The Patriot Post® · With Gates Memo, Climate Catastrophism Goes Stealth

By E. Calvin Beisner

You wouldn’t think it would take one of the world’s richest men, founder of one of the world’s foremost tech companies, to get the message across that the world faces more problems than climate change. But it did, because environmental activists have been so myopic for the last 30 years.

For them, no risk — not war, disease, poverty, hunger, lack of pure drinking water and sewage sanitation, or toxic wastes, each of which kills far more people every year than anything related to climate and weather — compares with “catastrophic” climate change.

So along comes Bill Gates to call for a bit of sanity. On October 28, in “Gates Notes,” his blog, he dropped a bomb (or did he? — hang in with me) on climate catastrophism:

“There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this: In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. …. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature. Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong.”

And so, all the climate activists went home, the UN canceled COP30, Bill McKibben disbanded 350.org, all the wind turbines and solar fields disappeared, coal and gas power plants sprang up everywhere, energy prices plummeted, everyone lived happily ever after — and Cornwall Alliance threw a party, closed up shop, and told donors to stop giving. The end.

Uh, sorry, not so fast. Despite widespread celebrations among climate realists and laments among climate activists, two things suggest Gates’s pronouncement may not be such a bombshell after all: the past, and the present.

For years, Gates has been one of the chief proponents of climate panic. Consider just a few quotes:

“Climate change is possibly the greatest threat to humanity,” he wrote in promoting his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. “It threatens food supplies, our health, and even our survival, should we not take decisive action.”

“Preventing a climate crisis will be one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced — surpassing landing on the moon [and] eradicating small pox,” he said in pressing the case for a massive investment in “green” tech.

“If we don’t reduce emissions … the unrest would be global in nature. You’ve got to start work now to avoid those terrible consequences much later,” he said in a CBS interview in 2021.

Over and over from 2018–2021, Gates insisted we needed to reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions to solve the “existential threat” of climate change. It’s not likely that he’s really reversed course. Slightly changed it, perhaps, for political reasons, but not reversed it.

That’s the past. What about the present? What else did he say in the memo to those gathering for COP30, the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, November 10-21 in Belém, Brazil?

Okay, I’ll admit, some of it was pretty good, like this: “Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.”

But the memo is loaded with qualifiers (like “for the foreseeable future”) and hints that his basic goal remains unchanged (like “drive emissions down much further”), even if postponed a bit. Here are a few examples, with some explanations.

“… the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.” Sounds good, but “emissions goals,” even if they shouldn’t be “near-term,” remain, as we just saw, long-term.

“It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change.” So, climate change remains the ultimate concern, even if it can take a back seat briefly while we deal with more immediate problems.

“I know that some climate advocates will disagree with me,” Gates wrote, “… or see this as a sneaky way of arguing that we shouldn’t take climate change seriously.”

But they shouldn’t, because: “To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved …. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives” (boldface original).

There’s the giveaway: “Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial [emphasis added] because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.” Not just a little beneficial — “hugely.” Every tenth of a degree.

Yeah, really, he said that. Cogitate on that a bit.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which most climate activists worship as their god, said in its 2018 “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°” that 2.46°C of global warming (which is 24.6 times a tenth of a degree) would only reduce gross world product in 2100 by 2.6%. That implies that the average earthling would be making nearly nine times as much per year then as now — and would have been making more and more every year till then, adding up to his being many times wealthier. How, then, could every tenth of a degree of warming prevented possibly be “hugely beneficial”?

It couldn’t. And I suspect Gates knows that. But he’s playing the long game — as are all the climate alarmists and the “renewable energy” companies that still see which side their bread is buttered on.

For them, as for all climate activists, climate change is a “threat multiplier.” It makes every problem worse. Which entails that it remains, if not the most immediate, still the biggest, most important threat — and will require the biggest changes in our energy, agricultural, and industrial practices to solve.

Gates’s memo doesn’t dispense with this weapon. It just gives it stealth.

E. Calvin Beisner is president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and co-editor and co-author, with climatologist Dr. David R. Legates, of Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism.