Gates' 'truth' about climate change

Ahead of this year's United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), now underway in Belém, Brazil, Bill Gates, who chairs and funds the foundation that bears his name, released an essay entitled "Three tough truths about climate". The first of these truths is: "Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilisation.

- Peter Singer

A farmer from Zanzibar's Sponge Farmers' Cooperative, a women-led organisation, cleans a sponge at her farm off the coast on Jambiani on Oct 25.

(AFP)

Mr Gates recognises that climate change is "a very important problem", that it "needs to be solved" and that "[e]very tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people's lives". Nevertheless, to say that climate change will not be the end of civilisation must lessen our sense of the urgency of acting to mitigate it. So, we should ask whether this "truth" really is true.

Mr Gates defends his flat statement that climate change "will not be the end of civilisation" with a graph showing that even if countries do no more than continue what they are doing now, "Global warming will probably be less than 3°C by 2100".

More precisely, the graph suggests that by 2100, with countries continuing to do what they are doing now, the global average temperature will be 2.9C above the pre-industrial level.

Suppose we agree that, although a global temperature rise of 2.9C would make some parts of our planet uninhabitable because of extreme heat or rising sea levels, enough will still be suitable for human habitation to allow civilisation to continue. The question remains: Will the temperature rise stop at 2.9C?