Brian Lear on WNYC now now our Climate Story of the Week,

which we've been doing every Tuesday on the show

all this year, and yes, Power Hour Tuesday included.

And maybe you saw the op-ed in the New York Times by climate scientist Kate

Marvel, who was a lead author on the fifth US National Climate Assessment, which just

came out this month. And if you did see the up ed,

maybe her take surprised you for the optimism

that she expressed,

even around the dire warning

that her own national assessment produced.

Let's find out why.

Kate Marvel, besides being a leader on the government's climate assessment,

is a research scientist with the Environmental Group Project Drawdown.

Previously, she was a research scientist at Columbia University and the

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Marvel, thanks for giving us some time today

for our climate story of the week. Welcome to WNYC.

Hi there, so happy to be here.

To set the scene, you wrote that you were reluctant to join the team writing this

national climate assessment at all. Why was that? I was because we have had so many

assessments before. This is the fifth national climate assessment. We've had six IPCC UN reports, and I was getting really frustrated because we had

kept issuing what to my mind were very accurate and also very scary, very dire warnings.

And yet emissions kept climbing and the temperature kept rising.

...