Trillions Later, Bill Gates Chills on Climate Catastrophe

Now, he tells us!

In a stunning reversal, after spending more than a decade and billions of his dollars plus trillions of ours fighting to end climate change, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates finally concedes that human civilization isn't doomed to melt away quite yet after all.

In a lengthy blog he recently posted, Gates wrote, "Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. He added, "People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future."

Gates even blamed obsessive climate alarm premised focus on lowering greenhouse gas emissions for opposite negative consequences on those impoverished populations.

"A few years ago," he wrote, "the government of one low-income country set out to cut emissions by banning synthetic fertilizers. Farmers' yields plummeted, there was much less food available, and prices skyrocketed . . . The country was hit by a crisis because the government valued reducing emissions above other important things."

Gates released the new essay a week before the U.N. COP30 climate summit in Brazil, stating that he wouldn't attend this year's event to instead emphasize global health, poverty, and resilience.

"We can't cut funding for health and development — programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change — to do it," he wrote. "It's time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies."

This is a big shift of consciousness over the past four years since warning in his book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster," that climate change "could be worse" than the COVID-19 pandemic.

Avoiding that disaster, Gates wrote, "will be one of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on — greater than landing on the moon, greater than eradicating smallpox, even greater than putting a computer on every desk."

Well, maybe not quite so urgent after all.

And certainly not disastrous enough to help prevent climate doom by foregoing flights around the world in his $70 million private jet that consumes around 450 gallons of fuel per hour.

Besides, he argues that he can sweep away guilt for those hydrocarbon-fueled contrails "with legitimate carbon credits."

Apparently referring to his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "green energy" spending extravaganza premised upon impending climate apocalypse; he now instead urges that "we should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature."

Adding marvel to this ecological epiphany, all that warming he so recently warned us about now turns out to be thawing out an even greater threat, writing, "surprisingly, excessive cold is far deadlier, killing nearly 10 times more people every year than heat does."

Yeah, but he fails to mention those beleaguered polar bears that Al Gore found sweltering on melting icebergs in rising oceans.

Except that maybe that isn't true either.

According to a study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering conducted by Dutch researchers Hessel Voortman and Rob de Vos of 200 different tide-gauge stations with at least 60 years of historical data, the world’s ocean levels aren't really changing much: only about six inches per century.

Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger that this rise was found to be far less than often reported by climate scientists and the media, and once small fluctuations are taken into account, there is no detectable acceleration.

Noting that models of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, "significantly overestimate local sea level rise in 2020," the researchers observed that most regions of notable increase were located near others that showed negligible changes in recent decades, "making it unlikely that a global phenomenon like CO2-driven global warming is the cause."

Voortman and de Vos concluded that most sea level fluctuations can be attributed to local factors such as earthquakes, extensive construction, or post-glacial effects.

Meanwhile, as oceans appear to pay little heed to hyperventilating UN climate report projections — good advice for all of us — the timing of Bill Gates' new memo coincides with an announced calls for a "strategic pivot" from investments in short-term greenhouse emissions targets to long-term energy innovations that "have the greatest impact on human welfare."

Earlier this year, the Gates Foundation announced plans to begin winding down its climate focus, including $1.4 billion to aid farmers adapting to hotter conditions.

Stressing that "temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate," Gates now argues that alarmist messaging can hinder practical solutions.

Nevertheless, he insists that he hasn't stopped investing in clean energy.

And he's demonstrating evidence of this with progress of his TerraPower nuclear energy firm which recently won key federal approval for an advanced 345 MWe next-generation reactor design.

That's another strategic pivot that's long overdue.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.