Why has Bill Gates, of all people, decided to break rank on climate change? The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist wrote earlier this week on his Gates Notes website, challenging what he called the “doomsday view of climate change.” While acknowledging that climate change would have “serious consequences” for some, he maintained that “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Rather, for the vast majority of the planet, “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.” Too much focus on climate is “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
Gates’s intervention might have been sparked by the United Nations’ latest apocalyptic proclamation, ahead of COP30 next month. In a statement on Monday, UN Secretary General António Guterres lamented the world’s failure to stop the average global surface temperature from rising by 1.5C—something that he believes will now have “devastating consequences” for humanity. As a result of this ‘overshoot,’ Guterres has warned that the Amazon rainforest could be turned into a savannah. “That is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible,” he said.
Guterres firmly falls into the “doomsday” camp of green acolytes. He believes that climate change (or the ‘climate crisis,’ as he would likely insist on calling it) will end life on Earth as we know it. All of humanity will be engulfed in hellfire. “The era of global warming has ended,” he declared in 2023, “the era of global boiling has arrived.” The year before, he told the world that “we are in the fight of our lives and we are losing.” He thundered: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” He has also, unsurprisingly, hinted that high-polluting nations have an obligation to address “loss and damage” (read: climate reparations) to poorer countries.
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