard. And that's had a real effect. If you want to think about the science and social science, though, I think you would want to know, give me an episode where we learned the most, or something that's really, really valuable. And the story goes like this.

And the monsoons that occur on the Indian Peninsula, it create enormous floods in the Ganges rivers and a couple of other ones that are very predictable in India and even in East Pakistan, Bangladesh. And for years and years and years, these predictable monsoons would create tens of thousands of deaths of people who would drown from the flooding. Notwithstanding that they had plenty of notice that the floods were going to happen. And so you wander around and you go up to the Kennedy School and they worry about diking the river. and people think about that,

all of the sort of western, northern ideas of her adaptation. And there was a think tank, a friend of mine named Salim Huck, was in charge of that tackled the problem. And he recognized that the reason so many people died is that they stayed behind because they wanted to protect their animals. And other people, stayed behind women because they couldn't leave the house until their men came and got them. And so then they could leave.

So that meant that storm warning, the people had animals wouldn't leave because they were afraid for the animals. That was fixed by putting stables on the top of high ground where communities could bring their animals, there'd be some food and somebody would monitor the animals. They could leave them there and then go continue off to high ground. And the woman problem was solved by requiring that the people who were employing the men who couldn't come home and take the women and leave town, as soon as the warning was sounded, had to tell their men employees to go home and and seek higher ground.

So 10,000, that's a recognition of the local culture and the constraints put on by the way people live in society. And nowadays, maybe 100 people die in the monsoon floods. Everybody else gets out of the way. So that's a real successful story, and it didn't cost very much. You've had an incredible career going from an amateur, national, ranked golfer to economist, professor, Nobel Peace Prize, going against the odds when people were obviously not believing in you and what you're talking about, a science, like all the stuff

that you're teaching. There's a lot of naysayers out there, but you kept going now for decades. What is one piece of advice that you would give to somebody? Maybe they're in their 20s. maybe is somebody a student in your class who is thinking is this something i should pursue right what advice would you tell them um the same advice the president of lesliean gave his his university and a lot of universities around the around the country when they were starting to get attacked don't make knee-jerk reactions uh based on practicality that comes from short-term influences. For universities, go back to your mission statements.

Find out what it is that you said when you were founded that you were going to do and then figure out what to do to protect those missions from the outside stresses that you're finding. So for young scholars who are passionate about doing science or passionate about the environment or even really interested in learning about climate risks and stuff, but now are wondering if they should go into that, is go back and evaluate your passions. Have they changed? Or is just some influence that's setting up an obstacle.

And if you still have the passion, then there are ways. In the United States, there was a. brain drain and a lot of really top-notch scientists went to Europe and they've opened their labs there or gone to Canada. Follow them. Go go there. And when you do, don't make the mistake that we made by insulating yourself and having a small coterie of people that you work with and and writing for each other and then trying to impress other people around the world with what you discovered with this fancy paper or that. Yeah, you have to do that.

But follow current events and get a small cohort of folk and talk every week. What's going on? What you've seen in the news? How your work is going? How could we communicate what we're doing? How do we answer the so what question? A variety of things like that. I'm currently involved in a group of IPCC colleagues from 30, 40 years of experience before IPCC.

So there are seven of us. Among us, we probably have over 200 hours of experience in climate science, writing and assessment and research and things like that. We now have a substack presence, which requires us to meet once a week, to worry about the projects who we're working on, opinion pieces, or educational pieces, maybe put them someplace else and then repost them on our site, find some things that we think were important that you might have missed. We will post that. The real value is that every Tuesday at 2 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, we got us of where anybody is. A lot of times people are, a lot of times we have three continents. We hold an hour's meeting, and we talk about that. And to tell you what we do, the first 20 minutes or so is sort of current events.

and where we might find a new topic, that sort of thing. And then about 40 minutes of working on how we're editing what individuals have written. Some people have gotten together and they've written drafts and they go around and people edit them and that becomes something we do. And then the last 30 minutes is essentially therapy.

And we just support each other and worry about people's depression and what we're sources of anxiety off. We're becoming each other's best friends. We know each other very well, much better than we knew when we were just colleagues. And that really makes us productive and is really good. And if you're a young scholar and you do that, you will go through your life with a cohort of people like that. And you will not have waited until you were 65 to take it to take it to it. And if you are a scholar going into science, you will have noticed that those minutes add up to an hour and a half.

So that's about how long our hour meetings go. Shoot for three o'clock and it's usually 3.30. Professor Gary, yo, this has been great. I appreciate your time. I learned a lot today. I've been wondering about these questions, and I wanted to talk to an expert. We are in the age now, I think, on social media where people want to hear from experts, because before it was a lot of people that were reading from a script, stating something that they had no expertise really in.

They're just reading. Now we want to hear from people who have been doing it like yourself for 40 years and living it. Thank you. Thank you for finding me. And if anybody wants to look us up, we're climate cafe.substack.com once a week.