Interesting and different perspective vs. what many others often say (but that’s one of the points he’s making).
I feel a lot of climate articles — and the comments attached to their HN threads — tend to favor more of the doomsday message he’s arguing against here.
It is very hard to gauge what he actually believes will happen based on these words
That's not clear at all. Claiming 25%+ of the world will die is the kind of hyperbolic doomsday claim the Gates is trying to move away from because it distracts from sane climate mitigation strategies.
For the developed world, climate change will be annoying but not serious. The US may have to give up on Miami and New Orleans, and build seawalls for New York. Some crops may have to be grown further north. Some irrigation systems will need upgrades. More power will be needed for air conditioning. Those will not seriously damage a society. After all, right now the biggest problem in American agriculture is where to put all the excess soy and corn.
Countries in Asia with heavily populated big river delta areas of shallow slope are very vulnerable to small rises in sea level, because the coast moves a long way inland. China and Vietnam can probably engineer their way out of those problems.
Some countries near the equator with political instability are in big trouble.[1] Too poor and too disorganized to upgrade water and agriculture systems.
[1] https://www.rescue.org/article/10-countries-risk-climate-dis...
Spillover of problems like mass migration away from the equator and increase in conflicts.
We're on track to warm the planet far past the point that of sustaining something you and I would recognise as human society. That said, we're also changing course which has the opportunity to mitigate things.
The meta part is, if everyone thinks we'll change course, that affects whether we do. There's no straight prediction that can be made.
This is the first message I am hearing, “There are more important things than climate change.”
It’s almost shocking to hear it. The cynical side of my mind is wondering if this is the start of a slow pivot for the political masses. Another news item today says that emissions reduction pledges are not forthcoming in new world climate discussions. Perhaps messaging about climate change is evolving.
The uncharitable interpretation being that he's trying to toe the line for the current US administration, while still signaling that he's part of the communities that he typically inhabits as part of his charity work.
It is very likely that the time span for an individual is long enough that the change does not matter. Still the future will arrive and most likely sooner than we thought.
Climate change could do a lot of damage it’s just not extinction level damage. Even large scale nuclear war based on current stockpiles isn’t going to result in extinction.
That's not a reason to take such a scenario seriously.
Like I don't think anyone thought the world would implode, but an increase in the number of places humanity can't survive? What if one of those places is South Florida? What if one of those places causes mass emmigration/immigration.
Can't read the article, but if he doesn't think climate change will do it, is he offering any new alternatives?
> doomsday message
That term reveals a partisan position: it's a strawperson ridiculing those who talk about the great risks and harms of climate change. 'Don't look up!'
> Interesting and different perspective
It's an old, well-worn perspective, that is commonplace now - especially in American business and government, it's more common than the 'realist' perspective on climate change. It's incredible that they - the entrenched, very powerful status quo power structure - depict themselves as insurgents for advocating the same old climate denial policies.
IMHO: The entrenched capitalists (including Gates) and their power structure simply don't want to change - a bias of the status quo. They are asserting a reactionary conservative position - no change, no matter what, and hate those who want change - regardless of its validity in reality, with the idea that nobody can make them change. They make spurious arguments like Gates to divert people - a tactic they can do endlessly.
The idea that the answer to the enormous damage of the entrenched capitalists is empower them more is, when you think about it, laughable and absurdly myopic and self serving. They can't even carry out the charade for 10 minutes - now those entrenched capitalists are building massive power-consuming datacenters, eliminating ESG, destroying renewable energy in the world's biggest economy ... I'm sure they'll save us.
But notice I keep talking about entrenched capitalists. An essential of capitalism and free markets is creative destruction. These failed capitalists - and climate change is an historic failure, about which their predictions and decisions were enormous errors - should be destroyed (economically) and buried like Lehman Brothers, and new ones, who correctly anticipate it and deal with it, should be funded.
Really, all we need is to stop making taxpayers fund climate change - prevention, remediation, cleanup from disasters, etc. - and have a GHG tax that prices things according to their real cost, rather than subsidizing the current failures. Then real, innovative capitalists in a free market can thrive.
I hope he's right. I'm glad he's doing this advocacy. By doing so he's fighting two popular opinions, first that climate change is a hoax, and second, that climate change must be addressed even if it means sacrificing the well-being of the global poor. That said, I have grave concerns that Gates is simply wrong, that we cannot invent our way out of both climate change and the suffering of the global poor. His many remarkable mentions of AI do not, in my opinion, lend strength to his argument, nor does his mention of "almost commercialized" fusion. The former being a gimmick, the latter being forever 30 years away. If our hopes rest on tech like that, then we must prepare to be devastated and pick one side of the zero-sum.
I feel positive around whether or not we can- renewable and battery technology in incredible at the moment and we could shift quickly to a much less devastating track if the political will was there.
That said, without the political story, technology itself can't change things. We've seen this by the fact thay renewable technology advances have also come alongside technology advances in the fossil fuel industry, like fracking.
Around a 1/3 of CO2 emision is down to agriculture, which is mostly meat (and of that mostly beef). There's no tech fix required here, since humans can survive easily without beef, but something would need to change economically or otherwise so that the CO2 impact of food factors into our collective diets.
My take on this is that he has thought about this longer than anyone posting here and has the data to back it up... that is there are no other solutions given human nature.
What you feel locally is weather, including extreme weather. It can go to extremes in either direction, but with more global average temperature the system have more energy to increase the frequency and how extreme is that weather.
And speed matters. The baseline of preindustrial times is because we started the high emissions trend around there, but we reached 0.5°C by 1930-1950, and 1.0°C by 2015-2017. And the first full calendar year that had over 1.5°C over preindustrial times was 2024, but we need more years to average to talk about the same numbers.
Climate change is the COVID of global natural disasters. Is it worth fighting? Yes. Can you do absolutely nothing about it and get away with it? Also yes. Cue the lackluster efforts.
The "really bad" +4C scenarios still have a death toll larger than that of WW2 - but spread out in time and space, across many decades and many countries. And the most vulnerable countries? The countries that are already on the brink. Climate change is not the "great equalizer" people want it to be.
In those "bad" scenarios, the main source of lethality for climate change is: agricultural failures, leading to local shortages and global price spikes, leading to famine. First world countries can eat a sharp +40% spike in food prices, at the cost of quality of life - but there are numerous countries where such a spike would have a death toll attached to it.
Maybe that's a worst case scenario, but the better ones still include many millions of people displaced towards more temperate zones. It will lead to the greatest migration humanity ever suffered and I'm not sure that in a scenario of scant resources, that's going to go on in a peaceful and dignified manner.
The reality of modern warfare doesn't favor large forces, poorly organized and underequipped, that are attacking reasonably well prepared defense positions.
Now, is there a will to use all the tools of modern warfare against climate refugees? Currently, no. But if "hordes of climate refugees will destroy the first world countries" stopped being a distant theoretical concern, and became a practical one? If there were real examples of border checkpoints in first world countries being breached by force, with border security overran, and thousands of somewhat armed and somewhat violent climate refugees pouring in through the breach? I expect that to change very quickly.
The impact of that "pivot" has been catastrophic as we are reminded every time the news reports the damages associated with remotely exploited flaws in Microsoft's software and the public's dissatisfaction with "automatic updates" (i.e., being part of the Redmond botnet), a feeble attempt to "fix" these flaws through a never ending game of whack-a-mole
So next best thing is to prepare for future changes with potential solutions now.
This is most realistic approach I can see. Start now developing solutions that then have to be put into place.
If you're in a developed country, you are the rich.
For better or worse, the HN software automatically edits titles. Perhaps the word "Three" was removed automaticallly. Submitters can fix these changes by using the "edit" URL
Really the most impactful stuff is at the margins anyway: Whether your electricity comes from coal or solar. How many rare earths can we mine and recycle? Do you have a lawn or xeriscape?
The story here is not really that Gates has changed his mind (he never got rid of his private jet after all) it's the emphasis that doomscrolling is counterproductive.
That said, it's somewhat unfair that, say, 1 Australian can have the footprint of 7–8 Indian people. So some changes are good overall, such as eating more vegetables and less carbon intensive meat (which also improves land usage).
I agree with you about other fringe choices, but most people can't control the energy mix of their country. We can advocate for better choices at the high level, which is great news because people have been doing just that.
I do find the positive tone of the climate models a bit worrying: some of the projections still consider permafrost decay to be fatal to most of the human race.
There's another large source of human greenhouse gas emissions that will perhaps be the most difficult to do anything about and which as far as I know we don't have much in the way of hard numbers about, and that is emissions from military activity. Not just wars, but ordinary peace-time training, patrol operations, hauling stuff around, and so on.
My first instinct is he's doing something right then... the problem is policy and human nature.
They attack him because he constantly yaps about stuff without being elected or yaps stuff that is not even within the purpose of his 501c3 foundation.
I don't know why he behaves that way honestly, being relevant in the discourse might attract talent to work at the foundation but also produces attacks on the foundation, I guess in his calculus he comes out ahead.
I’m also not sure that anyone anywhere earnestly believes that climate change is an extinction level event that’ll render the entire planet unliveable. Certainly not the people at COP.
The piece seems unnecessarily broadly combative and contrarian.
A lot of people do believe that, unfortunately. Decades worth of the most alarmist coverage possible sure didn't help the public awareness.
Now, people at COP? Hopefully not. But COP doesn't end with the people at COP. And there are a lot of people in this very thread whose reaction to "climate change cannot cause extinction of humankind" is shock and disbelief.
No they don't.
Like addressing the exponential growth of income inequality? Unsurprisingly not mentioned at all. Might mean that billionaires have to give up their carbon credit purchases and then how could they be dismissive about their own emissions?
Bill is one of the better ones with his personal capital allocation. He could've just tried to create the fastest sailboat racing team or something. But I find it extremely difficult to take the wealthy seriously when they speak about carbon emissions and climate change. It’s like hearing an arsonist lecture on fire safety.
> Thirty years ago, when I was running Microsoft, I wrote a long memo to employees about a major strategic pivot we had to make: embracing the internet in every product we made.
Is this the one that lead to the term "embrace, extend, extinguish"?
It's the one that gave us IE6.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
>Given the direction AI is headed—more personalized, able to reason and solve complex problems on our behalf, and everywhere we look—it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be. According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.
I'm rather shocked because this article reads very similar to the messaging Jordan Peterson and Bjorn Lomborg for like 2 years.
The other issue is that while he might be right, the worst and biggest consequences of being wrong will not affect Bill. Or, frankly, anyone reading this comment.
It’s such a complicated problem for us humans because we often struggle to conceptualize beyond our own tribes, let alone humans who won’t exist for decades.
But the problem is that IF climate scientists are right - and other than a few cheery cherry picked stats, Bill has no evidence saying otherwise - then the longer we do nothing the bigger the impact.
Will humanity die? Probably not. But will it drastically affect QoL for nearly all humans on the planet save the 1%? Probably.
I hate that thing where you visit a blog post (judging from the URL) yet the blog post is seemingly endless (judging from the scrollbar), and when you scroll down you hop into the next blog post (URL just changes).
The scrollbar is useless in that case, I can't gauge the real length of the article. The Gates Foundation has more money than God, maybe spend a tiny little bit of it on a good UI designer, yeah?
I think it's precisely the problem: they hired an expensive designer, and the designer, for the obscene amount of money they were getting, felt like they had to do something special...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/06/1124265/bill-gat...
How do we change incentives to be long-term aligned rather than counter-productive, anxious short-termism?
Easy? You develop technology that makes it win-win for everyone. If you give me a choice to improve my QoL or reduce my cost AND reduce my carbon footprint at the same time, I make that choice.
If I have a choice between reducing carbon footprint, but my QoL goes down or costs go up, I won't choose it.
Solving climate change is really really hard. Solving mass media being biased towards alarmism and allergic to nuance, decision-makers in politics and at corporations favoring short-term thinking? Hard enough to make solving climate change look easy.
Questionable how efficient these orgs are, etc., but data shows that more people than ever are being vaccinated and this helps [0].
You can like it or not, but a vaccine against measles helps more than a solar panel to keep a child alive and costs way less.
[0]: https://www.who.int/news/item/24-04-2024-global-immunization...
There's no evidence Gates was ever on Epstein's island, so it is unlikely he has anything interesting to say about it.
The only known connection Gates has to Epstein is a few business meetings.
> But Kudos on acknowledging the growing evidence that the climate change movement is mostly about ideology, money, power and redistributing wealth.
The article did no such thing.
Rich people want to get laid with young , attractive girls who are also well mannered and somewhat cultured and socially mature
Epstein was the curator of that list, kinda like an elite's elite escort agency.
Is the above so hard to grasp and reconcile with? The whole thing has been blown way out of proprtion
- we are nearing or at +1.5C above pre-industrial baseline
- human carbon burning CO2 emissions are at a max and likely long plateau
- mean temp is rising by around +0.3C per decade
- we will be nearing +2.0C in around 15 years, 2040 give or take
- warming is mainly caused by us humans burning carbon, emitting CO2 and some CH4
- if we reach net-zero, we will be at peak CO2 and thus peak heat, for a long while
In addition, the only economically viable way to bring down the temp seems to be deliberate pollution by emitting sulphur or other particles aka Solar Radiation Management to brighten clouds, reduce heat absorption by the ocean. Volcanoes and shipping fuels have essentially proven that this brings down the temperature, in the short term.
We geo-engineered our way into this hot mess, and we will need to geo-engineer our way out of it.
If the temp reaches +2.5 or +3C .. I think that means quite a lot of crop failure, forced migration, geopolitical tension, lack of stable food supply.. and death to a large number of humans seems to follow logically from that.
So, now Ill look at the article to see if any of these tough truths were mentioned .. sorta-kinda no-so-much, it seems like he thinks things are not that urgent. ?!?
