Climate change not apocalyptic

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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This month Bill Gates writes we still have to solve climate change (he does go into what that means) but the doomsday view is wrong, and carbon pollution “will not be the end of civilization.” He’s suddenly turned into a kind of Bjorn Lomborg. Forget Mitigation, say hello to Adaptation .

Three tough truths about climate
https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation/reader/three-tough-truths-about-climate
There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.

Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world…

This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.

Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.

DB2

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I’ve always wondered what people mean when they say this? How many years is the ‘foreseeable future’? The next 20 years, 40 years, or 200 years?

JimA

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Thanks for posting. It has been like this since the beginning, and known. But, like the health effects of tobacco, it was furiously black-holed by The Climate Establishment because the truth wasn’t useful to their agenda and didn’t generate sufficient political power.

The UN somewhere around 2010 or so published a report saying that even with climate change the developing world 100 years in the future would have a standard of living on a par with early 21st century Belgium. You’re welcomed Developing World.

And speaking of developing countries being poor. No, they were poor until Western Civ managed to colonize them and give them the world. And that wouldn’t have happened without the burning of fossil fuels. You’re welcomed.

And humanity had been adapting to climate changes for many, many thousands of years and much of that time we hadn’t even invented basics like shelter yet. Why now, at the peak of human development and achievement, all due to Western Civ, is a change in the weather a death knell? If anything, developing countries ought to be expected to fair better when all the machines stop working. Why don’t they mention that?

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It used to imply “a long time. Probably beyond the lives of most living at the time the statement was made.” Now it’s, as you say, indistinct. We are actually making The Future right now as we speak. We can see it forming and people are actually placing bets on it.

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Climate projections often look at 2050 or 2100, so that would be 25 or 75 years.

DB2

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