Bill Gates Admits There’s Lots of ‘Climate Exaggeration’

Could the Microsoft co-founder be having a change of heart?

Bill Gates speaks onstage at the TIME100 Summit 2022 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, on June 7, 2022. Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME

Multi-billionaire Bill Gates appeared to reverse course on some of his previous climate change remarks and suggested that some activists have made alarmist predictions.

“There’s a lot of climate exaggeration,” said Mr. Gates, who helped found Microsoft and is now a multi-billionaire philanthropist, in a recent event. “The climate is not the end of the planet. So the planet is going to be fine.”

He made those remarks at the Earthshot Prize Innovation Summit alongside fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg and Prince William of the United Kingdom. His comments about “exaggeration” did not include any specific examples.

During a New York Times event days later, he made a similar comment about the climate. “There are effects on humanity, the planet less so,” Mr. Gates said, adding that “no temperate country is going to become uninhabitable.”

“It’s pretty clear we’re not going to go to extreme scenarios,” he added. “Emissions will peak and then start to go down. They won’t go down as fast as we want them to and so the temperature will continue to rise and once the temperature has risen it doesn’t go down very quickly, unless you do massive carbon removal.”

In the NY Times event, Mr. Gates also touted himself as “the person who’s doing the most on climate in terms of the innovation and in how we can square multiple goals,” suggesting that he’s qualified to make comments regarding the climate due to his funding.

Mr. Gates, meanwhile, said at the NY Times event that if world leaders are going to implement climate polices, it cannot be achieved by using “brute force.”

“If you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living,’” Mr. Gates said. “Without innovation, it’s unlikely, particularly in middle-income countries, that the brute force approach will be successful.”

He did not elaborate, but he urged for there to be more bipartisan support for climate-related policies. “You can’t have a climate policy that when one party is in charge goes full speed ahead and stops cold,” he said. “These are 30-year investments in steel factories.”

Previously, Mr. Gates has issued a number of climate-related warnings, including one in 2020 where he claimed it would cause more deaths and human suffering than COVID-19. “As awful as this pandemic is, climate change could be worse,” he said at the time, while saying that world leaders need to “accelerate our efforts now” to “avoid a climate disaster.”

At the same time, Mr. Gates has also purchased a considerable amount of U.S. farm land in recent years, becoming the single largest private owner of farmland in the country. A considerable amount of his public comments on climate change relate to meat production, with Mr. Gates saying that current agriculture practices are unfriendly to the climate, and he’s also touted synthetic or plant-based meat as an alternative.

Recent Opposition to Climate Policies

It comes as a Nobel Prize laureate, John Clauser, recently challenged climate models and said researchers have ignored a key variable. He and about 1,600 other researchers signed a pledge declaring there is no “climate emergency” and said that Earth’s history shows there has been a constantly changing climate—with or without human activity.

Research physicist John F. Clauser poses for a photo at his home in Walnut Creek, Calif., on Oct. 4, 2022. John F. Clauser jointly won a Nobel Prize in physics with two other scientists, Alain Aspect of France, and Anton Zeilinger of Austria, for their work on quantum information science. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

“In addition, [climate models] ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial,” their declaration said.

What’s more, they accused mainstream scientists of manufacturing a “popular narrative” that is actually a “corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.”

“Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills,” it added. “It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis.”

“There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.”

Before that, two prominent scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Princeton University warned of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations to cut carbon dioxide emissions in electricity generation. In testimony published in August, the pair argued that the rules “will be disastrous for the country, for no scientifically justifiable reason.”

“The unscientific method of analysis, relying on consensus, peer review, government opinion, models that do not work, cherry-picking data and omitting voluminous contradictory data, is commonly employed in these studies and by the EPA in the Proposed Rule,” William Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at MIT, wrote. “None of the studies provides scientific knowledge, and thus none provides any scientific support for the Proposed Rule.”