There has been much consternation over a piece published by Bill Gates last week, about climate change.
NY Times, David Gelles, 28 Oct 2025: Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead to Humanity’s Demise’, subtitled “In a memo, the Microsoft co-founder warned against climate alarmism and appears to have shifted some of his views about climate change.”
Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has spent billions of his own money to raise the alarm about the dangers of climate change, is now pushing back against what he calls a “doomsday outlook” and appears to have shifted his stance on the risks posed by a warming planet.
In a lengthy memo released Tuesday, Mr. Gates sought to tamp down the alarmism he said many people use to describe the effects of rising temperatures. Instead, he called for redirecting efforts toward improving lives in the developing world.
“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” he wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
Coming just four years after he published a book titled “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” Tuesday’s memo appears to amount to a major reframing of how Mr. Gates, who is worth an estimated $122 billion, is thinking about the challenges posed by a rapidly warming world.
Predictably, some people said he should shut up, others said he has a point. You can find pretty much any take you like, e.g. via a Google search on “Bill Gates climate”.
My take is that this is yet another example of how people want to think in black and white terms. From, will climate change doom the human race?, to climate change is a hoax or even a benefit. The latter from conservative denialists, who have vested interests in oil production for example, of course.
It’s difficult for many people to think in terms of gradients, of shades of gray, and understand how a major change in Earth’s climate will have different effects in different places. As Gates said, climate change will affect poor people more than the rich, will affect areas of low sea-level in particular. I think it’s a reasonable conclusion that climate change will not extinguish the human race. Humanity is resilient. Annalee Newitz wrote a whole book about this. But it will do a lot else.
Many scientists believe that the planet’s rapid warming could bring about a series of irreversible tipping points that could have cascading impacts. These scenarios include changes to ocean currents, the disappearance of ice sheets and the mass death of coral reefs.
Mr. Gates did not address any of those scenarios in the new memo, though he has discussed them before.
“There are points at which when the corals die off, they never come back,” Mr. Gates said in 2021. “This is acidifying the ocean, and all the aqua ecosystems die off as that acid level goes up. As forests dry out, they are subject to both fires and infestations that kill all the trees, so you get a lot less trees. As the sea level goes up, the beaches go away.”
There might well come a day when some portion of humanity has survived, in a relatively small portion of the planet’s surface, after the oceans have risen and people from the equatorial zones have fled north (or south) despite all efforts to block them, with all 21st century cities destroyed, and think that stories about coral reefs are myths told by blasphemists. From that perspective, there really will be a “golden age” of life on Earth to look back on, but which can never be recaptured.
