Your Questions, December 2023

Go Ahead, Ask Me Anything

The Emperor addresses COP28, and 90,000 attendees admire his new clothes.

I’ve decided to make Your Questions, My Answers a regular monthly feature here at THB.¹ I’m shamelessly stealing the rules for reader Q&A from Nate Silver, whose Substack is excellent.²

Here are the rules:

• This is an opportunity for paid subscribers to ask me questions about pretty much anything. Unpaid subscribers are welcome to email me Qs or to post and tag me on X/Twitter or BlueSky. If you would like to ask a question anonymously, just email me (you can just respond to this post in your email) and make sure you tell me that you’d like to be anonymous — absolutely no problem.

• Good topics include: Any posts here at THB, old or new; anything related to science; policy and politics; climate policy; extreme weather; sports governance (especially U.S. college sports); politics politics; political science; my peer-reviewed work; universities and being a faculty member; THB itself; and whatnot. You can also ask questions about me or my views.

• Questions can be asked in the comments below. If I don’t answer your question, that doesn’t mean it was a bad question. Sometimes your questions have inspired a full-length post here at THB and I expect that to continue. Honest brokering is a group effort.

• Looking forward to 2024, I’ll plan on soliciting your questions near the beginning of every month and then I’ll answer them closer to the end of every month. If there are questions that others have asked below that you are especially interested in me answering, please favorite them by clicking on the little heart button above the comment.

• As the month goes by I’ll link back to this post across several posts as a reminder. It is a THB experiment and we will see how it goes — if it is worthwhile, it’ll stay around.

• In the comments, you are of course more than welcome to post comments that aren’t questions and to engage with each other, as in an open thread.

When I publish my answers to your questions later this month, I’ll aim to engage about 5 of them, plus or minus, and I’ll make one or two answers public and the rest will be for paid subscribers.

With that, go ahead, ask me anything!

1. In the ChatGPT image at the top of this post, I noticed that there are no black faces in the crowd at the fictional Dubai COP28. Perhaps that reveals a bias of the AI or maybe it is instead a profound commentary by the AI of the neocolonial nature of climate policy?

2. I think that the Substack Nate is more human and likeable than the 538 Nate, demonstrating another virtue of Substack over corporate media.