He presupposes a false dichotomy re climate outcomes. It's not just good for us on the one hand and literally the end of the world on the other. Bill Gates and his advisers don't seem to appreciate how radically transformed a 3C warmer world would truly be. Watch: Thoughts from a climate scientist on the Bill Gates climate memo, Nov 3 Weather West report- transcript and blogger's take below. [Weather West,home of Dr. Daniel L. Swain since 2010- interactive discussion of weather, climate, and climate change]
TRANSCRIPT:
I wanted to share some thoughts today on the Bill Gates memo about climate change that's been circulating in recent days. While I can't speak directly for others, I can say that my own response as a climate scientist is one of pretty substantial dismay and really deep frustration. I think that view is fairly widely shared among many other climate and earth scientists that I've spoken with over the past week.
I first do want to emphasize though that there are many really more than a few kernels of truth in this memo. In fact, there's whole paragraphs and sections that I personally professionally agree with quite strongly.
But unfortunately, there's also multiple fatal flaws in its underlying premise and therefore in its key conclusions.
So, let me say first that I do strongly agree both because I personally believe it's the right thing to do, but also because the empirical evidence supports it, that rapidly addressing poverty and health inequities and food and water insecurities should be a first order global priority. Full stop. No argent there whatsoever.
And I also do agree that sometimes and in some contexts that climate advocates and climate activists, though generally not, I would emphasize climate scientists have gone beyond what the data actually tells us about climate change and in some cases miscontextualized climate change as a singular driver of global harm. even in cases where in reality climate change is one of several causative factors or in many cases climate change is perhaps more accurately characterized as a harm amplifier rather than the only cause.
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It's also true and somewhat contrary to the prevailing narrative in at least some circles that as the late climate scientist Steven Schneider once reflected- actually on more than one occasion- that when it comes to global warming, the end of the world and good for you are the two lowest probability outcomes. And that's essentially still as true today as it was a couple of decades ago when he first said it.
But herein lies the problem, and this is where I think the Gates memo gets it terribly wrong.
There's a whole hell of a lot of distance along the spectrum between good for us and literally the end of civilization. Even if we can probably rule out both of those two extreme outcomes, there's plenty of terrible things that can happen along that wide axis of the spectrum in between.
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There's a whole hell of a lot of distance between good for us and literally the end of civilization; there's plenty of terrible things that can happen along that wide axis of spectrum in between
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In fact, the preponderance of scientific evidence in recent years actually points toward each increment of warming being more consequential and more harmful for human systems and for natural systems than previously believed, not less. So here the Gates memo presupposes what's essentially a false dichotomy regarding climate outcomes because the choice that we are actually faced with in the real world is not between good for us on the one hand and literally the end of the world on the other as the memo suggests but instead just how much harm we are willing to tolerate and endure collectively in the years decades and yes even centuries to come.
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Now, it's also true, as is stated in the memo, that our current warming trajectory is less extreme than the even more dire trajectory that we were potentially going to take looking forward from a couple of decades ago. We are now circa 2025 most likely on track for somewhere between 2 and a half and 3° C of global mean warming by around 2100 versus the 3 to 5° of global mean warming that was viewed as plausibly resulting from a business as usual trajectory from say 20 years ago.
But here's the thing. Two and a half to three degrees of global warming is still actually still really bad news. Is it relatively less bad than 3 to 5° of global warming? Sure, undoubtedly. But I don't think many folks, apparently, including Bill Gates and advisers, seem to appreciate just how radically transformed a 3C warmer world would truly be.
4.45
For some perspective on that, I just want to offer the following. 3C of global warming means many feet of sea level rise, fundamentally altering coastlines and swamping mega cities home to hundreds of millions of people. It means heat waves in human regions especially that could become literally unservivable for those outdoors without access to continuous active cooling.
It means the permanent loss of most mountain glaciers on Earth, the so-called water towers of the world, and rapid destabilization of the vast continental ice sheets in both Greenland and Antarctica.
It means droughts and floods of historically unprecedented magnitudes across broad swaths of the planet. It means the collapse of ecosystems the world over and possibly even cascading effects that could trigger any number of critical earth system tipping points. And we don't know today exactly where those tipping points might lie.
The great irony in all of this is that most of these climate change impacts will be borne most immediately and acutely by poorer nations in the global south. precisely those on whose behalf the memo authors are ostensibly advocating. That's one of the main reasons why this memo makes me so viscerally uncomfortable on a personal level.
Gates superficially does acknowledge this, but the other subsequent statements indicate a pretty deep misunderstanding of what life in a 3C warmer world would actually be like.
There's a statement in the memo regarding how we will simply pause outdoor work during daytime once it becomes too hot to safely do so. And that just seems bewilderingly out of touch to me as a climate scientist and somebody who just thinks about the way the world works, especially with respect to the daily realities of people living in any nber of resource limited settings.
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He’s out of touch to me as a climate scientist and somebody who just thinks about the way the world works.
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The proposed intervention that we can literally airondition condition our ways out of this mess is so preposterous to seem almost glib. To be clear, I am 100% behind efforts to provide air conditioning and other extreme heat risk mitigation measures to those who need it. But this just ignores basic human physiology.
It is also worth noting that wealthy nations, for their part, are not nearly as immune from the amplifying and cascading impacts of a warming climate as Gates seems to believe either. That's especially true when it comes to the complex interactions between intensifying extremes and the inherent nonlinearities that exist in built human systems the world over.
More rigorous econometric analyses, by the way, that better account for these realities suggest that the cost of observed and future climate change actually represent a much larger chunk of national and global gross domestic product, a common measure of the cost of climate change than Gates has suggested in public comments responding to criticism of this memo.
This becomes critically important when if one is trying to conduct any kind of large scale cost benefit analysis as the memo argues which is so important- something that I do agree with in principle by the way- but if you dramatically underestimate the cost of climate change then you're going to be wrong about the fundamental nature of the problem at hand and therefore how best and most efficiently to address it.
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So, is all this just a matter of semantics? Is this all just word games and posturing of different factions who largely agree? I don't think so, because this memo is already being gleefully championed by those seeking to misinform and sow doubt about climate change and delay climate progress up to and including the president of the United States. Ultimately, I am very disappointed to see this memo published in 2025 by people who I do believe are genuinely interested in helping lift people out of poverty and stamp out inarguably terrible diseases at the global scale. It should be uncontroversial that these are urgent global priorities.
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This memo is already being gleefully championed by those seeking to misinform and sow doubt about climate change and delay climate progress
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But whatever meeting the moment looks like in a climate context in 2025, this essentially feels like the opposite of that. And while I do agree with more than a few of the specific points in the Gates climate memo published in late October, it conveys a frankly poor understanding of climate science of the true societal and economic impacts of extreme events which are becoming more frequent and more intense in many cases in a warming world. and also leans on multiple false binaries to come to its fatally flawed conclusions-
-by discounting the vast, the dramatic, and the globally universal changes to the Earth system that would occur in a 2 to three Celsius warmer world. In some cases, by the way, changes that would be very hard, if not impossible, to adequately adapt to even in the wealthiest of nations, let alone in the poorest ones.
The memo ultimately sends a signal that the stakes are lower than they actually are. And that is a particularly unhelpful message in the present environment of faltering global ambition when it comes to climate progress. Thanks for listening.
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MY TAKE- KE Proof Gates’s memo is “gleefully championed by those seeking to misinform” inevitable reaction
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