Climate change is not the end of the world, according to Bill Gates. In a blog post yesterday, the Microsoft co-founder — whose foundation has donated billions to philanthropy projects aimed at mitigating a climate disaster — criticised the “doomsday outlook” of the “climate community”.

While he called climate change “a very important problem” that demands a solution, he added that “the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals.” Gates said that we are “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world”. He added: “Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise.”

These words will come as a shock to anyone who has followed the multibillionaire’s commentary over the past few decades. In 2021, Gates published How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. In it, he argued that humans would need to harness technology to “keep the earth liveable”.

As far back as 2010, Gates gave a TED Talk arguing that energy “miracles” were needed to avoid planetary catastrophe and that humans must push for Net Zero global emissions by 2050. In 2011, he said: “If you gave me the choice between picking the next 10 presidents or ensuring that energy is environmentally friendly and a quarter as costly, I’d pick the energy thing.”

Urging a “strategic pivot” ahead of COP30 in Brazil next month, the tech billionaire wrote on Gates Notes yesterday: “So why am I optimistic that innovation will curb climate change? For one thing, because it already has.” He highlighted that “ten years ago, the International Energy Agency predicted that by 2040, the world would be emitting 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.” A decade later, the International Energy Agency’s forecast “has dropped to 30 billion, and it’s projecting that 2050 emissions will be even lower. Read that again: In the past 10 years, we’ve cut projected emissions by more than 40 percent.”

In a 2021 interview with PBS, Gates said that failing to remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere would be more deadly than Covid-19. He argued that such an outcome “will create literally tens of millions of climate refugees […] And so it makes the [Covid-19] pandemic look small. The death rate by the end of the century would be over five times the worst of what we have had in this pandemic.”

In his recent post, he summarised the “doomsday” view as follows: “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.” But, he concluded: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong.”