Why two Yale profs returned from the U.N. climate summit with optimism

Two days after the end of the United Nations climate conference in Scotland, with a new global agreement in hand and thousands of pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions by governments, corporations and big institutions such as Yale, you’d have to figure the people who played a key role would suffer a bit of a comedown.

Let’s say they’re influential professors at Yale, named Daniel Esty and Anthony Leiserowitz. They’ve returned to the real world from a gathering of 40,000 people who, for all their disagreements, flew to Glasgow (yeah, burning a lot of fuel) to find a way out of the environmental meltdown that will happen in a few decades if we don’t take dramatic action.