a winning political issue. So what first got you onto this? Joe Romm: Well, I didn't pursue this topic because I thought it was a political winner. I started when my brother lost his home in Katrina, he wanted to know if he should rebuild, so I talked to a lot of climate scientists. And then I realized, "this is more dire than I thought, and climate scientists are not doing a good job of communicating it." So it was the underlying reality that gave me an urgency to stop doing what I was doing -- clean energy consulting -- and start doing communications full time. I have talked to the leading social scientists over the years. If you talk to Jon Krosnick or Ed Maibach or Robert Brulle, they will tell you that this is an issue that the public broadly gets -- and that there is an underlying respect for science and scientists. And so there is a way to talk about this issue that does work politically. That said, there are ways to talk about it that aren't useful, and I think people have mistaken the blowback from bad communications for thinking there's no way to communicate on this issue. And I think that's just not right. CM: Do you think this has always been true -- that climate change has always been a potential political winner -- or has it become more true over time? JR: I think many climate scientists have gotten better at communications