9 ms·

Tough truths about climate

109 points by ezequiel-garzon 11mo ago

raffael_de 11mo ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 11mo ago
  Please don't post flamebait or take threads off on generic tangents on HN. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- JumpinJack_Cash 11mo ago
  > > Tell us some tough truths about Epstein island! Rich people want to get laid with young , attractive girls who are also well mannered and somewhat cultured and socially mature Epstein was the curator of that list, kinda like an elite's elite escort agency. Is the above so hard to grasp and reconcile with? The whole thing has been blown way out of proprtion
- tzs 11mo ago
  > @BillGates: Tell us some tough truths about Epstein island! There's no evidence Gates was ever on Epstein's island, so it is unlikely he has anything interesting to say about it. The only known connection Gates has to Epstein is a few business meetings. > But Kudos on acknowledging the growing evidence that the climate change movement is mostly about ideology, money, power and redistributing wealth. The article did no such thing.
jader201 11mo ago
> 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. Interesting and different perspective vs. what many others often say (but that’s one of the points he’s making). I feel a lot of climate articles — and the comments attached to their HN threads — tend to favor more of the doomsday message he’s arguing against here.
- benrutter 11mo ago
  Climate change is so confusing to message about in this sense, because the future is not decided. We're on track to warm the planet far past the point that of sustaining something you and I would recognise as human society. That said, we're also changing course which has the opportunity to mitigate things. The meta part is, if everyone thinks we'll change course, that affects whether we do. There's no straight prediction that can be made.
- hmahonen 11mo ago
  Question is that how long is foreseeable future? It is very likely that the time span for an individual is long enough that the change does not matter. Still the future will arrive and most likely sooner than we thought.
- ares623 11mo ago
  That’s assuming over half the world’s population will just say “oh well, this is my life now. I wouldn’t want to bother those people in the good parts.” There will be upheavals everywhere.
- supriyo-biswas 11mo ago
  > Interesting and different perspective vs. what many others often say (but that’s one of the points he’s making). The uncharitable interpretation being that he's trying to toe the line for the current US administration, while still signaling that he's part of the communities that he typically inhabits as part of his charity work.
- jshen 11mo ago
  He says that as if he's certain it can't possibly, even a remote possibility, lead to societal collapse. First, there is no way he can be certain about that. Second, what is an acceptable probability for an existential threat? That's the real question to answer, and he didn't attempt to answer it.
  - Retric 11mo ago
    societal collapse != humanities demise. Climate change could do a lot of damage it’s just not extinction level damage. Even large scale nuclear war based on current stockpiles isn’t going to result in extinction.
andsoitis 11mo ago
”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.” How do we change incentives to be long-term aligned rather than counter-productive, anxious short-termism?
- ACCount37 11mo ago
  I'm afraid that humanity doesn't have sufficiently advanced incentive-engineering technology for that. Solving climate change is really really hard. Solving mass media being biased towards alarmism and allergic to nuance, decision-makers in politics and at corporations favoring short-term thinking? Hard enough to make solving climate change look easy.
- mlrtime 11mo ago
  >How do we change incentives to be long-term aligned rather than counter-productive, anxious short-termism? Easy? You develop technology that makes it win-win for everyone. If you give me a choice to improve my QoL or reduce my cost AND reduce my carbon footprint at the same time, I make that choice. If I have a choice between reducing carbon footprint, but my QoL goes down or costs go up, I won't choose it.
p1dda 11mo ago
Gates, who is not a climate scientist, not even a scientist, spreading misinformation to try to make money for his investments just like he always does.
- Yiin 11mo ago
  can you elaborate what part of his post is misinformation and why? I'm no fan of the dude for many reasons, but making money doesn't seem to be on his priority list as of lately
  - p1dda 11mo ago
    try googling Gates investment climate change
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      I did, it says Gates has invested in companies and stands to make money. Specifically Breakthrough Energy, a venture capital firm backing clean energy startups, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, his philanthropy foundation. Is it supposed to something about scientists and how he can afford some really good ones to tell him sciencey things about science so when Bill Gates says something sciencey, we should probably pay more attention to it than random HN comment that presented no credentials?
- wiredpancake 11mo ago
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- kamranjon 11mo ago
  He really was one of the first techies to project genius when he really just had antisocial behavior - sort of paving the way for folks like Musk and Thiel. There is such a distortion field around Gates that has been meticulously crafted for years, really since his rebranding after those antitrust trials that ruined his image.
  - 11mo ago
globalnode 11mo ago
You cant throw money at the problem and buy your way out of damaging the environment by participating in carbon credit scams. Plus the whole write up feels like a giant opinion piece designed to maintain the status quo. Thats what you want if you're one of the richest in the world right?
Mistletoe 11mo ago
Fourth tough truth about climate change: humans need LLM AI like a fish needs a bicycle and Microsoft is helping burn down the world to give it to them, reversing any progress that was made in reducing emissions and climate change in order to pump the stock price in the AI bubble. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ... >Given the direction AI is headed—more personalized, able to reason and solve complex problems on our behalf, and everywhere we look—it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be. According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.
- GaryBluto 11mo ago
  Gates isn't involved in M$ anymore last time I checked.
dagss 11mo ago
He is mentioning geologic hydrogen as a new energy source. Surely that is a fossil fuel?
- foota 11mo ago
  It's a fossil fuel, but burning it doesn't produce a greenhouse gas. It's similar to nuclear in the sense that it's a limited resource, but doesn't produce emissions.
- lmm 11mo ago
  Perhaps technically, but it's a zero-carbon one which is what matters.
- fulafel 11mo ago
  Yep, like uranium is from the fossils of ancient uranium golems.
- aitchnyu 11mo ago
  My Kagi-fu is failing me. IIRC people have drilled into underground reserves and piped it to a generator in farming areas. Its relatively low cost.
fulafel 11mo ago
Interesting that there's zero mention of regulation, even thought that's cheap and effective in ramping down fossils use as proven by the carbon trading system in EU.
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
  Carbon taxes are probably the most effective tool but politically unpalatable.
  - fulafel 11mo ago
    What's the advantage over the so far politically palatable carbon trading systems? Seems to me the end result is pretty much the same, except in carbon trading systems the market mechanism automatically adjusts the price to the available quota.
    - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
      The advantage is that they work. Carbon trading schemes get watered down to the point that they are ineffective.
IlikeKitties 11mo ago
The important thing to remember is that some of those bad parts where people will die from heat have nukes. Like Pakistan [0]. [1] https://www.arabnews.com/node/2352831/pakistan https://www.arabnews.com/node/2352831/pakistan
fragmede 11mo ago
getting the whole world to agree on climate accords didn't work. we blew past the 1 degree allowance we had budgeted for ourselves, so global action together is off the table. What will work, is extraordinary efforts by smaller groups. There's a lot of hard work by tiny groups and individuals to technologies that don't need the whole world to agree to collective action in order to save the planet. The obvious science fiction idea is to put sunglasses between the Earth and the sun, which is a ludicrous idea, because you'd need an insane amount of capability to lift things into space and place them far away from Earth. Once there, you'd just blackmail all the Earth's governments into paying you so the solar panels they rely on will work in order for your venture to be profitable.
- foota 11mo ago
  This isn't far off from their point, albeit without the geoengineering. Reducing the green premium solves the collective action problem.
NedF 11mo ago
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ACCount37 11mo ago
It's true. Climate change is not an extinction threat. Never was, and certainly isn't now. Climate change is the COVID of global natural disasters. Is it worth fighting? Yes. Can you do absolutely nothing about it and get away with it? Also yes. Cue the lackluster efforts. The "really bad" +4C scenarios still have a death toll larger than that of WW2 - but spread out in time and space, across many decades and many countries. And the most vulnerable countries? The countries that are already on the brink. Climate change is not the "great equalizer" people want it to be. In those "bad" scenarios, the main source of lethality for climate change is: agricultural failures, leading to local shortages and global price spikes, leading to famine. First world countries can eat a sharp +40% spike in food prices, at the cost of quality of life - but there are numerous countries where such a spike would have a death toll attached to it.
- mariusor 11mo ago
  And what do populations with a death sentence hanging over their heads usually do? Oh yeah, they take up arms and try to invade their better off neighbours. Maybe that's a worst case scenario, but the better ones still include many millions of people displaced towards more temperate zones. It will lead to the greatest migration humanity ever suffered and I'm not sure that in a scenario of scant resources, that's going to go on in a peaceful and dignified manner.
  - ACCount37 11mo ago
    The obvious counterpoint to any "hordes of climate refugees will destroy the first world countries" is that borders exist, and machine guns were invented over a century ago. The reality of modern warfare doesn't favor large forces, poorly organized and underequipped, that are attacking reasonably well prepared defense positions. Now, is there a will to use all the tools of modern warfare against climate refugees? Currently, no. But if "hordes of climate refugees will destroy the first world countries" stopped being a distant theoretical concern, and became a practical one? If there were real examples of border checkpoints in first world countries being breached by force, with border security overran, and thousands of somewhat armed and somewhat violent climate refugees pouring in through the breach? I expect that to change very quickly.
picafrost 11mo ago
> So I urge that community, at COP30 and beyond, to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare. Like addressing the exponential growth of income inequality? Unsurprisingly not mentioned at all. Might mean that billionaires have to give up their carbon credit purchases and then how could they be dismissive about their own emissions? Bill is one of the better ones with his personal capital allocation. He could've just tried to create the fastest sailboat racing team or something. But I find it extremely difficult to take the wealthy seriously when they speak about carbon emissions and climate change. It’s like hearing an arsonist lecture on fire safety. > Thirty years ago, when I was running Microsoft, I wrote a long memo to employees about a major strategic pivot we had to make: embracing the internet in every product we made. Is this the one that lead to the term "embrace, extend, extinguish"?
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
  >Is this the one that lead to the term "embrace, extend, extinguish"? It's the one that gave us IE6.
simpaticoder 11mo ago
Gates is making a speculative case that climate change can be (should be) fought with the needs of the global poor at top-of-mind. He acknowledges the apparent zero-sum nature of it: impoverished people face much greater and more immediate threats than climate change, and fossil fuel tech (for example) really does address those urgent threats effectively. He solves this conundrum by speculating that we can have our cake (help the global poor) and eat it too (slow climate change) by inventing new tools and methods. I hope he's right. I'm glad he's doing this advocacy. By doing so he's fighting two popular opinions, first that climate change is a hoax, and second, that climate change must be addressed even if it means sacrificing the well-being of the global poor. That said, I have grave concerns that Gates is simply wrong, that we cannot invent our way out of both climate change and the suffering of the global poor. His many remarkable mentions of AI do not, in my opinion, lend strength to his argument, nor does his mention of "almost commercialized" fusion. The former being a gimmick, the latter being forever 30 years away. If our hopes rest on tech like that, then we must prepare to be devastated and pick one side of the zero-sum.
- benrutter 11mo ago
  > That said, I have grave concerns that Gates is simply wrong, that we cannot invent our way out of both climate change and the suffering of the global poor. I feel positive around whether or not we can- renewable and battery technology in incredible at the moment and we could shift quickly to a much less devastating track if the political will was there. That said, without the political story, technology itself can't change things. We've seen this by the fact thay renewable technology advances have also come alongside technology advances in the fossil fuel industry, like fracking. Around a 1/3 of CO2 emision is down to agriculture, which is mostly meat (and of that mostly beef). There's no tech fix required here, since humans can survive easily without beef, but something would need to change economically or otherwise so that the CO2 impact of food factors into our collective diets.
- mlrtime 11mo ago
  >That said, I have grave concerns that Gates is simply wrong, that we cannot invent our way out of both climate change and the suffering of the global poor. My take on this is that he has thought about this longer than anyone posting here and has the data to back it up... that is there are no other solutions given human nature.
OtherShrezzing 11mo ago
I’m not sure this article is especially helpful. It’s addressed to the attendees of COP, but the attendees of COP already believe (almost unanimously) that adaptation has equal importance to mitigation. And it’s one of the only forums where poorer & disaffected nations are given a real opportunity. I’m also not sure that anyone anywhere earnestly believes that climate change is an extinction level event that’ll render the entire planet unliveable. Certainly not the people at COP. The piece seems unnecessarily broadly combative and contrarian.
- getnormality 11mo ago
  If everyone already agrees with it, why would it be viewed as combative and contrarian?
- ACCount37 11mo ago
  > I’m also not sure that anyone anywhere earnestly believes that climate change is an extinction level event that’ll render the entire planet unliveable. Certainly not the people at COP. A lot of people do believe that, unfortunately. Decades worth of the most alarmist coverage possible sure didn't help the public awareness. Now, people at COP? Hopefully not. But COP doesn't end with the people at COP. And there are a lot of people in this very thread whose reaction to "climate change cannot cause extinction of humankind" is shock and disbelief.
  - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
    >A lot of people do believe that, unfortunately. No they don't.
jgord 11mo ago
Before I read the article, Ill summarize the facts that seem to be hard and true about climate : - we are nearing or at +1.5C above pre-industrial baseline - human carbon burning CO2 emissions are at a max and likely long plateau - mean temp is rising by around +0.3C per decade - we will be nearing +2.0C in around 15 years, 2040 give or take - warming is mainly caused by us humans burning carbon, emitting CO2 and some CH4 - if we reach net-zero, we will be at peak CO2 and thus peak heat, for a long while In addition, the only economically viable way to bring down the temp seems to be deliberate pollution by emitting sulphur or other particles aka Solar Radiation Management to brighten clouds, reduce heat absorption by the ocean. Volcanoes and shipping fuels have essentially proven that this brings down the temperature, in the short term. We geo-engineered our way into this hot mess, and we will need to geo-engineer our way out of it. If the temp reaches +2.5 or +3C .. I think that means quite a lot of crop failure, forced migration, geopolitical tension, lack of stable food supply.. and death to a large number of humans seems to follow logically from that. So, now Ill look at the article to see if any of these tough truths were mentioned .. sorta-kinda no-so-much, it seems like he thinks things are not that urgent. ?!?
lucabs 11mo ago
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johngossman 11mo ago
This is one of these nuanced takes that will please few. It acknowledges all sorts of uncertainty and adopts ethical priorities that cannot be established empirically even if (unlikely) the facts are universally agreed upon. I applaud the attempt and wish there could be real debate over this and other complex positions.
- next_xibalba 11mo ago
  Agreed. But I think it is also worth pointing out that many climate activists (and, I think, the predominant climate narrative) has really shot itself in the foot with the extinction talk. I get it. It's hard to get people to care when you say, "it will probably be pretty unpleasant, and extremely unpleasant in some places." It's a lot easier to get people very excited when your message is, "this is definitely an extinction level event." But the latter is a lie. And eventually lies get outed. And then whoever was telling the lie loses credibility. And possibly the pendulum swings too far in the other direction–"there is definitely nothing to worry about with respect to the climate."
superultra 11mo ago
This feels like someone in a marathon deciding to quit because they just ran really well for the last 10 minutes, with the assumption that since they were running really fast there’s no reason to think they won’t keep running fast. It’s deeply flawed logic. The other issue is that while he might be right, the worst and biggest consequences of being wrong will not affect Bill. Or, frankly, anyone reading this comment. It’s such a complicated problem for us humans because we often struggle to conceptualize beyond our own tribes, let alone humans who won’t exist for decades. But the problem is that IF climate scientists are right - and other than a few cheery cherry picked stats, Bill has no evidence saying otherwise - then the longer we do nothing the bigger the impact. Will humanity die? Probably not. But will it drastically affect QoL for nearly all humans on the planet save the 1%? Probably.
- mlrtime 11mo ago
  Right, but he knows this and he's drawing up his knowledge and solutions. You can point this out, but what solutions do you offer? And I'm sure you can paste some articles with solutions, but I mean actual solutions that people would be willing to change for, not hypotheticals.
mk89 11mo ago
Curious to see who are the first who will boycott MS/Azure/etc because of this.
silexia 11mo ago
Bill Gates gets attacked by both the right and the left. But the truth is that he has made huge progress for human welfare in working to eradicate serious diseases as well as by bringing practical solutions to climate issues.
- mlrtime 11mo ago
  >Bill Gates gets attacked by both the right and the left. My first instinct is he's doing something right then... the problem is policy and human nature.
- JumpinJack_Cash 11mo ago
  > > Bill Gates gets attacked by both the right and the left They attack him because he constantly yaps about stuff without being elected or yaps stuff that is not even within the purpose of his 501c3 foundation. I don't know why he behaves that way honestly, being relevant in the discourse might attract talent to work at the foundation but also produces attacks on the foundation, I guess in his calculus he comes out ahead.
elihu 11mo ago
> "All greenhouse gas emissions come from one of five sources" > (Graphic shows electricity generation 28%, transportation 16%, agriculture 19%, buildings 7%, manufacturing 30%) There's another large source of human greenhouse gas emissions that will perhaps be the most difficult to do anything about and which as far as I know we don't have much in the way of hard numbers about, and that is emissions from military activity. Not just wars, but ordinary peace-time training, patrol operations, hauling stuff around, and so on.
- tylervigen 11mo ago
  It's not separate. That would be included in manufacturing, transportation, and electricity.
- xtiansimon 11mo ago
  Ha! And military combat vehicles are exempt from emissions regulations.
Ekaros 11mo ago
Asking people to lower their living standards will not work. So next best thing is to prepare for future changes with potential solutions now. This is most realistic approach I can see. Start now developing solutions that then have to be put into place.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
  Inflation is already lowering the living standards of millions, but without any reduction on ghg. So the most realistic approach is that we have to deal both reduced living standards AND a changing environment. But the rich will be rich, so there's that.
  - robocat 11mo ago
    > But the rich will be rich If you're in a developed country, you are the rich.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
      For now.
czottmann 11mo ago
Unasked-for meta complaint about the site, not the article itself: I hate that thing where you visit a blog post (judging from the URL) yet the blog post is seemingly endless (judging from the scrollbar), and when you scroll down you hop into the next blog post (URL just changes). The scrollbar is useless in that case, I can't gauge the real length of the article. The Gates Foundation has more money than God, maybe spend a tiny little bit of it on a good UI designer, yeah?
- tasuki 11mo ago
  > The Gates Foundation has more money than God, maybe spend a tiny little bit of it on a good UI designer, yeah? I think it's precisely the problem: they hired an expensive designer, and the designer, for the obscene amount of money they were getting, felt like they had to do something special...
  - card_zero 11mo ago
    It specially crashes my browser when I try to read it, and specially fails to save to the Wayback Machine (the captures there are blank pages). However I found Gates making what looks to be the same argument on a different site: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/06/1124265/bill-gates-ingenuity-climate-change-tech-investment/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/06/1124265/bill-gat...
josefritzishere 11mo ago
There is really no source that indicates greenhouse gas emissions are in decline unless the writer means over a very short, even immaterial period of time. With that opening gambit being either disengenusous or dishonest, it's hard to credit any of the deductions that follow. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
incomingpain 11mo ago
I actually really liked the article. I'm rather shocked because this article reads very similar to the messaging Jordan Peterson and Bjorn Lomborg for like 2 years.
cameldrv 11mo ago
Everyone who cares about climate change needs to stop talking about it in C to an American audience. 2 degrees sounds small, but 3.6 degrees F is significant. 3 degrees still sounds reasonably small, but 5.6 degrees F is getting to be a lot. Generally speaking Americans have no idea how much a 2 or 3 degree C difference is in F and so they just hear 2 or 3 degrees F.
- gmuslera 11mo ago
  More important than that, we are not talking about the temperature you are feeling right now where you are, but global average temperature, and in the context of the 1.5°C over the preindustrial average, we are talking about that average, kept over several years. What you feel locally is weather, including extreme weather. It can go to extremes in either direction, but with more global average temperature the system have more energy to increase the frequency and how extreme is that weather. And speed matters. The baseline of preindustrial times is because we started the high emissions trend around there, but we reached 0.5°C by 1930-1950, and 1.0°C by 2015-2017. And the first full calendar year that had over 1.5°C over preindustrial times was 2024, but we need more years to average to talk about the same numbers.
  - cameldrv 11mo ago
    Yes there are a lot of complicated second order effects from an increase in the average, but if you simply told people "We're looking at temperatures everywhere going up by 5.6 degrees on average, all the time", that sounds like a lot. 3 degrees doesn't sound like that much.
    - gmuslera 11mo ago
      The problem is that you don't see the averages. What you see is that in some places for some days the temperature was 40°C over what they used to have in that time of the year (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/03/24/parts-of-antarctica-have-been-40degc-warmer-than-their-march-average https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/03/24/parts-of...), the heat dome of 2021 should be a good warning (or warming) of the kind of extreme weather that 1.5°C could bring and increase frequency. Or the disruption of the polar vortex bringing extremely cold temperatures. What you see in your normal everyday life is that things that you were used to are not that way anymore. And that there are some activities (like agriculture) that depend on some stability on weather. At least till we cross another threshold and things not seen in human history start to happen enough to be noticed, but by then it will be too late. What we need is to trust the measurements.
1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
Actual title: "Three tough truths about climate" For better or worse, the HN software automatically edits titles. Perhaps the word "Three" was removed automaticallly. Submitters can fix these changes by using the "edit" URL
Blackstrat 11mo ago
I don't disagree with his new perspective. OTH, the cynical side of me thinks that the power requirements for AI/Microsoft may be playing into this new position.
legitster 11mo ago
I think one of the most important things the "message" has gotten wrong is that you personally need to make big sacrifices and suffer: Buy a worse/more expensive car. Stop eating meat. Don't use disposable plates. Stop travelling. This is the stuff that fuels reactionaries. Really the most impactful stuff is at the margins anyway: Whether your electricity comes from coal or solar. How many rare earths can we mine and recycle? Do you have a lawn or xeriscape? The story here is not really that Gates has changed his mind (he never got rid of his private jet after all) it's the emphasis that doomscrolling is counterproductive.
- port11 11mo ago
  The personal sacrifice cult was largely put forth by corporations and corporate media insisting on an individual's carbon footprint. That said, it's somewhat unfair that, say, 1 Australian can have the footprint of 7–8 Indian people. So some changes are good overall, such as eating more vegetables and less carbon intensive meat (which also improves land usage). I agree with you about other fringe choices, but most people can't control the energy mix of their country. We can advocate for better choices at the high level, which is great news because people have been doing just that. I do find the positive tone of the climate models a bit worrying: some of the projections still consider permafrost decay to be fatal to most of the human race.
1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
"Thirty years ago, when I was running Microsoft, I wrote a long memo to employees about a major strategic pivot we had to make: embracing the internet in every product we made." The impact of that "pivot" has been catastrophic as we are reminded every time the news reports the damages associated with remotely exploited flaws in Microsoft's software and the public's dissatisfaction with "automatic updates" (i.e., being part of the Redmond botnet), a feeble attempt to "fix" these flaws through a never ending game of whack-a-mole

109 points by ezequiel-garzon 11mo ago

raffael_de 11mo ago

[flagged]

tomhow 11mo ago
Please don't post flamebait or take threads off on generic tangents on HN. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
JumpinJack_Cash 11mo ago
> > Tell us some tough truths about Epstein island! Rich people want to get laid with young , attractive girls who are also well mannered and somewhat cultured and socially mature Epstein was the curator of that list, kinda like an elite's elite escort agency. Is the above so hard to grasp and reconcile with? The whole thing has been blown way out of proprtion
tzs 11mo ago
> @BillGates: Tell us some tough truths about Epstein island! There's no evidence Gates was ever on Epstein's island, so it is unlikely he has anything interesting to say about it. The only known connection Gates has to Epstein is a few business meetings. > But Kudos on acknowledging the growing evidence that the climate change movement is mostly about ideology, money, power and redistributing wealth. The article did no such thing.

jader201 11mo ago

> 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. Interesting and different perspective vs. what many others often say (but that’s one of the points he’s making). I feel a lot of climate articles — and the comments attached to their HN threads — tend to favor more of the doomsday message he’s arguing against here.

benrutter 11mo ago
Climate change is so confusing to message about in this sense, because the future is not decided. We're on track to warm the planet far past the point that of sustaining something you and I would recognise as human society. That said, we're also changing course which has the opportunity to mitigate things. The meta part is, if everyone thinks we'll change course, that affects whether we do. There's no straight prediction that can be made.
hmahonen 11mo ago
Question is that how long is foreseeable future? It is very likely that the time span for an individual is long enough that the change does not matter. Still the future will arrive and most likely sooner than we thought.
ares623 11mo ago
That’s assuming over half the world’s population will just say “oh well, this is my life now. I wouldn’t want to bother those people in the good parts.” There will be upheavals everywhere.
supriyo-biswas 11mo ago
> Interesting and different perspective vs. what many others often say (but that’s one of the points he’s making). The uncharitable interpretation being that he's trying to toe the line for the current US administration, while still signaling that he's part of the communities that he typically inhabits as part of his charity work.
jshen 11mo ago
He says that as if he's certain it can't possibly, even a remote possibility, lead to societal collapse. First, there is no way he can be certain about that. Second, what is an acceptable probability for an existential threat? That's the real question to answer, and he didn't attempt to answer it.
- Retric 11mo ago
  societal collapse != humanities demise. Climate change could do a lot of damage it’s just not extinction level damage. Even large scale nuclear war based on current stockpiles isn’t going to result in extinction.

andsoitis 11mo ago

”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.” How do we change incentives to be long-term aligned rather than counter-productive, anxious short-termism?

ACCount37 11mo ago
I'm afraid that humanity doesn't have sufficiently advanced incentive-engineering technology for that. Solving climate change is really really hard. Solving mass media being biased towards alarmism and allergic to nuance, decision-makers in politics and at corporations favoring short-term thinking? Hard enough to make solving climate change look easy.
mlrtime 11mo ago
>How do we change incentives to be long-term aligned rather than counter-productive, anxious short-termism? Easy? You develop technology that makes it win-win for everyone. If you give me a choice to improve my QoL or reduce my cost AND reduce my carbon footprint at the same time, I make that choice. If I have a choice between reducing carbon footprint, but my QoL goes down or costs go up, I won't choose it.

p1dda 11mo ago

Gates, who is not a climate scientist, not even a scientist, spreading misinformation to try to make money for his investments just like he always does.

Yiin 11mo ago
can you elaborate what part of his post is misinformation and why? I'm no fan of the dude for many reasons, but making money doesn't seem to be on his priority list as of lately
- p1dda 11mo ago
  try googling Gates investment climate change
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    I did, it says Gates has invested in companies and stands to make money. Specifically Breakthrough Energy, a venture capital firm backing clean energy startups, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, his philanthropy foundation. Is it supposed to something about scientists and how he can afford some really good ones to tell him sciencey things about science so when Bill Gates says something sciencey, we should probably pay more attention to it than random HN comment that presented no credentials?
wiredpancake 11mo ago
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kamranjon 11mo ago
He really was one of the first techies to project genius when he really just had antisocial behavior - sort of paving the way for folks like Musk and Thiel. There is such a distortion field around Gates that has been meticulously crafted for years, really since his rebranding after those antitrust trials that ruined his image.
- 11mo ago

globalnode 11mo ago

You cant throw money at the problem and buy your way out of damaging the environment by participating in carbon credit scams. Plus the whole write up feels like a giant opinion piece designed to maintain the status quo. Thats what you want if you're one of the richest in the world right?

Mistletoe 11mo ago

Fourth tough truth about climate change: humans need LLM AI like a fish needs a bicycle and Microsoft is helping burn down the world to give it to them, reversing any progress that was made in reducing emissions and climate change in order to pump the stock price in the AI bubble. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ... >Given the direction AI is headed—more personalized, able to reason and solve complex problems on our behalf, and everywhere we look—it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be. According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.

GaryBluto 11mo ago
Gates isn't involved in M$ anymore last time I checked.

dagss 11mo ago

He is mentioning geologic hydrogen as a new energy source. Surely that is a fossil fuel?

foota 11mo ago
It's a fossil fuel, but burning it doesn't produce a greenhouse gas. It's similar to nuclear in the sense that it's a limited resource, but doesn't produce emissions.
lmm 11mo ago
Perhaps technically, but it's a zero-carbon one which is what matters.
fulafel 11mo ago
Yep, like uranium is from the fossils of ancient uranium golems.
aitchnyu 11mo ago
My Kagi-fu is failing me. IIRC people have drilled into underground reserves and piped it to a generator in farming areas. Its relatively low cost.

fulafel 11mo ago

Interesting that there's zero mention of regulation, even thought that's cheap and effective in ramping down fossils use as proven by the carbon trading system in EU.

tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
Carbon taxes are probably the most effective tool but politically unpalatable.
- fulafel 11mo ago
  What's the advantage over the so far politically palatable carbon trading systems? Seems to me the end result is pretty much the same, except in carbon trading systems the market mechanism automatically adjusts the price to the available quota.
  - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
    The advantage is that they work. Carbon trading schemes get watered down to the point that they are ineffective.

IlikeKitties 11mo ago

The important thing to remember is that some of those bad parts where people will die from heat have nukes. Like Pakistan [0]. [1] https://www.arabnews.com/node/2352831/pakistan https://www.arabnews.com/node/2352831/pakistan

fragmede 11mo ago

getting the whole world to agree on climate accords didn't work. we blew past the 1 degree allowance we had budgeted for ourselves, so global action together is off the table. What will work, is extraordinary efforts by smaller groups. There's a lot of hard work by tiny groups and individuals to technologies that don't need the whole world to agree to collective action in order to save the planet. The obvious science fiction idea is to put sunglasses between the Earth and the sun, which is a ludicrous idea, because you'd need an insane amount of capability to lift things into space and place them far away from Earth. Once there, you'd just blackmail all the Earth's governments into paying you so the solar panels they rely on will work in order for your venture to be profitable.

foota 11mo ago
This isn't far off from their point, albeit without the geoengineering. Reducing the green premium solves the collective action problem.

NedF 11mo ago

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ACCount37 11mo ago

It's true. Climate change is not an extinction threat. Never was, and certainly isn't now. Climate change is the COVID of global natural disasters. Is it worth fighting? Yes. Can you do absolutely nothing about it and get away with it? Also yes. Cue the lackluster efforts. The "really bad" +4C scenarios still have a death toll larger than that of WW2 - but spread out in time and space, across many decades and many countries. And the most vulnerable countries? The countries that are already on the brink. Climate change is not the "great equalizer" people want it to be. In those "bad" scenarios, the main source of lethality for climate change is: agricultural failures, leading to local shortages and global price spikes, leading to famine. First world countries can eat a sharp +40% spike in food prices, at the cost of quality of life - but there are numerous countries where such a spike would have a death toll attached to it.

mariusor 11mo ago
And what do populations with a death sentence hanging over their heads usually do? Oh yeah, they take up arms and try to invade their better off neighbours. Maybe that's a worst case scenario, but the better ones still include many millions of people displaced towards more temperate zones. It will lead to the greatest migration humanity ever suffered and I'm not sure that in a scenario of scant resources, that's going to go on in a peaceful and dignified manner.
- ACCount37 11mo ago
  The obvious counterpoint to any "hordes of climate refugees will destroy the first world countries" is that borders exist, and machine guns were invented over a century ago. The reality of modern warfare doesn't favor large forces, poorly organized and underequipped, that are attacking reasonably well prepared defense positions. Now, is there a will to use all the tools of modern warfare against climate refugees? Currently, no. But if "hordes of climate refugees will destroy the first world countries" stopped being a distant theoretical concern, and became a practical one? If there were real examples of border checkpoints in first world countries being breached by force, with border security overran, and thousands of somewhat armed and somewhat violent climate refugees pouring in through the breach? I expect that to change very quickly.

picafrost 11mo ago

> So I urge that community, at COP30 and beyond, to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare. Like addressing the exponential growth of income inequality? Unsurprisingly not mentioned at all. Might mean that billionaires have to give up their carbon credit purchases and then how could they be dismissive about their own emissions? Bill is one of the better ones with his personal capital allocation. He could've just tried to create the fastest sailboat racing team or something. But I find it extremely difficult to take the wealthy seriously when they speak about carbon emissions and climate change. It’s like hearing an arsonist lecture on fire safety. > Thirty years ago, when I was running Microsoft, I wrote a long memo to employees about a major strategic pivot we had to make: embracing the internet in every product we made. Is this the one that lead to the term "embrace, extend, extinguish"?

tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
>Is this the one that lead to the term "embrace, extend, extinguish"? It's the one that gave us IE6.

simpaticoder 11mo ago

Gates is making a speculative case that climate change can be (should be) fought with the needs of the global poor at top-of-mind. He acknowledges the apparent zero-sum nature of it: impoverished people face much greater and more immediate threats than climate change, and fossil fuel tech (for example) really does address those urgent threats effectively. He solves this conundrum by speculating that we can have our cake (help the global poor) and eat it too (slow climate change) by inventing new tools and methods. I hope he's right. I'm glad he's doing this advocacy. By doing so he's fighting two popular opinions, first that climate change is a hoax, and second, that climate change must be addressed even if it means sacrificing the well-being of the global poor. That said, I have grave concerns that Gates is simply wrong, that we cannot invent our way out of both climate change and the suffering of the global poor. His many remarkable mentions of AI do not, in my opinion, lend strength to his argument, nor does his mention of "almost commercialized" fusion. The former being a gimmick, the latter being forever 30 years away. If our hopes rest on tech like that, then we must prepare to be devastated and pick one side of the zero-sum.

benrutter 11mo ago
> That said, I have grave concerns that Gates is simply wrong, that we cannot invent our way out of both climate change and the suffering of the global poor. I feel positive around whether or not we can- renewable and battery technology in incredible at the moment and we could shift quickly to a much less devastating track if the political will was there. That said, without the political story, technology itself can't change things. We've seen this by the fact thay renewable technology advances have also come alongside technology advances in the fossil fuel industry, like fracking. Around a 1/3 of CO2 emision is down to agriculture, which is mostly meat (and of that mostly beef). There's no tech fix required here, since humans can survive easily without beef, but something would need to change economically or otherwise so that the CO2 impact of food factors into our collective diets.
mlrtime 11mo ago
>That said, I have grave concerns that Gates is simply wrong, that we cannot invent our way out of both climate change and the suffering of the global poor. My take on this is that he has thought about this longer than anyone posting here and has the data to back it up... that is there are no other solutions given human nature.

OtherShrezzing 11mo ago

I’m not sure this article is especially helpful. It’s addressed to the attendees of COP, but the attendees of COP already believe (almost unanimously) that adaptation has equal importance to mitigation. And it’s one of the only forums where poorer & disaffected nations are given a real opportunity. I’m also not sure that anyone anywhere earnestly believes that climate change is an extinction level event that’ll render the entire planet unliveable. Certainly not the people at COP. The piece seems unnecessarily broadly combative and contrarian.

getnormality 11mo ago
If everyone already agrees with it, why would it be viewed as combative and contrarian?
ACCount37 11mo ago
> I’m also not sure that anyone anywhere earnestly believes that climate change is an extinction level event that’ll render the entire planet unliveable. Certainly not the people at COP. A lot of people do believe that, unfortunately. Decades worth of the most alarmist coverage possible sure didn't help the public awareness. Now, people at COP? Hopefully not. But COP doesn't end with the people at COP. And there are a lot of people in this very thread whose reaction to "climate change cannot cause extinction of humankind" is shock and disbelief.
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
  >A lot of people do believe that, unfortunately. No they don't.

jgord 11mo ago

Before I read the article, Ill summarize the facts that seem to be hard and true about climate : - we are nearing or at +1.5C above pre-industrial baseline - human carbon burning CO2 emissions are at a max and likely long plateau - mean temp is rising by around +0.3C per decade - we will be nearing +2.0C in around 15 years, 2040 give or take - warming is mainly caused by us humans burning carbon, emitting CO2 and some CH4 - if we reach net-zero, we will be at peak CO2 and thus peak heat, for a long while In addition, the only economically viable way to bring down the temp seems to be deliberate pollution by emitting sulphur or other particles aka Solar Radiation Management to brighten clouds, reduce heat absorption by the ocean. Volcanoes and shipping fuels have essentially proven that this brings down the temperature, in the short term. We geo-engineered our way into this hot mess, and we will need to geo-engineer our way out of it. If the temp reaches +2.5 or +3C .. I think that means quite a lot of crop failure, forced migration, geopolitical tension, lack of stable food supply.. and death to a large number of humans seems to follow logically from that. So, now Ill look at the article to see if any of these tough truths were mentioned .. sorta-kinda no-so-much, it seems like he thinks things are not that urgent. ?!?

lucabs 11mo ago

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johngossman 11mo ago

This is one of these nuanced takes that will please few. It acknowledges all sorts of uncertainty and adopts ethical priorities that cannot be established empirically even if (unlikely) the facts are universally agreed upon. I applaud the attempt and wish there could be real debate over this and other complex positions.

next_xibalba 11mo ago
Agreed. But I think it is also worth pointing out that many climate activists (and, I think, the predominant climate narrative) has really shot itself in the foot with the extinction talk. I get it. It's hard to get people to care when you say, "it will probably be pretty unpleasant, and extremely unpleasant in some places." It's a lot easier to get people very excited when your message is, "this is definitely an extinction level event." But the latter is a lie. And eventually lies get outed. And then whoever was telling the lie loses credibility. And possibly the pendulum swings too far in the other direction–"there is definitely nothing to worry about with respect to the climate."

superultra 11mo ago

This feels like someone in a marathon deciding to quit because they just ran really well for the last 10 minutes, with the assumption that since they were running really fast there’s no reason to think they won’t keep running fast. It’s deeply flawed logic. The other issue is that while he might be right, the worst and biggest consequences of being wrong will not affect Bill. Or, frankly, anyone reading this comment. It’s such a complicated problem for us humans because we often struggle to conceptualize beyond our own tribes, let alone humans who won’t exist for decades. But the problem is that IF climate scientists are right - and other than a few cheery cherry picked stats, Bill has no evidence saying otherwise - then the longer we do nothing the bigger the impact. Will humanity die? Probably not. But will it drastically affect QoL for nearly all humans on the planet save the 1%? Probably.

mlrtime 11mo ago
Right, but he knows this and he's drawing up his knowledge and solutions. You can point this out, but what solutions do you offer? And I'm sure you can paste some articles with solutions, but I mean actual solutions that people would be willing to change for, not hypotheticals.

mk89 11mo ago

Curious to see who are the first who will boycott MS/Azure/etc because of this.

silexia 11mo ago

Bill Gates gets attacked by both the right and the left. But the truth is that he has made huge progress for human welfare in working to eradicate serious diseases as well as by bringing practical solutions to climate issues.

mlrtime 11mo ago
>Bill Gates gets attacked by both the right and the left. My first instinct is he's doing something right then... the problem is policy and human nature.
JumpinJack_Cash 11mo ago
> > Bill Gates gets attacked by both the right and the left They attack him because he constantly yaps about stuff without being elected or yaps stuff that is not even within the purpose of his 501c3 foundation. I don't know why he behaves that way honestly, being relevant in the discourse might attract talent to work at the foundation but also produces attacks on the foundation, I guess in his calculus he comes out ahead.

elihu 11mo ago

> "All greenhouse gas emissions come from one of five sources" > (Graphic shows electricity generation 28%, transportation 16%, agriculture 19%, buildings 7%, manufacturing 30%) There's another large source of human greenhouse gas emissions that will perhaps be the most difficult to do anything about and which as far as I know we don't have much in the way of hard numbers about, and that is emissions from military activity. Not just wars, but ordinary peace-time training, patrol operations, hauling stuff around, and so on.

tylervigen 11mo ago
It's not separate. That would be included in manufacturing, transportation, and electricity.
xtiansimon 11mo ago
Ha! And military combat vehicles are exempt from emissions regulations.

Ekaros 11mo ago

Asking people to lower their living standards will not work. So next best thing is to prepare for future changes with potential solutions now. This is most realistic approach I can see. Start now developing solutions that then have to be put into place.

Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
Inflation is already lowering the living standards of millions, but without any reduction on ghg. So the most realistic approach is that we have to deal both reduced living standards AND a changing environment. But the rich will be rich, so there's that.
- robocat 11mo ago
  > But the rich will be rich If you're in a developed country, you are the rich.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
    For now.

czottmann 11mo ago

Unasked-for meta complaint about the site, not the article itself: I hate that thing where you visit a blog post (judging from the URL) yet the blog post is seemingly endless (judging from the scrollbar), and when you scroll down you hop into the next blog post (URL just changes). The scrollbar is useless in that case, I can't gauge the real length of the article. The Gates Foundation has more money than God, maybe spend a tiny little bit of it on a good UI designer, yeah?

tasuki 11mo ago
> The Gates Foundation has more money than God, maybe spend a tiny little bit of it on a good UI designer, yeah? I think it's precisely the problem: they hired an expensive designer, and the designer, for the obscene amount of money they were getting, felt like they had to do something special...
- card_zero 11mo ago
  It specially crashes my browser when I try to read it, and specially fails to save to the Wayback Machine (the captures there are blank pages). However I found Gates making what looks to be the same argument on a different site: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/06/1124265/bill-gates-ingenuity-climate-change-tech-investment/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/06/1124265/bill-gat...

josefritzishere 11mo ago

There is really no source that indicates greenhouse gas emissions are in decline unless the writer means over a very short, even immaterial period of time. With that opening gambit being either disengenusous or dishonest, it's hard to credit any of the deductions that follow. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions

incomingpain 11mo ago

I actually really liked the article. I'm rather shocked because this article reads very similar to the messaging Jordan Peterson and Bjorn Lomborg for like 2 years.

cameldrv 11mo ago

Everyone who cares about climate change needs to stop talking about it in C to an American audience. 2 degrees sounds small, but 3.6 degrees F is significant. 3 degrees still sounds reasonably small, but 5.6 degrees F is getting to be a lot. Generally speaking Americans have no idea how much a 2 or 3 degree C difference is in F and so they just hear 2 or 3 degrees F.

gmuslera 11mo ago
More important than that, we are not talking about the temperature you are feeling right now where you are, but global average temperature, and in the context of the 1.5°C over the preindustrial average, we are talking about that average, kept over several years. What you feel locally is weather, including extreme weather. It can go to extremes in either direction, but with more global average temperature the system have more energy to increase the frequency and how extreme is that weather. And speed matters. The baseline of preindustrial times is because we started the high emissions trend around there, but we reached 0.5°C by 1930-1950, and 1.0°C by 2015-2017. And the first full calendar year that had over 1.5°C over preindustrial times was 2024, but we need more years to average to talk about the same numbers.
- cameldrv 11mo ago
  Yes there are a lot of complicated second order effects from an increase in the average, but if you simply told people "We're looking at temperatures everywhere going up by 5.6 degrees on average, all the time", that sounds like a lot. 3 degrees doesn't sound like that much.
  - gmuslera 11mo ago
    The problem is that you don't see the averages. What you see is that in some places for some days the temperature was 40°C over what they used to have in that time of the year (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/03/24/parts-of-antarctica-have-been-40degc-warmer-than-their-march-average https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/03/24/parts-of...), the heat dome of 2021 should be a good warning (or warming) of the kind of extreme weather that 1.5°C could bring and increase frequency. Or the disruption of the polar vortex bringing extremely cold temperatures. What you see in your normal everyday life is that things that you were used to are not that way anymore. And that there are some activities (like agriculture) that depend on some stability on weather. At least till we cross another threshold and things not seen in human history start to happen enough to be noticed, but by then it will be too late. What we need is to trust the measurements.

1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago

Actual title: "Three tough truths about climate" For better or worse, the HN software automatically edits titles. Perhaps the word "Three" was removed automaticallly. Submitters can fix these changes by using the "edit" URL

Blackstrat 11mo ago

I don't disagree with his new perspective. OTH, the cynical side of me thinks that the power requirements for AI/Microsoft may be playing into this new position.

legitster 11mo ago

I think one of the most important things the "message" has gotten wrong is that you personally need to make big sacrifices and suffer: Buy a worse/more expensive car. Stop eating meat. Don't use disposable plates. Stop travelling. This is the stuff that fuels reactionaries. Really the most impactful stuff is at the margins anyway: Whether your electricity comes from coal or solar. How many rare earths can we mine and recycle? Do you have a lawn or xeriscape? The story here is not really that Gates has changed his mind (he never got rid of his private jet after all) it's the emphasis that doomscrolling is counterproductive.

port11 11mo ago
The personal sacrifice cult was largely put forth by corporations and corporate media insisting on an individual's carbon footprint. That said, it's somewhat unfair that, say, 1 Australian can have the footprint of 7–8 Indian people. So some changes are good overall, such as eating more vegetables and less carbon intensive meat (which also improves land usage). I agree with you about other fringe choices, but most people can't control the energy mix of their country. We can advocate for better choices at the high level, which is great news because people have been doing just that. I do find the positive tone of the climate models a bit worrying: some of the projections still consider permafrost decay to be fatal to most of the human race.

1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago

"Thirty years ago, when I was running Microsoft, I wrote a long memo to employees about a major strategic pivot we had to make: embracing the internet in every product we made." The impact of that "pivot" has been catastrophic as we are reminded every time the news reports the damages associated with remotely exploited flaws in Microsoft's software and the public's dissatisfaction with "automatic updates" (i.e., being part of the Redmond botnet), a feeble attempt to "fix" these flaws through a never ending game of whack-a-mole