Tech billionaire Bill Gates’s recent blog post stating that the “doomsday view” of environmental and social catastrophe from global warming is wrong appears to mark a significant shift in the debate over climate change.
While reiterating the orthodoxy that climate change will have “serious consequences” and will hurt poor people the most, Gates goes on to say that “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.”
“People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Written as a message to attendees of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Brazil, which begins on Nov. 10, Gates’s op-ed states that the biggest problems the world faces are poverty and disease, not rising temperatures.
This contrasts with his previous statements on the subject, including his 2021 book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” in which he says climate change is one of humanity’s greatest challenges and predicts that it could cause more deaths than the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed millions of people worldwide.
Similarly, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared in 2022 that all nations must end their reliance on fossil fuels “before climate catastrophe closes in on us all.”
US Judge Dismisses Climate Activists’ Suit Challenging Trump’s Energy Policies Gates joins others who are stepping back from dire predictions about rising temperatures attributed to the burning of oil, gas, and coal.
Ted Nordhaus, founder of the climate-focused Breakthrough Institute, wrote in 2007, “If we continue to burn as much coal and oil as we’ve been burning, the heating of the earth will cause the sea levels to rise and the Amazon to collapse, and, according to scenarios commissioned by the Pentagon, will trigger a series of wars over the basic resources like food and water.”
In an August blog post, Nordhaus said: “I no longer believe this hyperbole. Yes, the world will continue to warm as long as we keep burning fossil fuels. And sea levels will rise. … But the rest of it? Not so much.”
What has changed?
Critics of the claims that the climate changes as a result of human action and that the changes constitute an urgent existential crisis say that the most dire predictions from climate change models—the escalation of “extreme weather,” the flooding of Pacific island nations and coastal cities because of rising sea levels, the loss of coral reefs, and the loss of arctic sea ice—appear to be overstated.
While climate change activists continue to maintain that their predictions are largely correct, the scientific debate on global warming has become more nuanced, upending the view that there was a scientific consensus regarding climate catastrophe.
“The media, until recently, has had a stranglehold on what gets put out there, and most of the public have only heard extreme alarmist scenarios of climate and planetary doom,” Greg Wrightstone, executive director of the CO2 Coalition, which has challenged the so-called consensus regarding climate change, told The Epoch Times. “We’ve been saying all along that once the dam breaks—and hopefully it’s breaking now—we will be able to get the truth in front of not just the American people, but the world.”
A July report by the Department of Energy, authored by a working group of five independent experts in physical science, economics, climate science, and academic research, concluded that warming caused by carbon dioxide (CO2) “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation strategies may be misdirected.”
“Additionally, the report finds that U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays,” the report reads.
Coinciding with the release of that report, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said: “The rise of human flourishing over the past two centuries is a story worth celebrating. Yet we are told—relentlessly—that the very energy systems that enabled this progress now pose an existential threat.”
This reflected a shift in the debate over climate change, in which the benefits of fossil fuel energy and carbon dioxide were taken into account, as well as the potential harm from rising temperatures.
“By almost every metric we look at, Earth’s ecosystems are thriving and prospering,” Wrightstone said. “It’s quite obvious that there are huge benefits that are due to climate change—longer growing seasons, crop productivity is outpacing population growth year after year, extreme weather-related deaths have dropped more than 90 percent since 1900, deserts are shrinking, and forests are expanding.”
A 2024 report by Fred Pearce published by Yale School of the Environment stated that “despite warnings that climate change would create widespread desertification, many drylands are getting greener because of increased CO2 in the air—a trend that recent studies indicate will continue.”
However, Pearce also notes the downside to this, namely that “vegetation may soak up scarce water supplies.”
source www.theepochtimes.com
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend the Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Cymbals clash…
Then ask why the sudden change of heart?
To appear open minded and reasonable in order to promote his scheme to depopulate the world via unsafe mRNA vaccines as a countermeasure to gain of function infectious diseases that have been and will be released and spread in the future.
Didn’t he genetically modify mosquitoes for that purpose?
Put nothing passed this fiend.
Tom
| #
Don’t make book on that. This bum is a perpetual liar to the hilt.
Reply
Aaron
| #
anyway the wind blows ……
Reply
Lorraine
| #
Cymbals clash…
Then ask why the sudden change of heart?
To appear open minded and reasonable in order to promote his scheme to depopulate the world via unsafe mRNA vaccines as a countermeasure to gain of function infectious diseases that have been and will be released and spread in the future.
Didn’t he genetically modify mosquitoes for that purpose?
Put nothing passed this fiend.
Reply