Modeling is a critical part of crafting adaptive and mitigative responses to existential threats like the COVID-19 coronavirus and climate change. The United Nations, in its efforts to promote 17 Sustainable Development Goals, has recognized both sources of risk as cross-cutting themes in part because both expose the wide list of social and economic challenges facing the globe. Here, evidence is presented to encourage the research communities of both topics to work together within and across the boundaries of their international infrastructures, because their modeling approaches, their social objectives, and their desire effectively to bring rigorous science to opinion writers and decision-makers are so similar. Casting decision analysis in terms of tolerable risk, conducting policy relevant counterfactual experiments, participating in organized model comparison exercises, and other research strategies are all part of their common scientific toolsets. These communities also share a responsibility to continue to hone their communication skills so that their insights are more easily understood by the public at large—skills that are also essential to protect their science from attack by groups and individuals who purposefully espouse their own misguided or deliberately misstated perspectives and/or, sometimes, their own corrupted personal agendas

Gary Yohe earned his PhD in economics from Yale University in 1975. As a senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1995 through 2017, he shared its 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. His primary research, assessment and communication efforts have been focused on exploring describing the economic and social risks from climate change and elaborating ways to defend against them through mitigation (reducing the likelihood of extreme climate risks by limiting concentrations of greenhouse gases), adaptation (reducing the natural, human and economic consequences or climate change impacts, or suffering (recognizing that no combination of responses will ever totally eliminate a climate induced risk. He has published nearly 200 peer-reviewed papers in the academic literature and more than 85 opinion and communication pieces in reputable media outlets. Yohe served as Vice-Chair of the 2014 Third National Climate Assessment in the Obama Administration and on many panels for the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  He has testified multiple times before both houses of Congress in the United States, and he has been Co-Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Climatic Change since 2010.