“There’s a doomsday view of climate change,” said Bill Gates on Tuesday. “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong….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.”
In truth, Gates significantly understates just how wrong the doomsday problem is, says one of the world’s most influential climate scientists. “The weakest part of the argument has always been that warming is dangerous,” says Judy Curry, professor emerita at Georgia Tech University, in a new podcast with me. “It isn’t really. More people die from the cold than the heat. So this is probably a net benefit globally. Where’s the danger here?”
