Oct. 28 (UPI) — A changing climate won’t end the human race and can be managed through sensible policies that include emphasizing human welfare, tech entrepreneur Bill Gates said on Monday.
Gates downplayed what he called the “doomsday view of climate change” and said it is “wrong.”
The doomsday view “goes like this: ‘In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization,'” Gates wrote.
“‘The evidence is all around us — just look at all the heatwaves and storms caused by rising global temperatures,'” he continued. “‘Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.'”
The good news for humanity is that “this view is wrong,” and a changing climate “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates said.
He acknowledged that a changing climate has “serious consequences” for people in the world’s poorest nations, but people will “be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
Gates said emissions projections have decreased and will continue to do so as innovation and better policies continue driving down the rate of emissions.
“Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals,” Gates continued.
“It’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
Improving life requires addressing poverty and disease and not climate change, according to Gates.
He said it’s necessary to adopt a different view of climate change and how to deal with it, which could start during the COP30 climate change summit in Brazil.
The COP30 event is scheduled from Nov. 10 through Nov. 21 in Belém, Pará, Brazil, which is located along the outer edge of the Amazon rainforest.
Gates made his comments a day after the United Nations announced the world’s nations did not achieve the U.N.’s target of limiting the global rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to The Guardian.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said missing the target will cause “devastating consequences” for much of the world’s population.
“Some of those devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs,” Guterres said.
“We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah,” he added. “But 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.”
Princeton University professor of geosciences and international affairs Michael Oppenheimer accused Gates of adopting an argument used by “climate skeptics” in a prepared statement to The New York Times.
“Despite his efforts to make clear that he takes climate change seriously, his words are bound to be misused by those who would like nothing more than to destroy efforts to deal with climate change,” Oppenheimer said.
