25. Patrick Brown on extreme weather and the obvious climate strategy

Challenging Climate

Dr Patrick Brown is the Co-director of the Climate & Energy group at the Breakthrough Institute and Adjunct lecturer in Energy Policy & Climate at Johns Hopkins University. In this episode, we discuss Patrick’s expertise on the economic impacts of extreme weather, and unpack trends and attributable risk. We then venture into a broader scope based on his essay, ‘The obvious climate strategy nobody will talk about’, which carries the rest of the discussion into climate targets and bias in climate communication.

Links:

• Patrick Brown’s profile
• Patrick’s essay in Foreign Policy: The obvious climate strategy nobody will talk about
• His paper in PLOS, 'Approximate calculations of the net economic impact of global warming mitigation targets...'
• Another article on heat deaths versus cold deaths

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Chapters

1. 25. Patrick Brown on extreme weather and the obvious climate strategy (00:00:00)

2. Introduction and background (00:02:44)

3. What is the point of learning climate science? (00:06:11)

4. Extreme weather: Intensifying trends, detection, and attributable risk (00:07:36)

5. Balancing the 'risk equation' (00:18:13)

6. The obvious climate strategy nobody will talk about (00:20:44)

7. Are temperature targets arbitrary? What’s the difference between 1.5ºC and 3.0ºC? (00:26:37)

8. The discount rate of climate change (00:31:08)

9. Heat deaths versus cold deaths (00:34:30)

10. Bias in climate communication and academia (00:41:00)

11. What gives you optimism? (00:45:13)