It's Monday, October 30th, 2017, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at inquiring. show, on Twitter, at Inquiring Show, and on

Facebook. And you can subscribe to the show on iTunes or any other podcasting app.

Kishore Hari is off this week to run the Bay Area Science Festival, but I am joined by a very special guest, Stevie Lep, who is the host of a podcast called Reckonings.

Last year, we collaborated with them on an episode, and this year we're doing the same.

And I think this episode, in particular, you're really going to enjoy.

So this episode, we are in collaboration with

reckoning as I've mentioned. And so the format of the show is a little bit different. You're

primarily going to hear the story of Jerry Taylor, Jerome Cogburn Taylor, who is now an American

environmental activist and policy analyst, but he is perhaps most well known for the fact that he was a former

climate change skeptic, who came around to embrace policies to address climate change after

researching the scientific consensus.

I certainly don't argue that climate change isn't real. It is real. We know that the planet is warming.

You know, industrial emissions have a lot to do with it. But there's a lot of uncertainties here.

According to the IPCC, warming can be anywhere between 1.5 degrees Celsius to 4.5 degrees Celsius

if we double pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gas emissions. And it turns out while the models are showing that the

warming will be in the median to high side of that spread, the data that we've seen suggests it'll be

on the low side. So I'm not arguing that the scientific consensus is necessarily wrong. What I am saying

is that there's a lot of good reasons to think that warming will be on the very

low side of the most likely outcomes projected by the IPCC. And if that's the case, then it's probably

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