After that I began to worry about some other environmental problems applying
the same methodology like CFCs and ozone depletion and things like that.
>> What, what's CFCs?
>> Chlorofluorocarbons. >> Right.
>> And then began to worry about impacts and how to calibrate those.
And then began to worry about adaptation.
How you could ameliorate the impacts by responding to certain things
and what were the underlying determinants, of the capacity to adapt.
>> And [COUGH], and the, what we've learned since those early days is about
the trajectory of warming. And what other major advances
in what we know about climate change have you
seen since those early days of the spaghetti graphs?
>> We don't know a lot more about how to project what the future
is going to be, so we're still dealing with the full range of possibilities.
We've learned a lot more about how various strata in societies
and various countries around the world might be able to respond.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Both with respect to reducing emissions and
also with respect to adaptation and reducing vulnerability.
>> Mm-hm.
The major disc, the major conclusion of the fourth assessment report of
the Intergovernmental panel on climate change was that this is a risk problem.
>> Right.
>> Its not a cost benefit problem, and
so risk is likelihood times consequence and it depends
on co-benefit, damages, attitudes towards equity.
>> Right
>> Things like that.
But what that conclusion meant, and it was
unanimously agreed to word for word by 196 countries.
In a plenary meeting of the synthesis report for the fourth assessment
report, is that our clients in the IPCC wanted to know that risk.
They wanted to know about likelihood and
consequence, and we no longer had to focus our attention on what we knew a lot about.
>> Mm-hm.
>> We could talk about conclusions that, for which we had lower confidence.
If we could tell us a story that the con, or, lower
confidence but tell a story that the, consequences could be really quite severe.
>> Hm.