There is no contradiction between recognizing that anthropogenic climate change is real and rejecting the notion that it is an existential threat. There is no contradiction between recognizing that anthropogenic climate change is a problem and believing that the steps being taken in response to it are fundamentally flawed. And there is no contradiction between recognizing that anthropogenic climate change needs addressing but that there are other challenges that are just as, or maybe even more, pressing.
Bill Gates, once a climate doomsayer, seems finally to have understood that there is something to all three of those points. He has just issued a lengthy, carefully argued memorandum in which he argues that, while climate change will have serious consequences “particularly for people in the poorest countries,” it will “not lead to humanity’s demise.”
This has always been obvious, but Gates should still be congratulated for having come out and said it. He is rich enough to not care, but the next time he ventures into Foundationland, a few backs may be turned.
Gates warns that “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.” Those “effective things” are not confined to climate policy. This is what the likes of Bjørn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist” — someone whom Gates has read — have been saying for years, but better late than never.
Gates also concedes the obvious. The goal of containing increased temperature to 1.5°C by 2050 is not going to be met. The “current consensus,” he writes, is that by “2100 the Earth’s average temperature will probably be between 2°C and 3°C higher than it was in 1850.” That is plausible, but what Gates does not say is that this range is far lower than the original consensus prediction.
In an article for the Breakthrough Institute, published in August, Ted Nordhaus observes that, at the time he co-wrote Break Through (a book that contains a few predictions of doom of its own) in 2007, he “along with most climate scientists and advocates, believed that business as usual emissions would lead to around five degrees of warming by the end of this century,” a consensus that was, he now concedes, never very plausible and has now shifted to “3 degrees or less,” a number that takes him into Gates territory.
But, observes Nordhaus:
As consensus around these estimates has shifted, the reaction to this good news among much of the climate science and advocacy community has not been to become less catastrophic. Rather, it has been to simply shift the locus of catastrophe from five to three degrees of warming. Climate advocates have arguably become more catastrophic about climate change in recent years, not less.
The reasons for that are, I think, political and financial (catastrophism feeds and empowers a vast climate policy ecosystem) and psychological. To understand the last of those, the book When Prophecy Fails is a good starting point. Some have questioned aspects of this work’s methodology, but its underlying premise is sound: The failure of a catastrophe supposedly predicted by aliens to occur on schedule (or, so far, at all) did much less damage to the beliefs of members of the UFO cult than might have been expected. In a number of cases it intensified them.
According to Gates, a key reason for the failure to meet the approaching Paris target is that:
The world’s demand for energy is going up — more than doubling by 2050.
From the standpoint of improving lives, using more energy is a good thing, because it’s so closely correlated with economic growth. . . . More energy use is a key part of prosperity.
But Gates goes on to argue that:
What’s good for prosperity is bad for the environment. Although wind and solar have gotten cheaper and better, we don’t yet have all the tools we need to meet the growing demand for energy without increasing carbon emissions.
He is wrong about that, especially when it comes to the future. And he inadvertently explains why in his next sentence: “But we will have the tools we need if we focus on innovation.”
Indeed. And the richer we are, the more likely it is that we will have those tools. Moreover, one of our species’ defining characteristics is adaptability. (That’s why there can be more than 8 billion of us.) The more resources we have, the more adaptable we can be.
So far as the direction of climate change is concerned, Gates believes that there will be more “latitude creep”: “In North America, for instance, Iowa will start to feel more like Texas.”
His answer to that is, in so many words, to improve resilience:
Every time governments rebuild, whether it’s homes in Los Angeles or highways in Delhi, they’ll have to build smarter: fire-resistant materials, rooftop sprinklers, better land management to keep flames from spreading, and infrastructure designed to withstand harsh winds and heavy rainfall. It won’t be cheap, but it will be possible in most cases.
But he should have added that this is not solely the province of the public sector. Individuals and businesses will adapt their construction (or reconstruction) to the climate as it is, not as it was, something that humanity has been doing for millennia. And the wealthier we are, the easier it will be to do so.
And so scroll down further through Gates’s memorandum (as I noted, it’s lengthy) to find this (emphasis added):
A few years ago, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab ran a thought experiment: What happens to the number of projected deaths from climate change when you account for the expected economic growth of low-income countries over the rest of this century? The answer: It falls by more than 50 percent.
This finding is exciting because it suggests a way forward. Since the economic growth that’s projected for poor countries will reduce climate deaths by half, it follows that faster and more expansive growth will reduce deaths by even more. And economic growth is closely tied to public health. So the faster people become prosperous and healthy, the more lives we can save.
When you look at the problem this way, it becomes easier to find the best buys in climate adaptation—they’re the areas where finance can do the most to fight poverty and boost health.
The best way to help poorer countries deal with climate change — to adapt to it — is to help them become wealthier.
Gates (emphasis added):
We should deal with disease and extreme weather in proportion to the suffering they cause, and that we should go after the underlying conditions that leave people vulnerable to them. While we need to limit the number of extremely hot and cold days, we also need to make sure that fewer people live in poverty and poor health so that extreme weather isn’t such a threat to them.
Restricting their access to cheap energy will do the opposite. Much the same is true of richer countries too.
Gates also writes something that ought to be too self-evident to need stating, but, given the debased state of climate advocacy, it is not:
Climate strategies need to prioritize human welfare. This may seem obvious — who could be against improving people’s lives? — but sometimes human welfare takes a backseat to lowering emissions, with bad consequences.
“Sometimes” ought to be replaced with “often.” Gates cites (and oversimplifies: this particular fiasco was not just about reducing emissions) the disaster that occurred when (an unnamed) Sri Lanka banned synthetic fertilizers. He then makes a wider, yet very specific point:
Sometimes the pressure [on poorer countries] comes from outsiders. For example, multilateral lenders have been pushed by wealthy shareholders to stop financing fossil fuel projects, with the hope of limiting emissions by leaving oil, gas, and coal in the ground. This pressure has had almost no impact on global emissions, but it has made it harder for low-income countries to get low-interest loans for power plants that would bring reliable electricity to their homes, schools, and health clinics.
The word for that is eco-colonialism.
Gates also turns his attention to the climate-related death toll:
Excessively hot weather now causes around 500,000 deaths every year. Despite the impression you’d get from the news, though, the number has been decreasing for some time, chiefly because more people can afford air conditioners.
“Despite the impression you’d get from the news.” Climate misinformation from the establishment media: Say it ain’t so.
Gates points out that excessive cold kills more people than does excessive heat, but he forecasts that that balance will shift. He, unlike so many of the ascetics-by-proxy who infest the climate policy establishment, is no foe of the air conditioner.
He also notes that:
In the past century, direct deaths from natural disasters, such as drowning during a flood, have fallen 90 percent to between 40,000 and 50,000 people a year, thanks mostly to better warning systems and more-resilient buildings.
Thanks, in other words, to adaptation.
There is a lesson there, and while I would not agree with everything in Gates’s memorandum, his shift away from catastrophism and towards a recognition of the importance of adaptation and the overall quality of life is very welcome indeed.