For decades, Bill Gates has warned of climate disaster — but his tone meaningfully shifted Tuesday as the billionaire Microsoft co-founder cautioned against taking a “doomsday view” on the planet’s future.
In a memo posted online, Gates wrote that while climate change is still a major problem that needs to be solved, “People will be able to live and thrive on Earth for the foreseeable future.” Gates, who has invested billions developing green technologies to cut greenhouse gases, says doomsday climate scenarios over-emphasize cutting 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 to innovate and back climate breakthroughs 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 argued for putting “human welfare at the center of our climate strategies,” including improving health and agriculture in the world’s poorest countries.
In years past, Gates, the author of “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” struck a more alarmist tone.
In an interview with CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell in 2021, he warned: “If we don’t reduce emissions, then the death toll would be even worse near the equator, and the unrest would be global in nature.” He added, “You’ve got to start work now to avoid those 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 “way greater than the pandemic. And it needs a level of cooperation that would be unprecedented.”
Gates has personally invested over $2 billion in green technology and launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a firm formed with other billionaires to fund research and technology aimed at finding solutions to reduce carbon emissions.
Gates’ memo drew a mixed response. Some agreed that climate change isn’t the greatest threat to humanity, while others slammed the memo for understating the consequences of climate change.
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist and professor at Texas Tech University, says the problem of climate change cannot be separated from the other major threats that humanity faces because it contributes to them, including in the developing world.
“Just give me a list of people’s top 10 things to worry about, and I can tell you how climate change is making every single one of those top 10 things worse,” she said.
Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, called the memo a “breathtaking misread” that lacks an 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 same people the memo claims to be looking out for — the global 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’s real impacts, but so much is reported erroneously,” he said. “There’s so much misinformation in the climate space now, it’s a real shame.”
Gallaudet believes moving away from “climate doomsday alarmism” and focusing on adaptation and technological improvements to forecasting is beneficial, more realistic, and practical.
Ted Nordhaus is founder and executive director of global research center Breakthrough Institute (not to be confused with Gates’ Breakthrough Energy). He said that climate change is a problem, but it doesn’t pose the existential threat that some have cautioned.
In a column for The Free Press (which, like CBS News, is owned by Paramount Skydance), Nordhaus wrote that climate tipping points like the melting of ice sheets and the deforestation of the Amazon “don’t add up to catastrophic outcomes for humanity.”
Per Nordhaus, scientific evidence doesn’t suggest climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity, and it shouldn’t take top consideration when the world has already proven it can adapt to a warming atmosphere.
“We’ve always adapted, that’s why we have humans living across huge variances in climatic zones,” he told CBS News. “I think the point of Gates’ letter is we’re actually making a fair amount of progress here to reduce emissions and continuing to be more resilient.”
With the global climate summit known as COP30 coming up next month in Brazil, Gates urged world leaders, business and activists to chart a new path forward.
“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” he wrote.