The Honest Broker at Two Years
A status report and a thanks for your support!
In the United States this is our Thanksgiving week. For many, it is a special time to take a break and gather with family as the holiday season really gets underway. It is also a time for turkey, football, and reflection.
Here, The Honest Broker is celebrating more than two years of publishing and 6 months under Substack’s paid subscriber model. I have been absolutely overwhelmed by the response.
The Honest Broker is within sight of 10,000 total followers and 1,000 paid subscribers. The site recently debuted at number 6 on the Substack leaderboard for all sites in the category of “climate and environment.” Wow.
I am deeply appreciative of all of you. I know that the fare here is not partisan red meat — and that at times it can be esoteric (RCP8.5 anyone?), sometimes niche (FIFA governance?) and maybe even uncomfortable (pragmatic regulation of elite trans athletes?). I am thrilled that there is an audience for deep dives, wonkery and heterodox thinking. I am also really impressed by the diversity of subscribers and the thoughtful exchanges in the comments from many people, including many with considerable experience and expertise. It is an absolute pleasure to have readers who both agree and disagree with things that I argue or claim, and are willing to say so in the comments. So thanks!
It is no secret that I am using Substack as a sort of professional experiment. I’m 54 and have been a full professor for 17 years. It has been great (mostly). But I don’t see myself doing this same thing for the next 17 years.
I’m also at the age where many of us have seen friends and colleagues die early and unexpected deaths. No one has ever told me that they wished that they had spent more time in faculty meetings, but some have told me that they wish that they had taken more time to think, read and write. I’ve been listening.
For the next stage of my career I am ready to explore new possibilities for doing independent research and writing as a sort of junior varsity public intellectual. Based on the incredible growth of The Honest Broker to date, I am convinced that Substack can be a big part of such a model. I know that am truly privileged to have such possibilities and I am determined not to let them pass by.
I expect that I will always want to have a university affiliation of some sort, since I also love to teach and also to learn from smart students and colleagues. Whether that will be in Boulder or elsewhere is to be determined — but that is a discussion for another time. It will be interesting to see how things develop. I’ll continue to keep you updated on how things progress with this novel experiment since you are a participant in it as well!
Next week it is back to work. I have some posts in the works on topics including the following:
The 2022 seasonal hurricane forecasting bust. What to make of it?
The 1.5C global temperature target. It’s origins and demise.
The latest on regulation of trans athletes in elite sport.
Can citizen juries or assemblies help to improve the practice of democracy?
Global disasters: 2022 in long-term context
US disasters: why do we wrongly think a quiet year is much worse?
The secular apocalypse: why do we love it so much?
Climate imperialism, as uncomfortable as it is real
COVID-19 origins: where from here?
Lessons of COVID-19 for governmental science advice
That is just a sample of topics I’m working on and are in the queue. I always welcome your pointers, tips and requests — another benefit of this site is the incredible amount of learning I get to do thanks to readers and commenters. Where science, policy and politics collide is never a dull place.
Lastly, for today, I am happy to announce that I have just committed to a title, outline and delivery date for the sequel to The Honest Broker, my 2007 book that gives this site its name. I’m thrilled. It is going to be lit, as the kids say. More to come on that, watch this space.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Appreciate your work Roger, happy to provide some small level of support. Definitely not interested in partisan red meat. Don’t need lots of articles. Someone actually doing what the general public believes journalists do, reading, summarising on this important topic of climate is of great value.
Your list of topics in the cue sound great! But here is a topic, maybe not in your ball park, but one that I am curious about: What is the effect of elevated CO2 levels on the biosphere, on plant growth, etc.? How has surface warming and other changes impacted agriculture at a global level? What we seem to get is a thousand articles about the negative effects, real and imagined, of climate change, but not a balanced evaluation of its overall impact on the biosphere.