Did Bill Gates Really Drop a Bomb on Climate Catastrophism? – Watts Up With That?

by E. Calvin Beisner

Many people on both sides of the climate-change controversy—climate alarmists and climate skeptics alike—think Bill Gates dropped a bomb on climate catastrophism with a memo he published October 28 on “Gates Notes,” his blog. Here’s the money quote:

“There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this: In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. …. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature. Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong.”

And so, all the climate activists went home, the UN canceled “COP30,” Bill McKibben disbanded 350.org, all the wind turbines and solar fields disappeared, coal and gas power plants sprang up everywhere, energy prices plummeted, and everyone lived happily ever after. The end.

Uh, sorry, not so fast. Despite widespread celebrations among climate realists and laments among climate activists, two things suggest Gates’s pronouncement may not be such a bombshell after all: the past, and the present.

For years, Gates has been one of the chief proponents of climate panic. Consider just a few quotes:

“Climate change is possibly the greatest threat to humanity,” he wrote in promoting his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. “It threatens food supplies, our health, and even our survival, should we not take decisive action.”

“Preventing a climate crisis will be one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced—surpassing landing on the moon [and] eradicating small pox,” he said in pressing the case for a massive investment in “Green” tech.

“If we don’t reduce emissions, … the unrest would be global in nature. You’ve got to start work now to avoid those terrible consequences much later,” in a CBS interview in 2021.

Over and over from 2018–2021, Gates insisted we needed to reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions to solve the “existential threat” of climate change. It’s not likely that he’s really reversed course. Slightly changed it, perhaps, for political reasons, but not reversed it.

That’s the past. What about the present? What else did he say in his memo to those gathering for COP30, the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, November 10–21 in Belém, Brazil?

Okay, I’ll admit, some of it was pretty good, like this: “Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—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. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.”

Climate alarmists are up in arms and climate skeptics are dancing a jig and it seems like everybody agrees that Gates’s memo marks a sea-change in climate-change thinking. I don’t.

Why? Because his memo is loaded with qualifiers (like “for the foreseeable future”) and hints that his basic goal remains unchanged (like “drive emissions down much further”), even if postponed a bit. Here are a few examples, with some explanations.

“… the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.” Sounds good, but “emissions goals,” even if they shouldn’t be “near-term,” remain, as we just saw, long-term.

“It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change.” So, climate change remains the ultimate concern, even if it can take a back seat briefly while we deal with more immediate problems.

“I know that some climate advocates will disagree with me,” Gates wrote, “… or see this as a sneaky way of arguing that we shouldn’t take climate change seriously.”

But they shouldn’t, because: “To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved …. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives” (boldface original).

There’s the giveaway: “Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.” Not just a little beneficial, “hugely.” Every tenth of a degree.

Yeah, really, he said that. Cogitate on that a bit.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which most climate activists worship as their god, said, in its 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°, that 2.46°C of global warming (which is 24.6 times a tenth of a degree) by 2100 would only reduce gross world product in that year by 2.6%. Coupled with credible forecasts of population and gross world product, that implies that the average Earthling would be making nearly nine times as much per year then as now—and would have been making more and more every year till then, adding up to his being many times wealthier.

How, then, if 2.46° obviously won’t be hugely harmful, could every tenth of a degree of warming prevented possibly be “hugely beneficial”?

It couldn’t. And I suspect Gates knows that. But he’s playing the long game—as are all the climate alarmists and the “renewable energy” companies that still see which side their bread is buttered on.

For them, as for all climate activists, climate change is a “threat multiplier.” It makes every problem worse. Which entails that it remains, if not the most immediate, still the biggest, most important threat—and will require the biggest changes in our energy, agricultural, and industrial practices to solve.

Gates’s memo doesn’t dispense with this weapon. It just gives it stealth.

So, what’s Gates’s real message? The message that doesn’t get qualified to death?

News flash! What you spend on A you can’t spend on B!

That’s “opportunity cost,” one of the most elementary lessons in economics. The world hardly needed Bill Gates to get that message across.

Gates ended his memo by urging the “global climate community … at COP30 and beyond, to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare.”

There’ll be a pivot, all right. But it will be from seeing climate change as the world’s greatest problem, which must be solved now at all costs, to seeing it as the world’s greatest problem, which can take a temporary back seat to other problems, so long as we recognize that it makes all those other problems worse and must eventually be solved at all costs.

At the UN and among climate activists and progressives in America and around the world, climate change remains the biggest rationale for shrinking your freedoms and your wallet, because it makes everything else worse, even if it’s not so bad by itself.

That’s how the game is going to be played in coming decades. You see, Gates’s memo isn’t the end of the war. It might be, as Churchill described Dunkirk, the end of the beginning, but it’s not the beginning of the end. From here on out, the war’s going to be fought on many fronts.

Here’s what I foresee the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which I lead, along with other climate-skeptic organizations, must address: a war in which thousands of drones replace a few big missiles and tanks, demanding a multifaceted defense system—because the environmentalists, who’ve been doing it for a while already, will now more insistently hook every problem to climate.

I asked Perplexity AI to scan the Internet to identify what environmentalists consider the ten main global environmental problems. It listed climate change as first and worst, but then it added these nine:

1. extreme weather and natural disasters (driven, purportedly, by global warming),
2. world fossil fuel dependence (mainly because it contributes to warming),
3. biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse (both tied tightly to climate change),
4. air and water pollution by hazardous chemicals,
5. scarcity of pure water (exacerbated by climate change-driven droughts) and lack of sewage sanitation
6. soil degradation (often is code speak for opposition to modern farming, which is crucial to feeding the world’s 8 billion people) and desertification (the latter supposedly driven by global warming, though more atmospheric CO2 is shrinking deserts),
7. deforestation (undermining—you guessed it—climate stability),
8. plastic and solid waste (Will they admit this includes vast numbers of wind turbine blades and spent solar panels?),
9. overconsumption of water, minerals, and fish stocks.

Environmentalists routinely tie at least six of those nine to climate change.

Perplexity then added three “emerging and amplifying threats”: melting ice caps and sea-level rise (from climate change), new threats such as melting microbes (from climate change), and armed conflict and migration (partly from climate change), adding that solutions involve, among other things, “clean energy” (code speak for wind and solar, the darlings of climate alarmists).

Clearly, the global environmental movement is not backing off from climate catastrophism, no matter what Bill Gates says. With or without him, it’s going to step up the pressure.

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is President of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and co-editor with David R. Legates of Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism.