Posted by ezequiel-garzon 2 days ago
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.
but that is certainly not wrong!
If someone smashes your windows at night, robs you, you're in trouble.
If you're being threatened with a weapon, you're in trouble.
But you're also in trouble when you leave your house in a freezing night and don't remember to put your keys in your pocket.
If you're unlawfully detained, you're in trouble, as much as you are in trouble when you're detained for a good reason.
Dehumanizing people who are "in trouble" is as old as humanity itself.
Rape victims are also in trouble.
Even worse, trouble tends to accumulate and amplify existing trouble.
Some people think that's just how the world works.
It's certainly how a world of animals works.
And a "fair" world is hard to imagine, the human condition is partly an attempt to achieve it though.
Autarky can be often found in 19th century literature. The one we hopefully don't want to have or produce anymore.
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.
There’s levels of societal collapse, mass migration can destroy the existing social fabric without necessarily being that terrible. Fertility rates being so low means developed countries will likely want large numbers of immigrants.
At the other end stopping all CO2 production tomorrow would result in severe consequences. We can’t transport food to cities without burning fossil fuels. Obviously that doesn’t mean every current use case is worthwhile, but we can’t ignore the short term here.
The good news is we’re actually making a lot of progress on climate change. The electric grid being ~90% very low carbon emissions by 2050 is a realistic goal and would avoid the worst predictions.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
Add in more kids being born in 1985 than 2025 and per capita numbers matter. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-births-per-year
Poor countries are rapidly becoming wealthier which is obviously a good thing. Meanwhile wealthy countries are becoming a lot more efficient with their carbon emissions. Where those lines intersect is what matters in the near term because poor countries aren’t copying 1950’s technology. Skipping power hungry CRT screens and inefficient engines etc just makes economic sense. China emissions spiked as they industrialized but they are currently minimizing their investment in outdated fossil fuel based technologies in favor of solar and EV’s etc.
AI powered by renewables has ~zero impact on the climate.
Assuming you are right, when would you expect the rate of atmospheric co2 increases to start to decline?
CO2 from land use (deforestation etc) has already dropped by half since the 1960’s, but I know less about that so I’m unsure of the details. That said it’s well under 10% of total emissions so probably not a major factor for now. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-land-use?mapSelect=~C...
Globally more babies were born in 1985 than 2025. Population growth at this point is all down to people living longer but that’s a one time correction, we’re already in a steady state situation and heading to decline. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-births-per-year
That's not a reason to take such a scenario seriously.
WW2 with it’s restrictions & rationing, and almost all civilian economy/effort being redirected to the military is I think what a lot of people are wanting in my honest opinion.
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.
What you see in your normal everyday life is that things that you were used to are not that way anymore. And that there are some activities (like agriculture) that depend on some stability on weather. At least till we cross another threshold and things not seen in human history start to happen enough to be noticed, but by then it will be too late. What we need is to trust the measurements.
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.
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.
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
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.