Gary Yohe: 0:03

The science is going to evolve, the technology is gonna evolve. Our willingness to accept a level of, a tolerable level of risk is going to evolve and change at be higher or lower. And it's not malpractice to change your mind when you get new information, it's malpractice to think that you can write policy through 2100 and you'll be right.

Tom Raftery: 0:29

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 240 of the Climate Confident Podcast, the go-to show for best practices in climate emissions reductions. I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and before we get started, a quick reminder. This podcast now has a subscription option. For just five euros or dollars a month, you can unlock the full back catalog of hundreds of conversations with climate leaders who are actually moving the needle. Subscribers also, get a personal shout out here in the show plus direct access to me so you can pitch new directions, guests and ideas for climate confident. Everyone else still gets the most recent 30 days of episodes for free. But if you want access to the archive and a hand on the steering wheel, hit the subscribe link in the show notes now. No new subscribers this week, but if you've been on the fence, now's the time to join. On to today's conversation. We talk a lot on this podcast about technology breakthroughs, energy transitions, corporate pledges, but today we're getting to the very heart of

climate decision making: 1:38

risk resilience and the unavoidable costs of inaction. My guest is Dr. Gary Yohe, one of the world's most influential climate economists ranked 24th globally among climate scholars and a senior IPCC author and part of the Nobel Prize winning team in 2007. Gary pioneered the idea that climate change isn't just an environmental challenge, it's fundamentally a risk management problem. His framework, abate, adapt, or suffer, has shaped global climate policy and continues to guide how we think about both the opportunities and the unavoidable consequences of a warming world. In this episode, Gary shares why insurance markets are already flashing red, why some level of suffering is now inevitable, and why hope, not blind optimism, but the conviction that action still matters remains the essential ingredient for progress. Gary, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Gary Yohe: 2:44

Thank you very much, Tom. Thank you for finding me and inviting me. I'm Gary Yohe. I am a retired professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. And the short biography is that I started to worry about climate change and research it and work on it in 1982 when a dissertation advisor of mine, Bill Northouse phoned up and asked if I wanted to get involved in an NAF project. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Tom Raftery: 3:16

Interesting that you got into climate science then despite being an economist and not a physicist, and back in 1982 when very, very few people were talking about climate change.

Gary Yohe: 3:29

Yes. Back then there were probably five economists in the world that knew anything about it as a problem. But then after the academy put together a panel to write a report called Changing Climate. And Bill was invited to participate. Tom Shelling. Bill invited me. There were three economists, therefore on it, so two climate scientists that worried about the airborn fraction and so on and so forth. There were nine people on the panel and after all was said and done, 40 years later, five of them had Nobel Prizes. And it was just a spectacular time. We were making it up and learning as we were going, along. Bill and I were tasked with producing scenarios of carbon emissions that would span a range of uncertainty. Give us an idea of what concentrations would do, and through a very simple model, what temperatures would do, we didn't get the impacts of anything like that.

Tom Raftery: 4:27

Okay, and that was 1982. So you decided to stay with climate science since, despite being an economist and not a physicist.

Gary Yohe: 4:38

Pretty much. I was a micro theorist by training. I was doing decision making under uncertainty. And when you think about responding to climate change, all of those decisions have to be made under uncertainty. And there seemed to be an awful lot of low hanging fruit, if you will, questions that needed to be answered to get us out of the station. And so it was a full employment act for four years.

Tom Raftery: 5:06

And what would you say has surprised you most in the last 43 or so years that you've been working in climate science?

Gary Yohe: 5:14

How quickly not only the science was questioned and disputed by people that knew a lot less than we did. But also how quickly they turn to going after the people and the personalities and, and the scientists. Which is not to say that the scientific community raised really important questions about the correlations we were talking about. Well, if this is true, then that has to be true. Have you tested that? That has to be true. Have you tested that? And that was another full employment for the climate science community. And took up those challenges and 20 years later, just about all of them were confirmed that climate was changing, the planet was getting warmer, and all of these things that you would've expected to happen have been happening.

Tom Raftery: 6:04

And you've said that our climate choices really boil down to three things, abate, adapt, or suffer. Can you explain how this framing helps us understand our climate challenges?

Gary Yohe: 6:18

It organizes our thoughts, I think, pretty effectively. It can be overwhelming. It, it is enormously complicated. It used to be a welfare maximising problem over very, very long time horizons 110 years back then, or 120 years. And it was just overwhelming to think about how you could go about responding to it. In 2007, the IPCC changed the lens from cost benefit, global welfare maximisation to iterative risk management. And that allowed us to think about the fundamentals of risk, which are likelihood of an event happening and the consequences of that event. And then if you think about the options, well, you can reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. You can abate. What does that do? That slows the pace of the warming and lowers the likelihood of extreme events happening therefore lowering the risk. Adaptation is trying to ameliorate the impacts of the climate change on human systems economic systems, geopolitical systems and things like that. And effective investments in adaptation are designed to reduce the consequences, ameliorate the consequences. The one thing that had to be learned and it was obvious to us, but not obvious to people who would run around saying, well, we have to fix this problem. Is that you can't fix it. No combination of practicable, adaptation and mitigation is gonna eliminate all of the risk, all of the possible extreme events that will cause consequences. And unfortunately, the ones that they can't cover are the really bad ones. The, the ones that produce catastrophic effects with increasing frequency these days. And so that's the third option. You have to suffer and it gives you a third policy choice. Building resilience for communities so that they can recover most effectively after the damage has been suffered.

Tom Raftery: 8:27

I remember hearing Kevin Anderson back in around 2014, he's another climate scientist if, if you're not familiar, saying that there are no more non-radical futures. We can either radically change our emissions, bring on huge amounts of renewables, or we can suffer the radical changes in climate, which will happen if we don't radically change our energy systems and our emissions. Either way, there's no non-radical future. I thought it was an interesting framing of the problem.

Gary Yohe: 9:06

It, it's, it, it's a very interesting framing. There's a time dimension to it that speaks to the efficacy of the responses and how radical they, would have to be. If we had started in 1990 to ameliorate impacts and reduce carbon emissions the changes would've been just as significant to the way we do business, but they wouldn't have been so radical in the sense that they would've had to change so quickly. And the same thing for, for the climate impacts. As we, increased the temperature well above what we had hoped, we're increasing the likelihood of very, very quick acting tipping points that could cause radical, radical change in a very short period of time. The collapse of the west arctic ice sheet is an example. It's not highly likely, but it's not improbable, and it's increasingly likely in the estimates over the last 20 years. That has the potential of increasing sea levels globally by a foot or a foot and a half almost a half a meter in about a decade and a half and flooding enormous parts of the coast all around the world, with no time at all to respond.

Tom Raftery: 10:19

Lovely. You've pioneered though the idea that climate change is ultimately a risk management problem, not just an environmental one. What would you say is the biggest misconception people still have about this idea?

Gary Yohe: 10:33

It's still that you can fix it. And still that it's like home insurance and, and deductibles. You self-insure low risks when you buy home insurance, and that's the stuff that you can afford to cover. And you restore yourself above the house burning down. If you live someplace flood prone, maybe you have flood insurance that protects you against rising waters, but not rain. And, and things like that. Mitigation and adaptation. Abatement and adaptation are investments in insurance, but the part that you're not insuring through the programs, but what you're self insuring are the really catastrophic things. They learned that in California this past fall when the fires showed up. And you are completely uncontrollable for weeks. Now they've discovered that there's enormously dangerous pollution left in the residue of the fires. So you can't just move back in and rebuild the houses. Those were unanticipated consequences and there's no insurance against that.

Tom Raftery: 12:46

And of course we've seen insurance companies themselves in several of the states in the US kind of throw up their hands in the air and go, Nope, we're outta here.

Gary Yohe: 12:56

Yes. there's a theoretical reason for that. Property insurance is priced along the lines of the premium should reflect the likelihood of the events that's being insured against. And for a lot of the upper parts of the impact scale, the distributions are really quite severe and we don't know what the likelihoods

are: 13:19

We know, they're not zero. For a while we were thinking, oh, it's low likelihood. So it's a low likelihood, high consequence event. But in San Francisco, as they're planning for sea level rise, they're recognising a really high sea level rise trajectory that is possible is not a low likelihood event. It's it's an uncalculable likelihood event. And, if you can't calculate the likelihoods, you can't price the insurance. So out of California, the insurance company has come up with a new definition definition three or four. But it is, if we can't calculate the likelihood of what we're recovering in the policy, we won't write the policy. It's uninsurable. We can't price it.

Tom Raftery: 14:04

And for people, for homeowners, for example, if they're unable to insure their homes, they're kind of stuck, aren't they? Because something happens, they'll lose everything. They can't sell because they can't get insurance. I know in some states, the state itself is the insurer of last resort, right?

Gary Yohe: 14:23

Yeah, That's right. That's right. they can't sell because they can't find the buyer because the buyer can't get insurance and the bank won't give you a mortgage if you can't find it. So there needs to be an insurer of last reward to keep the financial markets, the real estate markets up and running. The Federal Reserve system has taken note of that. It was five or six years ago, they started to take account of climate as a possible source of contagion threats to national financial stability. And they, they had the West Antarctic ice sheet, as an example, by O Brainer, who was on the board of Governors, wrote a lot about that and convinced the board to use climate stress as one of the drivers of their stress test for the banking system. And I think that that one of the reasons that the insurance industry and the, and the real estate interest industry didn't collapse and cause contagion in the California fires was that they had practiced that scenario a couple of times and they knew how to insulate the rest of the banking system. But it's still a challenge of what to do with insurance after it's impossible to get insurance in Asheville because of the flash flood from, from the hurricane a year and a half ago.

Tom Raftery: 15:43

Yeah. And despite all that, some people still don't believe in climate change.

Gary Yohe: 15:48

And the answer to that isn't what I used to think the answer was. You don't believe in climate change. You accept the science of climate change. Science isn't a religion. It's a rigorous process of learning about what's going on on the planet where we live. That doesn't convince anybody, but if you get in a conversation with somebody says you believe in climate change I don't. Show me the data. Well then they just gave you an opening. If they actually ask that question with an open mind, you can show them the data. You can, and you can show it in graphical form that's accessible. A picture is worth a thousand words. If it doesn't take a thousand words that tell you what's in the picture. But those exist and you can put those together. I've, written that paper separate times and I, I just rewrote it to bring it up to date for 2025 and we'll, see where that goes, because I think it's useful to have six or seven figures in the back pocket. And somebody says, show me the data. Here you go. This is what this says. The planet is warming. This is what this said. Humans are to blame. This is what this said. The impacts are real. This is what this says. The impacts have economic and social consequences that are severe. And there have been aggregate reasons for concern that under which there are details that people can understand. On the table since the year 2000 when the IPCC created five categories of reasons for concern and invented something called the burning ember diagram, which indicates levels of concern against temperature increases. And that's evolved. That exercise is done every six years by the IPCC and more frequently by scholars and, in the last iteration that came out in nature in 2017, we had to add a purple as another color. So it's no longer white to yellow, to orange to red in the bright, bright red. It's now to purple.

Tom Raftery: 17:50

And Gary, you've worked at the highest levels of climate science and policy. What gives you hope when you look at the landscape today?

Gary Yohe: 17:57

I'm glad you could asked Hope. Not, are you optimistic? A lot of people ask if they're optimistic. Something has become a mantra of mine for about a year or so. It's words written by Vaclav Havel when he was in the process of creating the Czech Republic and had enormous uncertainties and great challenges and obstacles for people against him, and nobody thought it could happen. And, and a variety of things like that. He wrote back then, he published it in 2011." Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that doing something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. It is hope above all that gives us strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as they do today here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit it's devaluation by living pointlessly mentally without meeting, without love, and finally without hope". And, so as long as I can, tell myself that I'm doing things that might make a difference, that might help somebody that I don't know, they might not even be alive yet. I feel hopeful that it's a good expenditure of my time and my effort, even at the expense of my wife thinks I work too much sometimes. Now that I'm retired, I seem to work more than what I was teaching. Anyway it's just something that's worthwhile to do. And frankly, it makes you feel good. I'm working with a colleague to try to write, write a motivational piece for young scholars based on Havel's words. It essentially says, look, your passion is science. Your passion is climate science or health science, or something like that. But you're looking around at, at the lack of support and the attacks on it and stuff like that, and you're thinking about your career. Now's the time you're gonna make that choice. And, you know, maybe it'd be more secure if I tried to be an actor on Broadway. I don't know. And, we're, we're trying to tell them that if you have hope and ha and sense. you can still follow your dreams and we give them some advice about you're gonna have to use AI, but don't let it rob you of your voice. My colleagues and I have been writing for the general public now for about five years. It's actually very hard for us to do when we were writing for each other for 25, 30, 35 years. But we wish we had started it earlier, so we're encouraging people to do it together. If you live in Europe a lot of really first class American scientists and economists and political scientists are coming over and being welcomed find out where they're going. Take advantage of that. It's brain drain from this side of the pond, but it's an, an opportunity on the other side of the pond. So then we get to John Lewis. Don't give up. Don't ever give up. Imagine what the civil rights movement would've looked like if John Lewis and his folks had had given up. Imagine what it would've been like if the science community and climate had given up when the personal attack started in the 1990s. Then you see what it will be like if you don't follow your passion and just go for it.

Tom Raftery: 21:21

Fair. Good. Yeah. And With regard Vaclev Havel's idea that hope isn't the same as optimism, do you have a climate story that really embodies that difference for you?

Gary Yohe: 21:34

That's a really good question I have in the old days mayor Bloomberg started the New York panel on climate change, and the first thing we noticed was that the evacuation plan for Manhattan was for everybody to get on the subways and take the train to higher ground. And we looked at that as sort of, yeah, subways are underground. Water goes underground. That doesn't sound like a plan. Oh, and by the way, the closest high ground is the third story of the building right next door. So we approached that to the mayor and he, you're right, so they completely revamped it and they required buildings to have closets on the third floor with water and food and things like that. Flooding wasn't gonna last a month and it was gonna last a day and a half or whatever, and people could go up there. So then Sandy came. And they gave warning to Sandy eight hours before landfall and shut down the subways. And not only did they move the trains to higher ground, they took all of the electronics that would be corroded by the salt water and put that at higher ground as well. And it's our view that we probably saved 10,000 lives that day because they wouldn't have been in the tunnels trying to get out when the water came up.

Tom Raftery: 22:53

Amazing. And looking ahead, what are the biggest opportunities for real climate progress that maybe aren't getting the attention they deserve?

Gary Yohe: 23:03

I think it's the upper tails. I think it's the, recognition that suffering is the unavoidable third option, and you need to prepare for that. The other one is that responses, even adaptations, except the ones that are big construction problems, projects that are gonna last for 80 or 90 years, hopefully are amenable to midcourse correction. And so that has to be built in, I think with the response that you're looking for. And what you're trying to implement. An example of that is, is in fact, San Francisco. They're worried about sea level rise and vulnerable coastline across the city. The city is divided into regions with different characteristics of coastline. They had three scenarios, the sea level lies that they gave to the Army Corps of Engineers to do some analysis. But one of them was a very high scenario of six feet by 2100. It, it's the melting of the ice cap and they don't have a likelihood for that, but it, it couldn't be turned away so that they, they, they wanted that the, bring that into the calculus. The Army Corps was, was given six. Different response options and allowed to recommend different ones for the different parts of the coastline. And the way to summarise the conclusions is for all but one of the areas in the city Embarcadero, the recommendation was plan and build as if the middle scenario is going to happen. And plan to make course correct in 2055 plus or minus that decade. If you're going too slowly, speed it up. If you're go too fast, slow it down. That's a good idea. But for the Embarcadero, the damages would've been so severe, their recommendation was plan for the next 20 years, as if the worst scenario is gonna happen. And the argument there is, that it's along that scenario in 2055, it is much, much cheaper to slow down than it is to try to speed up. So that's, that's the sort of nuance that needs to come out and needs, to be developed. What is the socioeconomic political requirement for that? People have to get over the idea that if you make a mid-course correct and you didn't know what you were doing in the first place, you're doing the best that you can in 2025 if you have to change your mind in 2055. And that's built into the plan. That's built into the plan. The science is going to evolve the technology is gonna evolve. Our willingness to accept a level of, a tolerable level of risk is going to evolve and change at be higher or lower. And it's not malpractice to change your mind when you get new information, it's malpractice to think that you can write policy through 2100 and you'll be right.

Tom Raftery: 26:14

And you mentioned you and your colleagues are coming together to write about this. You've set up a newsletter on Substack, if I remember correctly, called Climate Cafe. So why start this new platform now and how do you hope it can shape the climate conversation?

Gary Yohe: 26:33

Really good question. We've, we've been writing these sorts of articles, like I said, for four or five years. And placing them in places like The Hill or in Scientific American, sometimes in Reuters the Guardian and Project Syndicate, we, we might get a hundred readers or some people on the hill reading The Hill, and it felt good to get all those things published, but we started to realize that we we should probably stop writing for ourselves and start writing to try to reach new audiences. And this seemed like a good idea. We've known about the people in Substack who've been writing every day about political things and stuff like that. And we thought we would, give this a shot. And the hope is we'll reach a whole set of new listeners and, and new readers. The reason I'm excited to, to be doing this is, I'm reaching people through you that I never would've been able to reach. And I hope conveying information that's valuable and allows them to become more productive. So that's why we started. We're sort of wondering why we didn't do it earlier, but it was launched a couple of weeks ago. Our essays are going to come out on Wednesdays of every week. We think we can get one a week. Which is a lot faster than we used to do it. So, but we've added Chris Ebi, a global expert in health and climate and health impacts of climate change with lots and lots of IPCC experience and climate experience. Among the six of us now, we have almost 200 years of experience researching and writing about and assessing climate data. And we just hope that people start to notice it and comment on it and we're gonna do it and, and see how it works out.

Tom Raftery: 28:22

Fantastic. I'll put a link to the climate cafe in the show notes so people can find it quickly enough. And part of that team of six with, as you said, nearly 200 years of climate expertise, is there anything surprising you've learned from your colleagues recently that you were unaware of before this?

Gary Yohe: 28:42

Not really. The group has, been around since 20 18 when Rich Richels who used to work at the Electric Power Research Institute phoned me up and asked if I wanted to write a fable with him. And I said it's sort of like a fun idea. So we did that for a little while and we showed it to a guy in MIT named Jake Jacoby, and he, he responded that this is fine. But I, I, I agree with your daughters who read it and had the comment that there aren't any women in the characters. So Jake joined the group. And then we realised we didn't have a really good scientist, and I invited Ben Santer. And we were very, very happy that he agreed to participate. And it was just the four of us up until December of last year. And we started to think about this sort of thing. We had a colleague named Bud Ward, who ran Yale Climate Connections until he retired, and we had dealt with him a lot when we were publishing. We invited him to a meeting to get advice of how to change our, what we were doing so we could reach some more people. And he had great ideas. So we invited him and he was happy and he said you don't have a health person, and I know one. So I called Chris and he said Yes. So that's how we became six. What was surprising over the entire process is how easy it was for us to begin to work together and to collaborate and criticise each other and edit and not care whose name came first or last, or, or whatever. The four of us when we were working all had pretty big egos and they were all left at the door. It was, it was, it was really quite extraordinary.

Tom Raftery: 30:27

Fantastic.

Gary Yohe: 30:28

That's, and That's, why it's one of the things we encourage young people to do. Don't, don't just follow your, your passion alone. Get colleagues, form groups, practice writing for the general public. It's hard, but I had the advantage, of teaching at Wesleyan University, which is fundamentally an undergraduate school. And if I wanted to teach my research, I had to be able to teach it to undergraduates, which meant I had to have an answer to the question. So what? Why would anybody care about this? And that, that's spectacular. And if you train yourself to write a little bit for the general public and take seriously the recommendations of big deal journals like Nature and Science to write an abstract for the lay leader you will be doing a service.'cause part of your job now as a scientist is to communicate to the people that make the decision.

Tom Raftery: 31:22

And you've been working on climate change, as we said already for 43 or so years now. How has your perspective evolved and what's one lesson you wish you'd learned sooner?

Gary Yohe: 31:35

Well, the lesson I wish I learned sooner is that I was missing a really important audience. What I learned over the process as a theoretical economist walking in was that the knee jerk economics response to how do you approach this question as a grand intertemporal welfare maximisation problem under enormous uncertainty. And writing solutions that would last for a hundred years. And people did that for, quite a while. It was very illuminating and it allowed us to explore our models and make them more realistic defend them, examine other sort of macro scale questions. But one of the big, big lessons was that those approaches give you answers that had zero chance of being right. And maybe you should take that, into account and you do by giving distributions, but that doesn't help a decision maker. So needed a whole new way of looking at it. And decision makers are used to dealing with tolerable risks, so let's get them thinking about risk and likelihood and consequence and organising their thoughts. That was really fun and, really revealing. The other thing as an economist is I talked about the five reasons for concern. Only two of 'em are economic. The other three are ecosystems, distributional aspects, sudden and enormous extreme events. And currency has the advantage of, being able to add it up. You can aggregate it, but there are a lot of other things you can add up. Human life, you can add up, number of species you can add up. You're not stuck with, the currency of, the realm when you wanna try to express what the damages are.

Tom Raftery: 33:23

For people listening, you believe there's hope, not optimism. What advice would you give people listening who might feel overwhelmed?

Gary Yohe: 33:35

Get educated and, follow the news. Don't get destroyed by the news, but follow it. See where the attacks are coming, see where you can help. But, mostly be educated about the fundamentals so that, if you're talking over the fence or at, at a, a social gathering or a town hall or something and somebody comes up with you, you think climate change is real. You're taking that seriously. Why are you doing that? Did you have a pretty good answer? Well, I've looked at the data, I've looked at the science. I'm not a scientist, but the data confirm what the major findings of the science community are and the consequences are, are really, really bad. And you said, oh, I'll take it. Show me the data. Well, there, are, there are places to go out there where really complicated data are collapsed to intelligible accessible, penetrable images and learn that some of the data, I mean you're talking about the future, so all of that data is generated by models. And so somebody's gonna say, I don't believe in models. What do you, and then you can get flip. I think you can ask them, do you ever fly on an airplane? Where do you think they came from?

Tom Raftery: 35:00

Fair. Yeah. A left field question for you, Gary. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional, as a champion for climate action, who would it be and why?

Gary Yohe: 35:19

Wow. The, the, the why part is what criteria are you using Gary to answer this question. And so I, I have to, I have to think about that and then work backwards.

Tom Raftery: 35:36

Okay.

Gary Yohe: 35:36

And, I don't think one person except for Steve Snyder, but he, he died a while ago, can explain all of the science and respond to every question on his feet. So, plus the science, plus the scientific community and the scientific method. But how to reach the most people and be the, trusted communicator that will reach a lot of people. And I think that's the pope.

Tom Raftery: 36:04

The Pope interesting. Interesting. Yeah, and I mean, he is continuing the previous Pope's legacy of Climate Action, which is nice to see and it can't hurt that he's a native English speaker. That'll help a lot in communicating as well.

Gary Yohe: 36:19

That's right. And, the teachings of Jesus are to worry about the least resource, the, the, the most, the most vulnerable among them. And and they're also are also pretty good at, at thinking about, the almost unimaginable events and, trying to help out in the missionary work that, that, that they go around and, and that is the dark tales of the climate problem. What happened in Asheville was a lack of imagination.

Tom Raftery: 36:49

Fair enough. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now Gary. Is there any question I did not ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't covered off that you think it's important for people to think about?

Gary Yohe: 37:02

You did a, a very good job. The one thing that you didn't pick up on, and maybe I can emphasize it, I mentioned tolerable risk a couple of times and it might be interesting to ask what is that? And is it a practical vehicle for thinking about these problems. And tolerable but risk can be personal, but it can be societal. It's the level of, risk that society or a person is willing to accept and then try to protect him or herself down not to, there's no chance that this is going to happen, but there's this chance that it's gonna, I I, I can live with that as well. That, that sounds a little silly. But we have all of the, we have a lot of those. Speed limits are a level tolerable risk. They're not low enough to keep people from having car crashes at speeds to kill them. And they're, they're not as high as we would like to go when we're late for an appointment. But they are a level of risk that we're willing to tolerate. Building codes don't guarantee that the building won't fall down, but it does, does the best to lower that likelihood to a level of security. I was staggered to find out that in the United States, 25,000 people a year die of the regular flu. Which is not necessarily hardly ever a lethal disease if it's caught early. If it's feasible and there's vaccines to protect yourself or, or whatever. And you could push harder and get that number down. But we don't, so it must be okay to lose 25,000 people a year to the flu. And in certain states this proportion that contribution to the 25,000. So, their level of tolerable risk to the flu is lower than other people's. So it's there. Okay. So, San Francisco, defined the question for the, the Army Corps of Engineers is a likelihood that thus in such property would be flooded sufficiently to cause X damages. Miami has said we want to, protect ourselves from sea level rise so that the likelihood of significant damage in any year is 10%, a hundred thousand dollars on every $1 million worth of problem. So they exist. And, and what that means is that the problem isn't maximised cost in body birth. It is minimise the cost of achieving that level of tall, local red. The iterative part isn't, what are we locked at? How hard is to look at all these variables we have to keep track? No, it's keep track of the likelihood that these events are happening, and if they're happening too frequently, you have to ramp things up. It just simplifies the problem. That's not a wide accepted notion. But I can say one last story. When Mayor Bloomberg created the New York Panel on Climate Change, we came up with that idea and our liaison approached him in the elevator in the mayor's mansion or the mayor of the city hall. And he said, we think that, that the target should be level tolerable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he got off it after 30 seconds and said, make it happen.

Tom Raftery: 40:22

Nice. Gary, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Gary Yohe: 40:32

To my email address G-Y-O-H-E at Wesleyan, W-E-S-L-E-Y-A-N dot EDU. And if you do a subject heading something like Tom's podcast I'll notice it.

Tom Raftery: 40:52

Brilliant. Great. Okay, super. Gary, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Gary Yohe: 40:58

Well, thank you for having me. It's, it's been fun. I've had a charmed life. I hardly ever do anything that's not fun, although it's very serious and depressing sometimes. And this was fun. Thank you.

Tom Raftery: 41:09

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.