In November 2015, I went to Paris with President Obama.

For years, we've been cajoling world leaders to reach an ambitious global agreement to

fight climate change.

We were in Paris to convince the remaining holdouts.

Now, 2015 was on track to be the warmest year on record.

In India, thousands had died and heatwaves so intense it melted asphalt.

Then on our side of the world, the hurricane season spawned Patricia.

It is being called the strongest hurricane ever recorded and now this potentially catastrophic

storm is just hours away from making landfall in Mexico.

So the need for climate action seemed pretty self evident.

So did the stakes involved.

But at that moment in Paris, something loomed larger and a lot of people's minds.

Not long before we arrived, the city had been rocked by coordinated terrorist attacks.

More than 100 people were killed at cafes and nightclubs on a pleasant Friday night.

Not surprisingly, when I gave a press briefing during our climate talks, at the venue where

this historic climate agreement was being forged, a lot of the questions were about terrorism.

Before about Syrian refugees seeking asylum in the US and what we were doing to make sure

there weren't any terrorists among them.

But when the questions did turn to Obama's work on climate change, even those ended up

being about terrorism too.

How does he prioritize this?

How does he see this in comparison with the challenge of fighting terrorism?

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