For decades, Bill Gates has warned of climate disaster, but his tone changed significantly on Tuesday when the billionaire Microsoft co-founder warned against adopting an “apocalyptic vision” about the future of the planet.
in a memorandum Posted online, Gates wrote that while climate change remains a major problem that must be solved, “people will be able to live and thrive on Earth for the foreseeable future.” Gates, who has invested billions in developing green technologies to reduce greenhouse gases, says doomsday climate scenarios overemphasize reducing emissions while “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
The lengthy memo essentially argued that we should continue innovate and support climate progress, but not at the expense of funding for global health or development: “programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change.” He advocated putting “human well-being at the center of our climate strategies,” including improving health and agriculture in the world’s poorest countries.
In previous years, Gates, author of “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” took a more alarmist tone.
In an interview With Norah O’Donnell of CBS News in 2021, he warned: “If we don’t reduce emissions, the death toll would be even worse near the equator and the unrest would be global in nature.” And he added: “We must start working now to avoid these terrible consequences much later.”
Gates described climate change as the most formidable challenge humanity has ever faced. He told Anderson Cooper in a “60 minutes” interview that same year that climate change is “much bigger than the pandemic. And it needs a level of cooperation that would be unprecedented.”
Gates has personally invested more than $2 billion in green technology and launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a company formed with other billionaires to fund research and technology aimed at finding solutions to reduce carbon emissions.
Gates’ memo generated mixed responses. Some agreed that climate change is not the biggest threat to humanity, while others criticized the memo for underestimating the consequences of climate change.
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and professor at Texas Tech University, says the problem of climate change cannot be separated from the other major threats facing humanity because it contributes to them, even in the developing world.
“Just give me a list of the top 10 things to worry about, and I can tell you how climate change is making each of those top 10 things worse,” he said.
Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, called the memo a “stunning misread” that lacks understanding of what it would mean for the world to experience 2 or 3 degrees Celsius of warming.
“I think it grossly misrepresents the magnitude of the consequences we’re going to see, ironically, for the very people the memo claims to be caring for: the world’s poor.”
Timothy Gallaudet, a retired rear admiral who oversaw weather forecasting for the U.S. Navy, questions some climate assessments, including doomsday scenarios.
“Ultimately, there are real impacts, but a lot of things are misreported,” he said. “There is so much misinformation in the climate space now, it’s a real shame.”
Gallaudet believes that moving away from “apocalyptic climate alarmism” and focusing on adaptation and technological improvements to forecasts is beneficial, more realistic and practical.
Ted Nordhaus is founder and CEO of the global research center Breakthrough Institute (not to be confused with Gates’ Breakthrough Energy). He said climate change is a problem, but it does not pose the existential threat that some have warned.
in a column for The Free Press (which, like CBS News, is owned by Paramount Skydance), Nordhaus wrote that climate tipping points like melting ice sheets and Amazon deforestation “do not add up to catastrophic outcomes for humanity.”
According to Nordhaus, scientific evidence does not suggest that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity, and it should not be taken into consideration when the world has already shown that it can adapt to a warming atmosphere.
“We’ve always adapted, that’s why we have humans living in climate zones with huge variations,” he told CBS News. “I think the point of Gates’ letter is that we are actually making quite a bit of progress here in reducing emissions and remaining more resilient.”
With the global climate summit known as COP30 taking place next month in Brazil, Gates urged global leaders, companies and activists to chart a new path forward.
“This is an opportunity to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” he wrote.
