Tough Truths About Climate

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...

It is very hard to gauge what he actually believes will happen based on these words

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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.

It's the one that gave us IE6.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My first instinct is he's doing something right then... the problem is policy and human nature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

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...

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.

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.