Hope Over Optimism in Climate Action and Climate Science with Gary W. Yohe

0:02John Lee Dumas:Who's ready to rock today? Fire Nation, JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down hope over optimism and climate action and climate science. And to talk these via bombs, I brought Gary W. Yohe into EO Fire Studios. Gary is a professor at Wesleyan University and is a climate change expert with over 40 years of experience. Nobel Peace Prize recognized, focusing on mitigation, adaptation, and economic impacts of environmental policy. Today, we'll be chatting about 40 years of insights, progress in reality, setbacks and policy changes, and oh, so much more.

0:39John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Gary and our sponsors. Fire Nation, if you have a high ticket offer and need more quality leads, Nexus Install is designed for you. We'll book you 8 to 20 qualified calls each month, then train you to run the system yourself. Email my team at john at eofire.com to learn more and see if Nexus is the right fit for you. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support.

1:13John Lee Dumas:Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 50-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Gary, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. In what I do, I am entrepreneurial in creating climate science, assessing climate science, communicating climate science. And in that, I need to know for a fact for myself that I will be changing my mind as the science emerges and evolves. And as I talk about policy responses in 2026, I am talking about something that's iterative because there may be a time when we want to make some big course corrections, and that does not mean that I'm lying today.

2:15It means I'm giving my best recommendations today for what would be good, but I'm building in the possibility and the likelihood and the necessity to make some changes as things evolve.

2:30John Lee Dumas:Well, Fire Nation, today we're talking about hope over optimism in climate action and climate science. And Gary, I want to go through your origin story. I mean, take us back. What led you down the path to climate economics? And what was it like contributing to the intergovernmental panel on climate change and actually being part, and this is crazy, of a Nobel Peace Prize recognized effort? Tell us that story. I went to graduate school with a mathematics background in economics. I didn't know very much economics, but I knew a lot of math. And that allowed me to come out of Yale with a degree and an expectation that I would be an applied microeconomic theorist worrying about making decisions under uncertainty.

3:17And that's what I did. I started to write some papers. I got picked up in some big deal journals. My wife and I moved to Connecticut from Albany. That was a good move. But 1980-81, Bill Nordhaus, one of my dissertation advisors from Yale, phoned me up and asked if I wanted to be involved in a National Academy of Sciences study on changing climate. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so I said yes. And we worked as a panel for about 18 months. There were three economists on the panel of eight, and that might have been three out of eight economists in the world that knew anything about climate change.

3:59So it was really fresh ground, very fertile ground. We produced a report. It's still widely cited. And it revealed to me a lot of low-hanging fruit on what drives warming economic activity and what drives damages at the other end net of adaptation. those become decision-making under uncertainty, and even mitigation is decision-making under uncertainty. And that was how I got started. It was a couple of 10 years later that I got involved in IPCC because impacts and adaptation and vulnerabilities were starting to become critical in their focus. They created a working group exactly on that. And out of that, every time I went to a meeting, I came back with three or four or five new questions that I wanted to answer.

4:57And I became involved in writing the synthesis reports for working group reports and then for the entire report. Those are designed for policymakers at the country leader level for their staff or whatever. But it's the attempt to put into 25 words what had taken the scientific community, 2 ,500 pages to write. It was a real challenge, but it allowed me to produce the responding to climate change involves an iterative risk management process and a variety of other things like that. And it's for that that the IPCC was awarded a share of the Nobel Peace Prize. Wow. Waking up in the morning and getting a phone call from Andy Rufkin at the New York Times said, you just won a Nobel Prize.

5:52What do you think about that? I thought, hmm. I answered that. And I had to teach class that day, but I thought I'd better sit down and plan for some interviews that were likely to happen. So I had something cogent to say. Andy was a friend, so he didn't report nothing but the surprise. But that was quite an experience. And it was followed up in 2018 when Bill, Bill Lordhouse, won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he invited me to his Nobel ceremony. It's the top of the world for somebody who does what I do.

6:29John Lee Dumas:Yeah, totally. And we'll circle back to this, but we have so much to get to. I want to keep moving because you have 40 plus years of insights. So after decades and decades, literally, in climate research, what are, let's just say, the two biggest lessons you've learned? Well, one, I'm an economist, but not everything is measured in economic metrics. And we created something called reasons for concern, of which two of them were economic, aggregate economic consequences and distributed economic consequences. But there was also risks to unique and threatened systems, and they don't have to be quantified in dollars and cents.

7:08They can be quantified in what they are. there was extreme weather events. Those don't have to be quantified, and the likelihoods don't have to be necessarily quantified. You can think about them as I have high confidence that there's going to be a tornado in the middle of the United States sometime three days ago or sometimes in the next three weeks. It's just possible. So that's one thing. There are lots and lots of metrics, and you can even add them up. You can add up human lives and you don't have to decide who's worth what. You just, a life is a life is a life. And the second thing is we're not going to write policy for 100 years and it really does have to be iterative.

7:57And you're not going to be able to do the cost-benefit calculation over that period of time. It becomes a risk management problem and there's a whole set of tools. The downside is you don't get one answer. The upside is that you handle all of the possibilities that you can think of, and you can even throw in some that you can't think of.

8:17John Lee Dumas:I mean, Fire Nation, this is really insightful when you just understand the fact. This is coming from 40-plus years in climate research. And I want to talk about the progress and reality, Gary. I mean, when it comes to climate change, you talk about these three choices, abate, adapt, or suffer. Break that down for us, and where are we seeing real progress on a global scale? Those three choices were articulated and invented by John Holdren when he was science advisor to President Obama for eight years. Whenever he traveled the world and talked about climate change, he would say that. And what he meant, and as soon as I heard it, I knew he was right, we do have the opportunity to abate, to mitigate, to slow down the emissions of greenhouse gases and the warming gases that affect the climate and therefore change the pace of the climate change or the pace of the acceleration of the climate change.

9:17That's one choice. You're not going to eliminate all impacts, so you could adapt to the impacts, and you can adapt to them over the short run and over the long run, But the fundamental observation is no combination of mitigation and adaptation is going to eliminate all of the dark tales of really bad impacts or just ordinary impacts that you hadn't thought of. And that means the third choice is to suffer. And it's the residual of unavoidable climate impacts for which building resilience is the policy choice.

9:57John Lee Dumas:fire nation we're going to talk about setbacks in policy changes we're going to talk about fact or myth on a very debated topic practical takeaways and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors fire nation if you are building a real business you need real infrastructure that is why high level is entrepreneur on fire's featured partner high level gives you a website builder and hosting funnels and landing pages email marketing appointment scheduling payment processing, course and membership hosting, and so much more. Everything you need to succeed all under one roof. No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business and their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most.

10:40John Lee Dumas:When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to uncommon success, my 50 days to something execution roadmap, and more. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Fire Nation, if you have a high ticket offer, but you are not getting enough quality sales calls on the calendar, Nexus install is exactly what you need. This is a custom LinkedIn client acquisition system built to help you connect with the right prospects, start real conversations, and turn those conversations into booked calls.

11:22John Lee Dumas:here is what makes it different. We do not just hand you a bunch of theory and tell you, good luck. We build the system with you. Dial in your audience, sharpen the messaging, run the outreach, and aim to book you eight to 20 qualified calls each month. Then, once the system is proven and installed, we train you on how to run it yourself so you are not dependent on another agency forever. If you have a strong offer, a clear result, and are ready for more quality conversations with real prospects, email my team at john at eofire.com. And then we'll set up a call to see if Nexus install is the right fit for you.

11:57John Lee Dumas:Simple, focused, and built for predictable, long-term quality lead flow. Gary, we're back. And I want to talk about setbacks. I want to talk about policy challenges. What would you say is the biggest setback that you've seen, especially around policy shifts and global trust? And what should we be paying attention to right now? That one's pretty easy, although the answer has changed. The first Trump administration was pretty dangerous to climate. He pulled out of the Paris Accord and stuff. But all of that could be undone and we could get back to where we were and progress forward. But since January 21st of 2025, it's been an all-out assault on climate science, climate scientists, the federal and private infrastructure of doing science research and science communication, and issuing reports that are full of errors, putting them open for public comment and then ignoring the public comment, continuing to base decisions like rescinding the endangerment finding of carbon dioxide as a pollutant so it fits under the Clean Air Act, shutting down leases for wind farms and otherwise completely discouraging investments in alternative energy and while promoting investments in old-fashioned fossil fuels.

13:38John Lee Dumas:So I want to talk about facts or myth on a very hotly debated topic. I mean, literally, extreme weather, climate events. Are they actually increasing or is that misunderstood? No, they are actually increasing. NOAA has been producing for the United States, for example, over the last 25 years, a catalog with maps of the 50 states of a billion-dollar or greater climate and weather-related extreme events. And a couple of decades ago, they might have three or four inflation-adjusted events to report, and it was gradually a little bit more. Through 2024, that number had gotten up to 28, and the total damages had gone from something around$10 billion to something around$350,$400 billion just in economic damages.

14:42And the losses of life also increased. Oddly enough, not consistently. Sometimes bad events like Hurricane Andrew in Miami, which killed a lot of people, created a very, very good adaptation response so that people felt more secure. They would go back and rebuild, but rebuild in a way that wasn't quite so hazardous. And so we had more hurricanes come through 15 years later, and not very many people died, but a lot of property damage was still done. So that's what we're seeing. The Trump administration stopped NOAA from doing this, and something called Climate Central did it for 2025. and there were 25 extreme events, including the fires in Los Angeles and the floods in Texas, the flash floods in Texas that killed children.

15:49It is definitely going up, and attribution science can quickly give an estimate of the change in likelihood of that event occurring occurring because the climate had changed, the planet had warmed. And those numbers are, it's always more likely than not, and it can be almost certainly we would not have had the flash floods in Texas without the warming conditions and the drought in the local conditions.

16:19John Lee Dumas:Yeah, I can tell you being in Puerto Rico in 2017 for Hurricane Maria, that was quite an event, It's 215 mile per hour winds and the actual hurricane hits land 10 miles south of my house. So very close to where I'm actually speaking to you from today. So very crazy times. And I know a lot of people listening have also been through really extreme weather and climate events. So let's talk about some practical takeaways, Gary. For entrepreneurs, policymakers, and individuals who are listening right now, what practical steps can they take to be more climate aware and prepared? I think it is a practical step to realize that non-improbable scenarios that climate science is putting forward as low likely, very, very high consequence, or not quite sure what the likelihood is, but still very, very high consequence isn't risk mongering.

17:21It is beginning to do what is required to manage the risk iteratively. You take into account all possible futures if you can, or at least representations of a few of them. Some of them are benign, some of them are pretty troubling. But if science has said there's something out here that we can tell a credible story might happen, even if we can't tell you that it's 1 % chance or 2 % chance over the course of 50 years, but we can say it's not zero and for all we know it might be 15%. Take that seriously as you begin to make your decisions. If you're a business person, where are you going to locate firms or worry about your supply chain?

18:08If you're an individual, worry about where are you buying a house? If you're an employer, You're worrying about where you want to locate your business model as it moves forward. What are your climate risks in your product? And what are your climate risks in your production possibilities?

18:32John Lee Dumas:If there's one thing, Gary, that Fire Nation should understand about climate change and specifically their role in it, what would that be? Don't be afraid of taking seriously, at least to the point of thinking about it, something that people tell you could easily happen as happened in the past. I'm tired of people saying this event, the Asheville flooding, was unimaginable. No, it wasn't. It happened in 1910. This is a repeat of something that already happened. the floods in Texas. That was unimaginable. Well, no, it wasn't. You may not have had a flood that big that killed so many people, but you've lived in what was designated a flash flood prone zone.

19:21So take that seriously. And when an insurance company says property in this area is uninsurable, they mean it's uninsurable because they can't compute the likelihood that a bad event that they're insuring against will actually happen. What that means, and then they can't set a premium because the premium should be a reflection of that probability. If you're a business person or just a regular citizen, look at the opposite side of that very troubling situation and say, holy cow, an company whose business it is to think about risk is afraid of putting assets in this region because they can't produce the probability that something bad might happen, and they're walking away.

20:16That should give me pause.

20:18John Lee Dumas:Gary, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you or maybe learn more about what you have going on, what is your call to action for our listeners today? Keep informed. There are a lot of ways to keep informed. one way of personal ad. I work with five other IPCC colleagues, longtime friends among us. We have about 200 years of climate science experience. We post weekly on a Substack presence called Climate Cafe. So climatecafe, all small letters,.substack.com. We write about what we're writing about and what comes out in the news. In case you missed it, really important papers that we think you should be aware of, some educational topics, a new report on why sea level rise estimates are too low, exactly how did these guys come to that conclusion, and what should you think about it.

21:25A variety of things like that. But also watch the evening news on ABC, World News Tonight, or other places. World News Tonight has four or five minutes every night out of the 22 minutes that they devote to news on extreme weather. And it happens every day. And there was one day that there was a weather warning or watch. that could be attributed to the warming of the planet in all 50 states of the United States in one day. Wow. So it's happening everywhere, people.

22:08John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with G, Y, and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit EOFire.com. Just type Gary, G-A-R-Y in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Gary, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Gary for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world?

22:44John Lee Dumas:If yes, we are now accepting applications for EO Fire. To learn more about becoming a guest, visit eofire.com slash guest, and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Fire Nation, if you have a high ticket offer and need more quality leads, Nexus Install is designed for you. We'll book you 8 to 20 qualified calls each month, then train you to run the system yourself. Email my team at john at eofire.com to learn more and see if Nexus is the right fit for you. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. Sure. High level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform.

23:22John Lee Dumas:Plus award-winning 24 seven supports. Get a 30 day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15 minute private call with me and much more at high level fire.com high level fire.com.