Sleepless Nights for WGIII

Back in 2018 I went to South Korea as part of the US delegation for the approval session for the IPCC Special Report on 1.5C. It was an intense but rewarding experience, and the State Department convinced me to sign up again and serve on the US delegation for the IPCC Working Group III Summary for Policymakers approval. This time the meetings were on Zoom, but even though there wasn't any travel involved the 'jet lag' was just as bad if not worse than the in person approvals! The virtual meetings were spread out over two weeks and needed to accommodate participants in time zones all over the world. The first week our meetings started a 6am and went until 7pm, with 3 hour sessions and 2 hour breaks (assuming we didn't go over...). On Sunday we rested, then the second week we started with meetings from 1am to 2pm. Realizing how much work was left, on Thursday we went from 1am to 7pm, but enough countries complained that we stopped a 2pm again on Friday. Really though they just wanted us to get a little rest before the final push with a marathon negotiating session from 1am on Saturday until 4pm on Sunday! All told it was 174 hours of work over the two weeks, but we approved the report! Now I just need to rest up before doing it all again for the Synthesis Report approval in September ;-)