
When Gary Yohe could no longer hit his teammate’s curveball, he realized his baseball career was over. He was a junior in high school. He then took up golf and pursued it with a singular passion, practicing “like 10 hours a day” and then “playing nine holes,” he said.
“I was good enough to qualify for the United States Amateur twice,” said Yohe, “but never good enough to earn a living at it. (The University of Pennsylvania) was interested in me playing golf for them, but the reason I went to Penn was because I won a full academic scholarship from the same high school that led me to golf.”
Academics took a back seat to golf, at least with regard to scheduling. As Yohe explained, “I only took one economics course as an undergraduate, so I really had no idea where I was going to end up. I changed my major five times: English, philosophy, chemistry, chemical engineering, and finally mathematics primarily because I liked science and math (philosophy is math), but science labs interfered with golf practice. I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa even though I was not very reliable when it came to attending classes. My junior spring, we had 22 away golf matches in the month of April, so I went to one class the whole month. Remember, it was the 1960s. I got good enough at learning remotely. I got five A’s that semester.”

Yohe has fond memories of playing in the 1974 U.S. Amateur at Ridgewood Country Club in New Jersey, where the championship returns this August. He was 2 down on the 17th tee (No. 8 West) in the first round. But that was a better position than at the turn. He still thought he could square the match and take it to extra holes. It was not to be, however. Yohe lost to Mark Bedillion, a member of the University of Texas golf team, 3 and 1. (Bedillion went to medical school and is now an anesthesiologist in Austin.)
Yohe completed his Ph.D. in four years at Yale, all while playing competitive golf. Environmental issues became important to him when he took a class offered by Tjalling Koopmans and William Nordhaus, two eventual Nobel laureates. In 1977, he found his way to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he became a professor in the economics department.
“Wesleyan turned out to be the perfect place for me because I was hired as an economist but was allowed to follow my interests to focus almost entirely on climate change for over 40 years – a fundamentally interdisciplinary issue,” he said.
Yohe said that he “. . . discovered climate change when William Nordhaus, a dissertation adviser at Yale, phoned me in 1980 and asked if I wanted to work with him to write a chapter on economic drivers of carbon-dioxide emission scenarios for a National Academies of Science panel.”
The panel had been asked to publish what would turn out to be one of the first influential globally integrated assessments of climate change. Back then, “maybe five economists on the planet knew that climate change was a ‘thing,’ ” Yohe said.
He made it six by saying “yes.” The rest is history.
Yohe continued to collaborate with Nordhaus for many years while successfully turning all of his research to climate risk and climate policy. Around 1990, he was approached by the U.S. Department of State. It wanted to nominate him for lead author representing the U.S. in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Yohe again said “yes,” and he quickly became a senior author who shared the responsibility of producing not only individual chapters, but also “synthesis reports.” Synthesis reports are 25-50-page summaries of 2,500-page physical and social-scientific assessment. They are designed to educate heads of state and their staffs about the perils of climate risk and the range of available options should they want to respond.
Yohe has authored more than 175 scholarly articles and books. Over the past few years, he and his colleagues also have published more than 50 opinion pieces on climate change for a variety of media.
In 2007, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize as a senior member of IPCC. The award came as a very pleasant surprise. His wife was watching the news the morning the prize was announced as Yohe was preparing to go to Wesleyan to teach. When she told him that they had been awarded the Nobel, they both hugged and expressed astonishment. They wondered who would be the first to call. It was Andy Revkin of The New York Times.
Yohe has authored more than 175 scholarly articles and books. Over the past few years, he and his colleagues also have published more than 50 opinion pieces on climate change for a variety of media. Most of his work has focused attention on abatement and impact. He has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by then-Sen. Joe Biden, the Senate Energy Committee chaired by the late Sen. John McCain, and the Senate Banking Committee chaired by Chris Dodd, an “old friend from Connecticut.”
In April 2011, Yohe was appointed vice chair of the third U.S. National Climate Assessment for the Obama Administration. He also has served as a member of the National Research Council Committees on America’s Climate Choices and on Stabilization Targets for Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Concentrations.
And, about that curveball that he no longer could hit as a high school junior: His teammate was future Mets ace Jon Matlack, the 1972 National League Rookie of the Year, a pitcher who struck out a lot of major-leaguers with that curve.
During one high school game, their coach ran onto the field, passing Matlack, who was pitching, and Yohe, who was playing second base, to yell at the outfielders who were playing cards in centerfield.
Sometimes things work out for the best.