Earlier this week, billionaire philanthropist and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates asked the world to rethink its approach to the climate crisis. In a self-published essay, he argues it’s time for a “strategic pivot” from focusing on mitigating rising temperatures to protecting humanity from poverty and disease.

Gates described a “doomsday” perspective that frames rising global temperatures as an existential threat to civilization, claiming this has led the climate community “to focus too much on near-term emissions goals.” He also claims that innovation can save us from the worst impacts of climate change. As such, the global community should instead prioritize preventing human suffering, he concludes.

“The problem is that climate change is not divorced from poverty, or health inequity, or food insecurity, or any of these things,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, told Gizmodo. Rather, climate change profoundly exacerbates these humanitarian threats, he said.

 

Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, would agree. “Mr. Gates has set up a false frame that pits improving lives against science-based temperature and emissions goals; in fact, the two are intrinsically connected,” she told Gizmodo in an email.

Cleetus and Swain are two of many climate experts who are speaking out against Gates’s argument. With the 30th annual United Nations Climate Conference (COP30) just weeks away, they warn that adopting this misguided perspective could have dangerous global consequences.

Obscuring the consequences of warming

The central premise of Gates’s argument is that the biggest near-term threats to human lives and welfare are poverty and disease, not climate change.

Gates does acknowledge the interconnectedness of these issues to a certain extent. “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,” he wrote. He added that “the best way to help people adapt to climate change is to make sure they’re healthy and prosperous.”

What Gates failed to convey, however, is the magnitude of the impact rising global temperatures will have on poverty, disease, and a myriad of other humanitarian threats—from natural disasters to global hunger.

Swain agrees that these issues deserve far more attention from the global community but argues that current warming trajectories of 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 3 degrees Celsius) by the turn of the century pose a serious risk of reversing the progress that’s already been made. In fact, studies show that this reversal is already well underway.

“The warming climate is directly undermining poverty eradication and human development goals around the world,” Cleetus said. “Hurricane Melissa, a climate change-fueled monster storm, is just the latest example of the deadly and costly consequences of climate change for nations already struggling with complex humanitarian challenges.”

What’s more, Gates failed to present solid evidence that a focus on near-term emissions goals is diverting resources from global development, Holly Buck, an associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo, told Gizmodo in an email.

“I would like to see the data both in terms of dollars spent and in terms of hours spent in discussions about both of these in order to better evaluate the merits of the claim,” she said.

Emissions reductions are still the key

Gates is confident that investing in “climate-smart” innovations will curb catastrophic warming and claims that it has already led to a significant reduction in global emissions.

“Ten years ago, the International Energy Agency predicted that by 2040, the world would be emitting 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. Now, just a decade later, the IEA’s forecast has dropped to 30 billion, and it’s projecting that 2050 emissions will be even lower,” he wrote.

In the memo, Gates included a graph that attributes a 40% reduction in energy-related CO2 emissions over the past 10 years to innovation. Swain argues this interpretation of the data paints an overly optimistic picture of the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions.

Though the graph shows a leveling-off of energy-related CO2 emissions in recent years, it’s still “an extremely bad-news plot that’s being used to argue that we’ve essentially solved the problem,” Swain said. For one thing, energy-related CO2 emissions only account for a fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions, he added.

Even if this graph did show a leveling-off of all planet-warming emissions across every sector, it would still be bad news, Swain said. To make a meaningful difference in global warming, we don’t need emissions to plateau; we need to bring them down to zero, he explained.

Investing in renewable energy—as Gates points out—is critical to achieving that goal. But Swain disagrees with his broader framing of technology as a silver bullet.

“The great irony of that is the people for whom [this] will do the best job of mitigating some—but certainly far from all—of the risks are wealthy people in wealthy nations, precisely the opposite group of people that Gates and the Gates Foundation claim to care so much about.”