Happy Retirement, Dad

A computer in a suitcase - that was the first inkling I had that my Dad had an odd job. Something mathsy; something sciencsy.

It must have been the very early 1990s, and this was the closest his department at Cambridge University had to a 'laptop'. It could do four colours (black, white, bright pink, and luminous green), and it was heavy enough that three children aged between two and six years old couldn't move it (collectively try as they might). You could play Chess on it if you typed in a special code.

'Maybe Dad is a professional chess player?', I remember thinking, aged 4.

He wasn't, it turns out. But his job was still pretty cool, I'd later learn.

He's Dr Chris Hope, the creator of the PAGE integrated assessment climate model, who was for several decades a Reader at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. I say 'was', because today is his last.

Today, my Dad is retiring.

Most people won't know what the PAGE model is, but a reasonably large chunk of people who are still scrambling to try and prevent the world from frying do. And lots of them also know my Dad.

That's why I wanted to write some words to mark the occasion - to reflect on his career and the almost infinite lessons i've learned from having a back-stage pass to it my whole life.

PAGE stands for 'Policy Assessment of the Greenhouse Effect'.  Here's the one line explanation of what it does: It's a computer model that allows policymakers to estimate the cost of emitting an extra tonne of carbon today due to future climate change.

If you want a longer explanation, he can give that, too. And he'll do so without patronising, with patience, and with a genuine pleasure that you're interested. I'd encourage you to do so.

The reason I can explain it at all is because my Dad has explained it to me, with absolute patience, about four thousand times.

Initially, it was because I was vaguely interested (in that way 10 year olds are). Once, it was because I had to answer the question 'what do your parents do?' for homework. More recently, it's because i've started to build a fledging career working on climate change and, frankly, it got a bit embarrassing when others could offer a better explanation than I could.

He'll wriggle reading this, but my Dad has been my inspiration. Not exclusively. Not always consciously. But without doubt he is a very large part of the reason I chose such a bloody difficult problem to which to commit myself.

He taught me to find hard problems stimulating rather than defeating. And he taught me, above all, to treat those that work around and with you with the respect they deserve. Not because it helps your career, but because that's just what good people do.

He has his parents, my grandparents, who were always so proud of him, to thank for that.

It’s definitely not just me that my Dad's career has affected.

His work has helped policymakers decide what they should do to tackle climate change, if anything, for 30 years.

What PAGE shows is that we are miles - I mean bloody MILES - from properly costing carbon. A government commissioned report by former World Bank economist Nick Stern more than a decade ago used PAGE, and called climate change the greatest market failure the world has ever seen. Given the impacts we're already seeing, and those that science tells us to expect, it's really hard to argue with that.

And PAGE's numbers continue to back that up. My Dad has published over 193 articles (according to Google Scholar, the number is likely higher) essentially saying just that. He has also more recently embraced Twitter to calmly, politely, persuasively argue this point with more or less anyone - a rare and valuable trait.

The thing that really startles me, looking back, is just how early my Dad started working on this. He first published papers using probabilistic risk analysis - the method that underpins PAGE, suggested to him by an oil industry analyst - in the early 1980s.

That was years before I was born, and seven years before the first report from the UN group generally seen as the benchmark for the progression of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was published.

As a father of three young children, what he knew about climate change at that point must have scared him witless. I don't have kids, and it scares the heck out of me.

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".

Because my Dad was a review editor on the IPCC's Fourth Assessment report he got a share of this. He has a certificate to prove it, which for years was hidden behind the door in his office (he would never want to appear to brag).

Public recognition is a poor measure of success, but it makes my heart swell that his name will forever be associated with that effort.

Initially I rolled my eyes at the idea of a big group of scientists all getting a little share of this prize. But as I've got closer to the IPCC process I've come to understand that the people that work on these absolutely mammoth reports aren't there because of their heads (though they are all stupidly well-qualified). They are doing it because of their hearts.

It's so easy to forget that lots of scientists do their work mainly because they care - and my Dad is definitely one of them. He’d never actively campaign for more action, choosing instead to point to the data.

But that always niggled at me. If the data was so good, and I saw my Dad in a suit often enough to suggest at least some politicians were listening, why was nothing happening?

From where I had been standing my whole life, it looked as though my Dad had for decades been telling smart, important, connected people that climate change was a problem, and one that got worse the longer some sort of solution wasn't enacted. And yet, nothing.

For so, so long: nothing.

So I rebelled; I went and did a social science PhD. My thesis was on the politics of climate change. (It wasn’t a huge rebellion, I admit.)

My Dad was always hugely supportive of this. Maybe if I'd had his skills with numbers I'd have taken on PAGE. But he happily accepted that I preferred words. And encourged me to use them - so long as I'd tried to do it smartly.

We now have painfully polite and incredibly niche climate policy  disagreements over dinner (and maybe a little whisky). My mum is good enough to allow us to have it out. I know how proud she is of him as well. I'd wager he wouldn't have got half as far without her. His achievements really are hers, too.

Occasionally, our disagreements become research projects. Because while my Dad is sure he's right, he is also more open to the possibility of being wrong than almost anyone i've ever met.

He just wants the argument to be based on analysis.

One of these arguments led to us publishing a paper together in Nature Climate Change in 2013. At the time I was a bit uncomfortable about it. Now, i'm so glad we did it. It's a reminder, particularly at that point of my career, of how the personal and professional actually can mix. And how, sometimes, that can be great.

Admittedly, it helps if the senior partner in that relationship is smart, humble, patient, polite, experienced, encouraging, and incredibly well-qualified. It helps, in other words, if they're my Dad.

Perhaps that's why he seems to be dealing with retirement much better than me. He's losing an institutional structure he'd outgrown. He's shedding the hassle. He no longer has anything at all to prove.

I'm losing my professional compass. The one person I can rely on to nudge me back on course when perhaps i've let my heart rule my head just a little too much.

Except of course i'm not. Because while he might be professionally retiring, he'll always keep questioning, exploring, analysing.

When I went home last Christmas, I found him Googling the best strategies for a board game i'd bought the family. I can't ever see that behaviour changing. He is my grandmother's child in many ways.

His relentless desire to make sense of intriguing, difficult, problems means we'll keep discussing, debating, arguing and - hopefully - helping each other understand a little more about the world; all as the climate continues to change.

It’s just that climate change is a little bit less his problem now. That's a position he's earned.

So enjoy retirement, Dad. Go and put your feet up. Just for a bit. Because you know I'm going to ring you later... I just need you to help me understand something.