I am delighted to be here this evening, to talk about my favorite topic – climate uncertainty and risk. To provide some context for climate uncertainty and risk, lets first consider the so-called climate certainties:

• The Earth’s climate is warming
• A warming climate is dangerous
• We’re causing the warming by emitting CO₂ from burning fossil fuels
• We need to prevent dangerous climate change by eliminating CO₂

These alleged certainties are associated with apocalyptic rhetoric from UN and our national leaders.  Here are some of my favorites:

• “The clock is ticking towards climate catastrophe” – Ban-Ki Moon, UN Secretary General
• “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator” – Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General
• “Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world” – Joe Biden, US President.

The UN Paris agreement targets NETZERO emissions by 2050 to keep warming to within 1.5 degrees. Policy makers and others are grappling with a number of issues in addressing the NETZERO challenge. These include the technical, economic & political feasibility, the priority of climate change relative to other problems, and unintended consequences of a rapid transition of our energy systems.

So how did we come to be between a rock and a hard place on the climate issue, where we are allegedly facing an existential threat. And the proposed solutions are both unpopular and infeasible? Well in a few words, we’ve put the policy cart before the scientific horse.