The Bill Gates Memo: Climate Scientists Respond With Urgency

Transcript

Sammy Roth: All right, thank you everyone for being here for this very last minute discussion, call-in response to this memo that Bill Gates released last week, which I’m guessing you’ve heard about by now, if you’re here. 

Very briefly, I’m Sammy Roth. Until recently, I was the climate columnist at the Los Angeles Times. I now write an independent newsletter called climate-colored goggles about the intersection of climate and culture. You can sign up at climatecoloredgoggles.com if you’re interested. 

Thank you very much to the folks at Covering Climate [Now] for agreeing to host this webinar and responding to my sort of crazy pitch at the last minute to put this together. And they’re a wonderful, if you don’t know, CCN, [is] a wonderful global media collaboration that helps news organizations do a better job at covering the climate crisis, which is more important now than ever. And thanks very much to this fabulous panel of climate scientists that also agreed at the last minute to get together and respond with urgency to this, this memo that Bill Gates put out: Three Tough Truths About Climate. 

I’ll introduce the panelists briefly, but for those who may not have read the Bill Gates memo yet, or who may have just heard about it in the news or seen it circulating across their social media feeds, basically Bill Gates, you know, the cofounder of Microsoft, billionaire investor and philanthropist, put out this lengthy memo last week ahead of the global climate summit that’s beginning next week in Brazil, the annual United Nations COP30 — the climate summit, essentially — making the case that climate change is not as bad, in his view, as climate activists, have made it out to be, [that] the impacts are perhaps not as bad as you’ve heard, that there are steps that can be taken that are already, in fact, being taken, that have mitigated the worst impacts of climate change, and that funding from rich nations to poor nations should instead be allocated to other things, like dealing with disease and poverty and that we shouldn’t be so worried about climate change. 

So I saw this memo, like many of you did, and I thought, “Gee, I’ve been writing about climate change for a long time and some of this seems like possibly true…some of this seems like I don’t know what he’s talking about here, and some of it seems a little bit strange. 

I want to talk to some climate scientists about this, some real experts on this topic, not Bill Gates, and see what they have to say. So that’s what we’re going to do right now for the next hour. So we’ve got a fantastic panel of folks here. 

We’ve got Katharine Hayhoe, who’s a professor at Texas Tech University and the Chief Scientist for the Nature Conservancy. We’ve got Zeke Hausfather, who’s the research scientist at Berkeley Earth and the climate research lead at Stripe. We’ve got Daniel Swain, who’s a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, and we’ve got Kim Cobb, who’s the director of the Institute for Environment and Society at Brown University. 

I’m so grateful that all four of them are taking the time today to be with us and to talk through this nuanced, but in some ways, I think, problematic memo, and to share some perspective on it. What did Bill Gates get right? What did he get wrong? What should we take from this? How should, if at all this, this document, impact the global conversation? Thank you all for being here. And I think that the question that I want to start with is sort of the headline quote that’s been making the rounds. 

Bill Gates said, climate change, “will have serious consequences,” particularly for people in the poorest countries, but “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Big Question here — and we’ll go into lots more detail over the rest of this hour — is Bill Gates, right? He says it will not lead to humanity’s demise. Is that accurate? Is that even the right framing for a conversation about climate change? 

I’d love you all to weigh in on this, but Katharine, maybe let’s start with you on this one. Since I know you spend a lot of time thinking and talking about this very thing…

Katharine Hayhoe: Sure, I think we could all probably weigh on that. So first of all, he’s not wrong. I have not seen a single scientific paper that ever posited that the human race would become extinct anytime in this century, or even a couple of centuries to come, due to climate change. 

But it’s a straw man, the way he’s proposing it, he’s speaking about it as if scientists are saying that, and we’re not. What we are saying is that suffering increases with each tenth of a degree of warming. And I would add that this false dichotomy continues because he talks about how climate change will affect people who are poor, but it won’t be the worst thing that affects them. There’ll be other things like hunger and poverty. 

Well, how does climate change affect us? It affects us by making hunger and poverty worse. They are not separate problems. They are problems that are being exacerbated by this very issue. So we’re not talking about humans becoming extinct, but we are talking about massive suffering, including loss of life as well as livelihoods, homes and more, and that suffering increases degree by degree.

Sammy Roth: So not that it’s inaccurate, but kind of the wrong framing for the conversation. Zeke, it looked like you wanted to weigh in there for a second.

Zeke Hausfather: I was just gonna add that, you know, our colleague and fellow climate scientist, Kate Marvel, had a great quote on this where she said, you know, climate change isn’t gonna cause humanity to go extinct, but we can do a lot better than not extinct. You know, raise your bar, people. 

And by that, she meant that there are very few issues that are actually going to cause the extinction of the human race. You know, maybe a giant asteroid hitting the planet, maybe a thermonuclear war involving all the major powers — even then, maybe not. But that’s a ridiculously high bar to hold any problem. 

And so many of the problems we deal with in society, you know, poverty, hunger, war, are huge things that need to be addressed, but don’t actually cause extinction. So I feel like it is putting climate sort of an unrealistic level compared to all the other problems that we deal with.

Sammy Roth: Daniel… Kim, anything either of you want to add here?

Daniel Swain: Yeah. I mean, I agree with everything that we’ve heard so far, which is that this is… it’s not great that this really important memo from a very influential person who controls a lot of money and a lot of power in the world by virtue of the role that he has in society, starts out with what is inarguably a false binary. 

That frame is a big problem, even if the rest of the memo were totally on target, which I don’t think it was. But even if that were the case, that frame, I think, is problematic, not just in the rhetorical sense we’ve gotten used to it recently, but because what it does it is it presupposes that anything in between totally fine and the end of humanity is manageable or not, is not as big of a problem. 

And whereas in reality, there’s a whole hell of a lot of bad things that can happen in between not a problem at all and literally, the end of the world. And that, of course, somewhere along that very wide spectrum is where we are now and where we will end up, but it’s a wide spectrum.

Kim Cobb: Yeah, I’ll just pile on with a couple additional thoughts — again, plus ones for everything my colleagues have already said. 

But I think it’s also important to note that, of course, the suffering that’s going to pile on — that we’ve known about for decades — is going to pile on to the global poor, and that happens at every scale, in every geography. 

That is the case, something that I think he’s kind of alluding to — that fact — and I find it just grossly ironic that the release of this memo occurred right on the heels of this catastrophic hurricane that we had down in the Caribbean, Hurricane Melissa. And you know, we’re talking about generational losses that have just occurred before our very eyes. And of course, here in the US, really still reeling from the catastrophic losses that we’ve had. You could count many different kinds of catastrophic losses filling up many fingers over the last several years. 

And so you know, really, that this scale of suffering that we are hanging in the balance right now when we’re framing it as extinct versus it’s okay — when we are seeing this before our very eyes just so recently, it’s just gutting. 

I think to many of us who have been studying this issue, [who] have been looking at the uptakes and extremes from any kind of class of climate-related hazard take-up. And I think there’s also the counterfactual that weighs in my head when I read a statement like that, which is to remind us that continued dependence on fossil fuels is an incredibly huge threat to global health everywhere.

And so, you know, as we think about the weight of our climate futures, we have to bring that into the conversation, especially when we’re talking about the health and well-being of the global poor.

Sammy Roth: Kim, I’m glad you bring up both Hurricane Melissa, which is obviously on a lot of folks’ minds right now, and I want to circle back to, you know, the spectrum that we’re on — that it’s not either the extinction of humanity or everything is fine, in the way that Gates somewhat sets it up, and also the fossil fuel threat to health, which seems to be the thing that Bill Gates says that he cares about the most. 

Because, of course, this isn’t just a conversation about climate change, it’s a conversation about the millions of people who are dying prematurely because of air pollution globally from fossil fuel combustion, which is a part of the conversation that doesn’t make it into his memo at all. 

But let’s, let’s pause for a moment and circle back to both of those things, because I want to return a little bit to a point that Katharine began to make about how climate change is making it — and forgive me, Katharine, I’m going to paraphrase a little bit or phrase [it] maybe a little differently [than] what you were saying — that climate change is something that’s making it harder to solve all of these other problems. Or you’ll have to remind me exactly how you said it, all of the problems that Bill Gates is saying that he cares about the most, or that are really the biggest things we should be trying to solve, disease and public health and poverty in developing countries. I’m hoping that you and maybe some of the the other folks here can expand on that a bit more, because Bill Gates sort of sets it up in a way, that these are sort of separate, discrete issues that, you know, there’s limited resources that we can’t, you know, that we have only so much money that we can devote to, you know, whether it’s climate change or vaccination or improving wealth in developing countries. And that, you know, we have to just sort of kick one or the other. We can only throw so much cash here or there or there. And it’s sort of this thing where these problems are all disconnected and unrelated. 

And I think you started to get into the fact that that’s very much not the case, that climate change is related to all of these other problems, and, in fact, making them worse. And in some ways, you know, this hole at the bottom of all these problems. I’m hoping you could just expand on that a bit more, and all of these connections between them.

Katharine Hayhoe: Yes, I know exactly what you’re asking. So the reason I became a climate scientist myself… I was originally in astrophysics, as actually quite a few of us were — turns out that’s a great background for doing climate modeling. I became a climate scientist when I found out not only how urgent climate change is and how quickly we need to solve it, but also because it is so profoundly unfair. 

There is no question that it disproportionately affects the poorest and most vulnerable people who’ve done the least to cause the problem in the first place, and it does this by taking all the issues they’re already coping with — poverty, hunger, disease, lack of access to clean water, a safe place to live, basic health care, education, gender equity, taking all of these things — and making them worse. 

So the image I have is that all too many people — including Bill Gates, as he clearly lays out in his memo, they — see climate change as one more bucket at the end of a long line of buckets of things we need to fix. 

So there’s the poverty bucket, the hunger bucket, the disease bucket, with all different sub buckets for all the different diseases, there’s the education bucket, and all of these other buckets, then you’ve got climate change. And his point is, and he literally is saying this, we don’t have enough time and money to get all the way down the buckets to the climate change bucket at the end, so we have to put our money in the buckets at the front. 

But that mental model is fundamentally flawed, because climate change is not a separate bucket. The only reason we care about climate change is because it affects everything else we already care about — our health, our welfare, our well-being, poverty, hunger, disease and the economy, national security —  you name it. So climate is rather the hole in every other bucket. 

And I would add [that] the nature crisis is also the hole in every bucket, because where does the air we breathe come from, and the water we drink, and the food we eat? We depend on nature for everything. So these are the holes in the bucket, and the holes are getting bigger and bigger. 

So if you want to fix anything that’s wrong with the world, automatically, you care about fixing the climate and nature crises because you want to patch the hole in the bucket so you can get on with fixing poverty or hunger or disease or whatever it is you’re passionate about. 

But if you don’t have that model, if you have the model of climate being this bucket at the end, then yeah, why prioritize it?  We have more urgent things. But if you think of it as the hole… there is no way we’re going to fill the bucket if we don’t patch the hole. And in fact, the bigger the hole gets, the more you’re putting into that bucket, the less you’re getting out of it. There’s no way you’re going to be able to fill the bucket if you don’t patch the hole.

Sammy Roth: His whole argument is kind of predicated on this point he keeps making that we shouldn’t be measuring progress on climate in terms of… because he does say we should work on climate and that it’s important, and that every tenth of a degree helps, it matters to improving people’s lives, but it’s kind of predicated on this idea that we shouldn’t be focusing on temperature emissions. The whole point is to improve the quality of people’s lives, and we should be focusing on improving the quality of people’s lives. 

And I kept reading those statements and thinking, does he think that climate scientists or activists aren’t worried about improving people’s lives, like, why does he think anyone cares about climate change? Anyways, again, straw man type stuff. I was wondering who he was talking to. 

Zeke, you and Daniel. I mean, you both. You both wanted to weigh in there. Go for it. Zeke, you’re unmuted.

Zeke Hausfather: So I think, you know, when I read this memo, I’m actually a little sympathetic to Gates. You know — see, it sounds weird saying I’m sympathetic to a billionaire — but this is someone who has spent a huge amount of his life trying to deal with some of the thorniest problems in the world, you know, fighting malaria, getting vaccinations, you know, getting public health programs to the poorest countries in the world. And there have been huge cuts to those in recent years, you know, what has happened to USAID is a catastrophe. What’s happening with other countries cutting international aid is tragic. 

Where I think I disagree with Gates fundamentally, is this idea that by taking money away from climate, we’d suddenly have a lot more money for these other programs. Like we don’t necessarily live in a zero sum world. 

Most of the money the world is spending on climate change — and the world spent about $2 trillion on clean energy last year — is building and buying clean energy solutions in middle income or upper middle income countries. 

And so it’s not like if the Trump administration cuts spending on renewable energy, they’re suddenly going to start sending a lot more money to USAID, right? If we wanted to deal with both of these things, there’s plenty of resources to do so. It’s fundamentally a policy problem, not a resource problem. 

And so I think in cases where there is money going to the poorest countries today for mitigation, maybe more of that should go to adaptation, maybe more of that should go to disease eradication. But that’s not the fundamental thing that’s standing in the way of solving climate change. The fundamental thing is emissions, and that’s mostly coming from the rich countries today.

Sammy Roth: Daniel, you look like you wanted to weigh in too?

Daniel Swain: Yeah, and once again, I mostly agree with what Zeke just passed along there. But to that though, I think that I also share that fundamental disagreement that [addressing] the climate and addressing other human suffering is somehow part of a zero sum project. Of course, it isn’t. There are trade offs in some settings, but they certainly aren’t what I think has been articulated here. 

But the other thing I just wanted to emphasize is that this memo also doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And, you know, Bill Gates personally has been doing the rounds in the media world since this memo has been published over the past week, and I am reading this memo in the context of the other thing that the author of this memo has said in public in response to some of the initial criticisms, even where there was an opportunity to clarify and course correct, and instead, it’s really been quite the opposite. [Such as] where the memo author has rhetorically asked whether climate scientists and activists, in fact, don’t care about people, and they’re only in it for other reasons, and so if you really cared about people, you would agree with me, essentially. 

I’m not trying to get too far into the deeper personal motivations here, but [when] I read these responses by Bill Gates to the initial criticisms of the memo, it made me interpret certain parts of the memo pretty differently. I was originally inclined to be quite sympathetic to the perspective that it’s not always climate change, not every problem in the world is climate change. I think there are no climate scientists who argue that. I think there probably have been some people in the world of activism who may have said something like this, and I think that that is frustrating, honestly, when I do hear that. So I’m very sympathetic to the idea that climate change is the sole source of every problem. Clearly, it isn’t, it hasn’t been, and it won’t be even in a much warmer future. 

However, not only is that also a bit of a straw man in the sense that climate scientists are not making that argument in the first place, but also that still doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to become progressively a greater fraction of the problems that we face, or that it isn’t connected to the other problems that we face. And so in the context of that, I’ve been looking at and consuming as an avid consumer of news media — I guess that’s rarer and rarer these days, but just thinking about…

Sammy Roth: Everyone, consume news media.

Daniel Swain: Yes, yes. I mean, it’s great to see so many people on this. 

Sammy Roth: Thank you for whoever did the thumbs up there that I’m seeing floating across. 

Daniel Swain: Yes, exactly. But I guess what I, so maybe this — I won’t monopolize too much time here, but I just wanted to point out that this memo, even, doesn’t exist in a vacuum of climate communication, even in the past week. 

When I was first reading the memo, I was in New York City last week. I had just had — and this is a brief personal anecdote and I will end my little monologue here — but I had just… in fact, I was reading the memo instead of going to CBS Studios to record a segment on climate change, because they had just fired their entire climate team at CBS. I was literally reading this instead of going to do that interview. 

At the same time, there was a torrential downpour, a downpour that was one of the heaviest downpours that New York City Manhattan had actually ever seen in October, not at any point in time, but for October. And as it turned out, multiple people drowned in New York City from this downpour while I was reading the memo. And in the news response, in the interviews that Bill Gates has given in response to the criticisms, specifically pointed out that it was ridiculous to think that New York City was going to have problems with climate change. I was reading this as people were actively underwater in their basement apartments in New York City last week. So just as a really specific example of where the rhetoric just isn’t matching the real world here.

Sammy Roth: Well, let me, I appreciate all of that, and let me use it to redirect us a little bit, because I think one of the one of the sort of unstated assumptions in Bill Gates’s memo is that climate change is in addition to the fact that it’s not as bad as, you know, certain unnamed activists make it out to be, is that it’s mostly a problem for the developing world, for poor countries. 

And you know, you talked about the sort of media tour that he’s been doing, defending the memo and expanding on it, one of the comments he made in an interview with CNBC, he’s very optimistic about clean energy and electric vehicles, and we should get into that too, because there’s a lot of reason for optimism about that and about the good that they’re going to do to reduce emissions. 

But he’s so optimistic that he went so far as to say on CNBC, and I’m going to quote him here, “there’s enough innovation to avoid super bad outcomes in terms of climate change.” And so I want to pose to all of you. Can we avoid super bad outcomes? Are we not already seeing super bad outcomes from climate change, even in rich countries like the United States. Kim, maybe you brought up Hurricane Melissa earlier that Caribbean. But I mean, even in the US, how would you respond to that one?

Kim Cobb: I mean, I think we can all agree that there’s a key role for innovation in this solution set. Right? And we’ve seen a lot of innovation that’s come to bear and has actually been scaling and righting us out of those emissions that we would like to say are enough already, but obviously we are already experiencing catastrophic outcomes. That’s here in the United States. That’s across the world, and unfortunately, it’s not going to stop. 

And so just to bring some numbers into this, the billion dollar time series of weather and climate related disasters just alone in the United States per year, that toll is something north of $150 billion per year. Of course, that time series is no longer being compiled by the current administration, for obvious reasons, but that’s something that is just reminding us of the grim toll on our economy. Which brings me to another important point I was wanting to make earlier, which is kind of pulling maybe Katharine’s analogy about buckets a little further here. 

First of all, it’s quite rich for a billionaire to say we don’t have enough money to do everything. But the point I’m trying to make is that it’s important to note that this is a grave economic threat here at home and around the world. So, if we want to think about the amount of water that we’re pouring into these various buckets looking ahead, we’re really talking about, you know, an economic level of damages and instability that would dramatically compromise our ability to try to fill any number of those kinds of buckets going forward. So that’s also what I think is part of this conversation as well.

Katharine Hayhoe: And if I could add, too. I think we’ve discussed how, first of all, climate change is not an issue in isolation. It affects and worsens and exacerbates all these other issues. The US military literally calls it a threat multiplier. 

But, on the flip side, we know that there are an abundance of climate solutions that also address hunger, poverty, disease, health, water, livelihoods, and more. We are nowhere near tapping out on our investment in and innovation in those win-win-win solutions. 

And so it just makes sense when we’re confronting multiple issues, to prioritize the solutions that address multiple issues at the same time. So not only is there a false dichotomy that they’re separate issues, there’s a false dichotomy that they’re separate solutions. We are nowhere near the point where distinct, uniquely non-overlapping solutions are the only ones available for all of those problems.

Sammy Roth: Yeah, that’s actually one of the weirdest thing to me about the Gates memo. He spends a lot of it talking about how solar and wind and batteries are now the, you know, some of the cheapest and most reliable forms of energy. And then he has this strange bit where he talks about how fighting for clean energy and climate solutions can actually be counterproductive for development in poor countries, because pressure on banks to stop financing fossil fuel projects can make it harder for low income countries to get electricity, which doesn’t make a lot of sense in light of any of the earlier things that he said. So there’s some parts where he just starts contradicting himself, which I was confused by. But anyways, Zeke looks like want to weigh in as well? 

Zeke Hausfather: I was going to say, you know, there’s some nuance there. We don’t need to go into a debate about whether or not we should develop natural gas in Sub Saharan Africa. But, you know, that’s also not really the most climatically significant question, because, again, it’s the rich countries, not the poor countries, that are responsible for the vast majority of our emissions today. 

Sammy Roth: True, that’s a very good point. That’s a very good point.

Zeke Hausfather: But I think more broadly, you know, Gates makes this point in this memo that we have made some progress on climate change, and he sort of infers from that that therefore, we don’t need to worry as much about climate change.

I think it is true that we’ve made some progress. You know, we used to think we’re heading toward about four degrees warming. You know, the UNEP emissions gap report that just came out today says we’re heading toward about 2.6 degrees warming under current policies. That’s a pretty big improvement, but it’s important to recognize two things. 

One, the desire to limit warming well below two degrees was never preconditioned on a four degree counterfactual. It’s because it just gets really damaging to the world above two degrees. And so yes, making progress is great, but it doesn’t mean we can stop and rest on our laurels. 

And the other thing I wanted to emphasize on this question of progress is that we do tend to focus a little too much on these round numbers, you know, 2.6 degrees by the end of the century. In reality, the climate is a highly complex system. We don’t know exactly where we’re going to end up. 

And so yes, you know, we think our best estimate, or 50th percentile, is somewhere around there in a current policy world. The current administration is trying to undo current policies, so we’ll see if that ends up being too optimistic. But we could end up in a lot worse place. The climate could be really sensitive to our emissions, and we could end up at closer to four degrees warming with the same emissions trajectory, if we sort of roll sixes on all the climate dice. 

And so in many ways, when we think about how much we want to reduce emissions, it’s not just where we think we’re going to end up. It’s a question of mitigating against these catastrophic tail risks, of really buying insurance against the worst outcomes in the future. And I think that’s something that’s really missing from the memo.

Sammy Roth: Daniel, I see you raising your hand, but Zeke, let me just ask you a quick follow-up question. A lot of the optimism that Bill Gates is is describing here is based on these projections of emissions, where, you know, the International Energy Agency is projecting emissions to go based on current trends, and, you know in energy and transportation and cost declines and all these technologies. I guess I’m wondering, you know, even if warming is, you know, sensitive to emissions in the way that we currently think it is, and we’re not, you know, way far off in those estimations — how warranted, I guess, do you think the optimism is based on these estimated forward looking emissions reductions? 

And I guess the reason I’m asking that question is because it just… putting out a memo like this and trying to sway the global climate dialog in the way that he’s doing when these are projected reductions and not actual reductions that we’ve achieved. It just, I guess I wonder about the responsibility of an action like that, especially at a moment in US politics, when we’ve got an administration that is trying very hard to derail global climate progress. Because, I mean, these are just projections right now. It’s, it’s not guaranteed that the world is going to go this way. And I mean when you see how the Trump administration and you know, climate denial folks have responded to this. I mean, President Trump put out a, you know, a post untruth social that said, see, Bill Gates has finally admitted that climate change was a hoax all along. And, you know, I was right! Which seems like a pretty predictable response. I’m asking a bit of a leading question here, so I just say, you see what I’m getting at. 

Zeke Hausfather: So I think it’s important to recognize that, you know, current policies, and when we talk about warming, implied by current policies, we don’t know exactly how emissions are gonna end up. There’s some pretty big uncertainty there. And even then, it requires the persistence of those policies, you know, keeping pushing to reduce emissions. 

Technology doesn’t descend from the heavens on magical stone tablets. It comes from decades of important R and D work, most of which is funded by governments, and deployment work which is funded by governments, like tax credits for clean energy. And so this idea that we can somehow rely on technology to save us, independent of policy, independent of what we actually do to get that technology out there, I think, is worrying. 

I’m not sure Gates necessarily goes that far in his argument, but certainly there are some people who do. And so technology is promising, and if anything is going to reduce emissions, it’s replacing digging stuff up and burning it with clean alternatives, which is technology. But you can’t be really seen independent from the broader policy context.

Sammy Roth: I like the way you put that. Yeah, there were parts of the memo that seemed like, wildly optimistic to me, like it doesn’t matter what happens in the policy realm. Technology is going to save us this many degrees, but also at the same time other parts that were strangely pessimistic, like there is only so much money to fund serious problems… solutions to serious problems, and despite the fact that I’m a billionaire who has lunch with the president of the United States, I can’t do anything to address that problem. So that felt like a strange disconnect to me.

But anyway, Daniel, you’ve been trying to talk for a while, and I’ve been monologuing here. So forgive me.

Daniel Swain: No, I’ve done some of my own monologuing. So no worries. I think what Zeke was just saying about what trajectory are we currently on… you know. And of course, as he was mentioning, it is true that the trajectory we’re on now is not as bad as we theoretically could have been looking forward from 20 years ago on a path toward an additional couple degrees centigrade warming beyond where we are, sort of on track for now. So in relative terms, of course, I’d rather be on this path than that one.

But the question is, what are the consequences of the path that we actually still are on if we go well above two, somewhere between two and a half to three degrees centigrade Celsius is essentially, you know, that’s the median current policy kind of estimate. Also, as Zeke mentions, we cannot rule out significantly more than three degrees of warming, either due to bad luck with policy, human developments, geopolitics, whatever it is, or even with a fairly optimistic geopolitical trajectory, if we get unlucky with the climate system itself and sensitivity ends up being on the high end — we can’t rule out more than three.

But let’s just take for a moment, let’s assume that it is true, since most likely, according to science, it probably is, that we will end up somewhere between two and three degrees of global mean warming by the end of the century, which is something that Gates mentions in the memo as being the most likely outcome, which is probably true. I don’t argue with that as being the most likely.

But what does that actually mean, though? And for me, as somebody who studies the impacts of climate change, extreme events, and the cascading effects that has on people and ecosystems and human systems, that was the most fundamental misstep, I think, in the whole… and this whole, not just the memo, but in the broader conversation surrounding is missing the point, really, that a two and a half to three degree warmer world, it is a catastrophe, not just for people who live in the Global South, not just for poorer nations, but also for wealthy nations. It’s a catastrophe for all global ecosystems, for anybody who cares about anything that relates to the natural world, anywhere, but also people. 

I mean, a three degree warmer world, just to give a few specific tangible pictures of what that looks like. That’s a world where the sea level is feet higher than it currently is today, where global mega cities that are within a few feet of sea level — their viability is seriously threatened. This is a world where we see widespread, frequent occurrences of historically unprecedented, flood and drought events. It’s a world where we lose almost all of the mountain glaciers and we start to see massive destabilization of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. And that’s just a short list. 

You know, my question, and I’ll leave it at this, is, is that a world that I would want to live in as somebody, as a climate scientist, who lives in a wealthy nation? No, it is not. Let alone anybody who doesn’t have that level of privilege or those kind of resources. And so I think that the categorical misstep here is just fundamentally underestimating what the correctly stated most likely trajectory actually means for people in the world. 

I genuinely believe Gates, and people who work for the Gates Foundation and implement their priorities genuinely are trying to help and have a track record of making great strides with eradication of disease and global health. But I think the challenge here is, what does that future look like for those people? And the answer is, it’s a much more dire future, I think, than this memo, than the way this memo characterizes it.

Katharine Hayhoe: And if I could point out something, people are always quick to say, Oh, well, the science is so uncertain. It is uncertain. But when we look at impacts, there is a much bigger tail of uncertainty in one direction. We are seeing consistently that the majority of the impacts on health, food, water, resources, the economy, supply chains, you name it, the majority of the resources have been massively underestimated. 

Study after study is coming out showing that an order of magnitude more people die from hurricanes than we thought, or that the direct impacts of extreme weather events that are measured and reported on, they’re only 10% of the total economic impacts of these extreme events. 

We are so connected globally, all of our systems, and we have so perfectly developed our society for the conditions of the past that our economic models, which are not based on physical principles, they’re based on economic principles that apply to the previous economy during a more or less stable climate. They can’t even fully model the potentially catastrophic impacts on the economy alone. Let alone anything else. 

So… and then we haven’t even mentioned the fact that there could be tipping points, which are irreversible changes in the climate system for which we are profoundly not ready or adapted for. So yes, there is uncertainty, but the uncertainty is of the type that if we were making personal decisions about whether to buy insurance or get on that airplane or not, or go to that place or do that thing or not, we would not be doing those things. We would not be making those choices, because the risk of it being worse than we think is so much worse. 

So unfortunately, we’re not applying that precautionary principle here. And in fact, if anything, people are assuming uncertainty means it’s going to be better than it’s going to and for every example of something being better, we could collectively show you 100 examples of things that are worse. 

Sammy Roth: I’m muted. That’s right. In a few minutes, we’re going to start taking audience questions. So if you have anything that you want to ask scientists here, please put it in the Q and A. We are going to prioritize questions from journalists. So if you are a journalist, please put your organization or your affiliation in the chat, so we can prioritize your question. 

Before we get to that, one thing that I’m wondering — and perhaps I’m part of the problem here, because I, you know, convened with Covering Climate [Now] this session — are we spending too much time talking about Bill Gates? 

You know, should we be ignoring this more, or is this something that, you know, his memo, is it inevitably going to influence the global dialogue because of who he is? And is it a good thing that we’re, you know, rapid fire responding to him? I guess I’m just, you know, curious what you all think about the fact that you know, over the last six days, Bill Gates has got everyone kind of up in a panic over this. Any thoughts on that one? Kim, you’re, you’re smiling.

Kim Cobb: There’s a lot to say here. I want to just, you know, remember what Daniel just said about, you know, this is a whole ecosystem, a climate communications ecosystem that we are navigating as a planet, day to day, week to week. There’s never a dull moment, and much of that is because we’re reeling from extreme to extreme and catastrophic losses from catastrophic loss. So let’s just put that in the room. 

But obviously, you know, I’d just like to call into this space the hundreds of delegates who are going to be convening in Brazil to discuss our collective future and to think about where they have put their voices into this mix. And indeed, they have been the ones who have, for decades now, been saying, this is an existential threat. We need countries to come together to be more aggressive on emissions goals. And you know, we’re, we’re we’re not going to be able to have a future from their perspectives, from their own words, from conference the party to conference the party over the last decades. 

So those are the voices that I continue to listen to. Is there a role for Bill Gates in this moment? I think there are certain people that are going to be more likely to listen to him, and that’s why it, frankly, is unfortunate that this is the take-home message that he’s leaving the world with on the eve of COP30. 

Daniel Swain: Yeah, just to echo and to expand a little bit on what Kim just said, I think this is, this is a person who wields a lot of influence globally in terms of money and power… certainly in the US, but also globally. And also, maybe even more related to the broader climate communication world, I will, I will say this, it got everyone talking about climate change again, in a moment where it has really left the news cycle. So, not that I think that compensates for any poor framings. 

But I guess the point is, you know, this is the way climate change is currently being talked about, certainly in the United States. This is the frame, the frame is, yeah, it’s getting a little warmer, but so what? And I think that this really plays into that incorrect understanding, and I think this weaponized characterization of what climate change is and will be, and what it will mean for different groups of people moving forward. 

So I do think it’s important to address it, not just because this is an influential document coming from an influential person that’s clearly already influencing other influential people, up to and including the president of the United States. But also because it’s a good exercise and talking about why a group of climate scientists doesn’t think that — despite actually, I think all of us, we didn’t quite get to this… I think each of us actually, a lot of specific points in this memo that all of us would agree with, at least that’s certainly true in my case. And yet I walked away from this feeling like it was much less than the sum of its parts, which is often the opposite of how I feel about these things. 

I think the reason for that is that there is this deflated feeling that somehow this is constructed to support this narrative — that yeah, it’s there. It’s real. See, I’ve been saying it’s real for a long time. But also, I’m not too worried about it — which I think is a really dangerous framing in this moment, because it’s just not true.

Katharine Hayhoe: The content of that memo, much of it, was very encouraging. So if you have not actually read the memo yourself yet, I would encourage you to do so, because there’s lots of great examples of solutions that are being implemented today that make a real difference. 

I’m not speaking to anybody on this panel. We’ve all read the memo, but if you haven’t, I would encourage you to read it. But what Daniel said is right, it is the framing that is the issue. And the problem is, is the framing is what’s being used to communicate this. 

It’s like the cake was okay, but the icing was really off. And unfortunately, the icing is what people see. The number of people who actually take a slice of the cake are orders of magnitude less than the people who just look at the icing and say, “oh, that’s what it’s about.” 

So that’s really, I think, the issue we have, not not the actual content, but the way that it’s framed to send a message that basically says, first of all, we have to choose, and second of all, when we choose, this isn’t so important. That’s really the frame that people are walking away with, and that’s the frame that the science is so clear is not accurate.

Sammy Roth: I have to say, all of the people in the, you know, who are responding to this with, oh, he’s, you know, from Trump on down. I mean, obviously Trump didn’t read it. But so many of the other folks who are looking at it and saying, hey, you know, Bill Gates is saying climate change isn’t a problem and renewable energy is unreliable and a hoax. 

It’s so obvious they didn’t read the thing. I mean, you know, we’re having a nuanced discussion about how the framing isn’t quite right, and here’s why this isn’t exactly the right way to look at climate change, but everyone is trying to sell garbage off of it. I mean, it doesn’t take a lot of thought to look at the points they’re making. Oh, they didn’t get past the second sentence or very far into it. It’s not that hard. 

So this is why I’m very grateful that so many people are here with us, you know, listening to a really thoughtful, nuanced dialogue. And yeah, I agree with you. It’s like, go and read the thing yourself. Like, engage in this intellectual activity and really evaluate it. Don’t just look at a headline, don’t just look at a tweet. Don’t just watch a video. Look at it. It’ll take half an hour, but you’ve got half an hour to do that. This is important. It’s worthwhile. 

We’ve been getting some really good questions in the chat. And I apologize because there are 60 of them right now, so we’re absolutely not going to get to all of them in the next 15 minutes, but we’ve got several here, including at least a few from journalists. I’m going to try to start with one from Jeff St. John at Canary Media. At least I’m going to assume this is Jeff St. John from Canary Media. If you all had to pick, oh, let’s say top three financing targets for Bill Gates and other billionaire philanthropists to be pouring money into efforts that both fight climate change and materially improve the lives of the Earth’s poorest and most vulnerable people, what might they be? 

Interesting question: three top financing targets to improve climate change and improve the lives of the Earth’s worst and most vulnerable. You don’t all have to take every one of these questions. But does anyone want to try that one? It’s an interesting question. Zeke?

Zeke Hausfather: I can start. I’m sure others in the panel will have thoughts, as well. You know, one important thing we’ve seen over and over again is that, you know, prosperity and, you know, development are strongly tied to energy in many cases. 

And so finding ways to bring energy to large parts of the world, places like Sub Saharan Africa, particularly — they don’t have access — is really important. And I think there is a lot of potential for, you know, win-win solutions, as Katharine put it earlier. 

The IEA most recently assessed, you know, what would be needed to give electricity access to the poorest people. And they found that, you know, solar and storage could play a huge role there. You know, it’s not the only one — we’d need grids. We still need, you know, some combustion resources, but we can get a long way with the dramatic cost declines [that] have happened with solar and storage. And so, that would be one area I think would be useful. But again, it’s not the only thing we need to do, and not all, we don’t only need to do development work that benefits the climate. We also need to fund GAVI for vaccines for the poor, right? You know, we can do all these things.

Katharine Hayhoe: When it comes to climate solutions. There’s no silver bullet, but there’s a lot of silver buckshot. And a lot of people sort of falsely argue that there’s like a silver buckshot, like there’s one thing that would do it. If you think of the atmosphere like a pool and the water and the atmosphere like the carbon…

Sammy Roth: You really like your water metaphors, don’t you?

Katharine Hayhoe: I know, I love water. We stuck a hose in the pool back at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We have to turn off the hose, but we also have to make the drain bigger, and we have to help people learn how to swim. We have to do all three of those things. 

And so finance, invested in clean energy, is a huge part of turning off the hose, as is efficiency. We’re very wasteful with our energy use, especially in high income countries. Making the drain bigger through investing in nature, which also invests in water, food, health, and climate is a big part of it, and then adaptation and resilience is part of it. 

But again, there’s solutions that often address many of those things like Kim pointed out fossil fuels are a huge health risk. They’re responsible for millions of premature deaths per year. So replacing those fossil fuels with clean energy is not just an energy solution, it’s a health solution. How many more of those solutions are there out there?

Sammy Roth: Okay, let me. Let me switch to a different question here, because we got some good responses there. I appreciate that this one is from Sandra McDonald, who I believe is probably my former colleague, Sandra McDonald from the LA Times. 

She wrote: Gates said at his Caltech talk last night his intention was not to frame climate change as unimportant, but partially as a refocusing on how to prepare for the warming that we know is already going to happen, hardening crop seeds to withstand higher temperatures for instance. Wondering how the climate scientists here see that interpretation. 

And I’ll just add my own small twist to this one, which is that I think a part of what this question is getting at is, you know, sort of the balance between mitigation, reducing emissions and climate resilience, or adaptation, preparing for the impacts of climate change. How [would] you guys think about or talk — or would encourage journalists or others to talk — about balancing those two things? Daniel, you raised your hand there. 

Daniel Swain: Yeah, and this is somewhere where I actually expected, going into this with no preconceived notions, to strongly agree with the memo, because it’s absolutely true. I actually usually say that we focus way too little on adaptation. Sometimes we do focus on mitigation at the expense of adaptation, whereas we really have to be doing both as much  as we possibly can —

Sammy Roth: I just want to stop you here to point out that you’re, I mean, I know you as an adaptation guy, because in California, you’re the person everyone goes to, and there’s an atmospheric river to find out what’s going to happen. I mean, that’s your thing.

Daniel Swain: Yeah. And I think we have, historically, I think California specifically, actually has not necessarily gotten the balance right historically, where there is, there’s a real absence, until recently, of real adaptation effort, and much more on the mitigation side. So I expected this memo to essentially make that argument that we can’t just think about reducing emissions.

We also have to deal with the things that improve people’s lives in the meantime, which is essentially adaptation. Which I would be, I mean, that’s, that’s literally one of my key messages. And yet, here we are having this conversation. And I think the reason is that it really matters that somebody in a position to write a memo, I guess, understands what it means to have a two degree warmer world, a two and a half degree warmer world, a three degree warmer world, because the adaptations that you would need to to to engage in are very different, if it’s just tweaking things, making, you know, making existing structures a little bit stronger, adding a little bit of resilience to the margin of our current systems, versus a world with three degrees warming, where things change so dramatically that you can’t just bolster our existing systems. You have to completely change everything to accommodate the new world that that would represent. 

And so it’s not enough to say climate change is real. You also need to understand, and this is another point that I strongly agree with, by the way, which is that measuring in terms of global mean temperature is not the right metric. Of course, it’s everything else that matters. Again, something I fundamentally agree with. 

But if you don’t use the right heuristics to understand what that actually means, I think yes, so, so essentially, I agree with the point, but I still don’t see, I don’t think it seems like Bill Gates quite understands what the implications of that statement actually are.

Zeke Hausfather: Yeah. Oh, go ahead Kim, yeah.

Kim Cobb: If I, if I could pile on and just underscore what Daniel just said, which is that the our ability to interrupt the damages and loss that are coming down the pike, and are in many cases, already here, really recede into the impossible when we start to get into those higher warming levels. 

So every tenth of a degree is going to lessen our ability to be effective when we think about adaptation and resilience. And the other point, I think, is really important underscore is that this is also not an area where we have to choose either emissions mitigation or adaptation resilience. There’s a large swath of overlap between these really important, you know, arms of climate solutions work, where we can do both at the same time while advancing climate justice, energy access and affordability.

These are the kinds of things that we should be really focused in on. If the entire memo had been about that intersectional space, I think we’d all be here clapping. So that’s just, I think, just underscoring, first of all, this false choice that we can set up all too often in the climate discourse. And I think he’s in some ways, setting that up as well. But also, of course, really muggling it on the emission side.

Sammy Roth: A related question…oh, go ahead, Zeke.

Zeke Hausfather: I’ll be quick just to add to that a little bit. You know, the bulk of the money that the international community spends on climate in the poorest countries should be for adaptation, and we’re not spending nearly enough on poor country adaptation today. Like there is some truth there. 

But I think where the memo goes astray is this inferred idea that if rich countries who are spending the bulk on mitigation didn’t spend that money on mitigation, it would suddenly magically end up, you know, funding poverty alleviation in poor countries like that’s, that’s not a real trade off. And so, you know, we can chew gum and walk at the same time. We can fund adaptation for the poorest in the world while reducing emissions and middle to middle income and rich countries.

Sammy Roth: Yeah, no, completely. And I’ll, I’ll just go back and say what I said earlier. If Bill Gates wanted to do something about that, that problem, and try to get more funding for both of those things, he is one of the few people in the United States who has the political influence that he could probably do something about that problem. But he treats it in this memo is sort of immutable. There’s just not enough resources for anything, and that just exists in a vacuum. 

But I want to pivot from this to another audience question here from Derek, frankly, because it’s related to this and related to something else that I meant to ask and didn’t get to. Derek asks, can you speak to Gates’ very technology forward messaging. He seems to be of the mind that we can tech our way out of climate disaster. 

And specifically, Gates referred to some research that he linked to in his memo, and he made the argument, and I’m going to quote him again here, that “Since the economic growth that’s projected for poor countries will reduce climate deaths by half, it follows that faster and more expansive growth will reduce deaths by even more. And economic growth is closely tied to public health. So the faster people become prosperous and healthy, the more lives we can save.” 

So basically, he’s making this argument that, you know, technology and economic growth, that’s, that’s the best response to, you know, to climate change, because it will, it will make people healthier, and that’s the best thing we can do to stave off deaths from climate change is, you know, more economic growth in developing countries. 

I wanted, you know, [to] put that [to] one to you guys here. Is there anything to that? Can we tech and growth our way out of climate disaster? Is that the thing that we can do to save lives? Does that work? What I’m asking is, the climate system, does it allow for that? 

Everyone’s staring at me, like, how do I even…

Katharine Hayhoe: Well, we are scientists, first of all, not engineers or economists, but I think it’s obvious to everyone that tech does not exist in a vacuum. We’ve spoken before. In fact, Zeke was saying earlier how policies make a huge impact.

So for example, wind energy technology is really well developed, but if the wind energy leases all get canceled, then what good is the wind energy technology to the United States, that’s all policy. 

And then you’ve got the fact that the entire economy is built around the faulty assumption of an infinite planet. Our whole economy assumes there’s always more resources somewhere over there, and we can put all our waste and pollution over there where it won’t bother us. 

So the externalities that are not priced into the market actually create this false sense of, these things cannot be valued, therefore they don’t matter. So technology is certainly a part of it. I don’t think any of us on this call here are Luddites. 

Technology has a huge role to play in efficiency, clean energy, helping us live better, in better synergy with nature, reducing our impact through food. 

You know, they’ve invented a tiny sticker. You put it on a mango. Instead of going bad in a week, the mango lasts for 30 days because of this one little sticker. That’s technology. 

But alone it’s not enough. We need all of those things together, and if we don’t do all of those things together in the same way, if we don’t adapt and mitigate at the same time, we’re not going to get where we want to go. And it’s very dangerous to assume that one thing is enough.

Daniel Swain: I’ll just… I like citing specific evidence. So I’ll follow that up with saying, I’m all for technology. And I think the greatest success story we’ve seen so far with the green energy revolution is, like, that’s, like, pure technology. That’s a technological success, full stop, end of story. That’s great. 

But there’s one specific line in this memo that Gates has also cited in subsequent interviews, which is essentially, well directly, saying that, for example, when it gets too hot, we’ll just pause outdoor work, because everyone will have access to air conditioning, and that that just strikes me as so disconnected from the way the world works, particularly in poor places in the world, and even poor places in wealthy nations, just so fundamentally disconnected with the fact that most people who live in these settings are either outdoor workers or indoor workers in places where maybe that’s even worse, if you’re indoors without air conditioning. And the notion that you can just fix this problem by either just not working anymore outdoors, or by, you know, by bestowing air conditioning. 

Now, let me be clear. I’m 100% behind air conditioning. I…there’s a lot of controversy for this. I think everyone who needs it deserves air conditioning. Let’s just take that as a given.

Sammy Roth: I agree. And in California even, there’s a lot of places that don’t have air conditioning that should, and they’re struggling to get it…

Daniel Swain: Exactly. So I’m totally on board with that. But the problem is, that until that’s actually the reality for all the billions of people on Earth — anybody who lives in a place that is exposed to particularly extreme humid heat, which we will start seeing a lot more of as we go between two and three degrees C of warming, for example, there will be, in some places, at some times, conditions where the combination of heat and humidity is immediately life threatening to unsurvivable. 

This is not going to be the norm anywhere anytime soon. There will be periods. And of course, the problem is, if it even happens for brief periods. That’s a big problem if you’re there when it happens. And the notion that you can just solve extreme heat risk through this, this technology of air conditioning, which we again, absolutely should have more of, but it just suggests that there’s this notion that there’s always a techno fix for everything.

And when it comes to basic human physiology, for example, there isn’t always going to be one. There is such a combination of heat and humidity, for example, that you cannot techno fix your way out of that if anybody ever plans to be outside.

Sammy Roth: So we, I think we are just about out of time here, unfortunately, which is sad because we have like, dozens of more questions. I will just very quickly ask you, and hopefully you and hopefully you guys don’t mind if we go one minute over. One last great question that we got from Bill Weir at CNN, he wants to know what you’re all be — now that we spent the last hour talking about Bill Gates instead of whatever we should have been talking about — what will you be watching for at COP 30, the global climate summit that starts in in Brazil next month? Just real, real quick here — what, what’s on your mind in terms of what you’re going to be looking for at COP 30, and let’s say Katharine, Zeke, Kim and then Daniel.

Katharine Hayhoe: So at COP 30, you know, it is stunning. It’s meeting number 30. And it wasn’t until just a couple of years ago that the words fossil fuels even entered the discussion at COP. So we have to be talking about phasing out fossil fuels. 

We have to be talking about in this distorted market that we have, getting the money that we need to the sources and valuing the things that we need to value, like our livelihoods and our lives on this planet and the nature that supports it. 

And we have to be looking at resilience and adaptation as well as mitigation. We have to be looking at all of those as much as possible, as soon as possible, because the quote that John Holdren said so many years ago is even more relevant today. He said, we have three choices, and we’re going to do some of each. The only question is, how much? Because the more we mitigate, the faster we cut our emissions, the less adaptation is required, and the less suffering there will be. 

Zeke Hausfather: I think, from my perspective, we’ve seen a lot of countries make big promises, including some of the biggest emitters in the world, US, previously, EU, China, India, to get their emissions to zero later in the century. But it’s really easy for leaders to promise to do something in 2050, 2060, or 2070, when you know they’re not going to be in power and they’re probably not going to be alive, and so I’d like to see a lot more tangible near term action that accompanies these bold and ambitious Net Zero pledges.

Kim Cobb: Well, with Brazil hosting, I think all eyes are on the land-use emissions this year, as well. So there have been several COPs leading up to with a lot of discussions about what to do about this knob on the emissions control board that’s worth 10 to 20% of emissions every year, depending. 

And so with Brazil at the helm right now, I think we have some real hope that there will be a coming together of the various countries that are responsible for the bulk of those particular emissions, it’s quite a different landscape than thinking about coal fired power plants and the transport sector. So I think we can look potentially for progress there. I will be laser focused on that issue to watch what happens, because if it doesn’t happen here, that bodes extremely ill for the controls on that particular portion of admissions, perhaps for the next 10 plus 20 years. That’s very alarming to me.

The second thing I’ll be watching for is there’s been a nascent discussion around better disclosures for who is funding the delegates at these Conference of the Parties, and so really thinking about getting together an international accord that says all we want to do is understand where the funding is coming from that’s putting people in the tents and the discussions for negotiations here. I think that’s an obvious and overdue ask at this point, and I’d love to see some progress on that issue at this Conference of the Parties.

Daniel Swain: And just quickly, I’m actually just going to combine essentially what Zeke and Kim just said into one brief statement about what I’m really looking for at this point. Where we’ve made the most progress so far is with energy sector emissions, and so what I’m looking for next is what is the near term progress that we’re going to make on everything else — all the other sources of greenhouse gasses that are warming the planet. We’ve made real progress with clean energy. We’ve not made a lot of progress with all of the other sources. And so what are we going to do in the near term on that front? And that’s what I’ll be looking for.

Sammy Roth: Well, thank you guys. Thank you to the four of you for doing this. Thank you to everyone here for joining us for this discussion. It’s so important. It’s so time sensitive and urgent. If you have friends or family or people in your life, colleagues who weren’t able to make it today, but who you think would benefit from listening to the discussion, Covering Climate Now is going to be posting the video on its YouTube page and on the event page for sharing later. I’m also going to be sending out the video on my newsletter, Climate-Colored Goggles. 

Again, I mentioned this at the beginning, but you can subscribe to that at climatecoloredgoggles.com, a bit of a mouthful of a name. I’m still getting used to saying it myself: climatecoloredgoggles.com

Covering Climate Now is also hosting a webinar for journalists who are looking for tools to help them cover the Global Climate Conference. There’s a link to that in the chat as well. 

And again, yeah, just thank you for taking time out of your day to do this. Thank you to the climate scientists for just all of the thoughtful and nuanced commentary. And yeah, hope to see you all out there in the world continuing this conversation and doing good work.

Thanks, everybody. Bye.