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Facts Matter
Bill Gates Admits There Is No ‘Doomsday’ Risk From Global Warming: Let’s Examine the Models
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- [00:00]
Roman
Ahead of the United Nations 30th Annual Climate Conference, otherwise known as COP 30, Bill Gates released a memo that you could say surprised a lot of people. That's because in his memo, he seemingly changed his position on climate change, acknowledging for the first time ever publicly that there is no doomsday risk from global warming. Now, the memo itself is pretty long. It's over 5,000 words and it's filled with data graphs, charts and anecdotes laying out his argument that climate change is not going to lead to the end of civilization. Secondly, that measuring global temperatures is not the best measure for progress on this particular issue. And that thirdly, the money being spent on climate related issues would be better allocated towards improving human health as well as human prosperity. To get an idea of his thesis, here was his opening salvo in the memoir quote, There is a doomsday view of climate change that goes something like in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us. Just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature. Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. 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. Now that's wild because that is a complete 180 from the narrative that's been pushed over the last decade plus. And as just one example of thousands right here in New York City, over in Union Square, there is this massive doomsday clock looking over the city, which is literally counting down second by second, the, the time that we have left before the supposed effects of global warming become irreversible. That clock, by the way, it was set up right around the time when you had several lawmakers here in the US begin to float the idea publicly that we only had 12 years left before the world ends. Here is, for instance, AOC speaking on this issue back in 2019.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Millennials and people and, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we're like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. And your biggest issue is, your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it?
- [02:26]
Roman
And it was a few months after that speech when that clock in Union Square in New York, which by the way, just used to be a normal clock, which told the time it was changed to instead be a countdown doomsday clock. And so, given this context, this new memo that came from Bill Gates is a real sea change. In fact, when he was asked specifically about the way that this memo will be perceived by the hardline climate activist types, here is what Bill Gates said on a segment over at cnbc.
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CNBC Interviewer
When the climate activists who have been very supportive of what you've done and you've been very supportive of what they've done, read this. And if Greta Thunberg is reading this and saying to herself, my goodness, he seems like he is reversing himself, what would you tell her?
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Bill Gates
I'd say, wasn't the goal here to improve human lives? And shouldn't we, in our awareness of how little generosity there is to help measure, you know, should we get them a measles vaccine or should we do some climate related activity? And if we stop funding all vaccines and that saved you 0.1 degree, would that be a smart trade off? That's the kind of question we have to ask. So I'm a climate activist, but I'm also a child survival activist.
- [03:50]
Roman
And indeed, with the publishing of that memo, it appears that the Overton window on this particular subject has really shifted. In fact, I mean, there was a period of time just a few years ago when publishing a video on YouTube saying basically the same thing as Bill Gates is saying now would have gotten your video and maybe even your channel demoted. And then subsequently the legacy news outlets would come out and write hit pieces against you. But now that's changed. For instance, after he published that memo, the front page of the New York Times website was promoting a guest essay that was titled Bill Gates has a Point. And so we're living basically in a new world. And just to give you an idea of how drastic this change in narrative actually is, let's juxtapose Bill Gates new position with something that Al Gore said during a presentation at the 2023 World Economic Forum and again just two short years ago.
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Al Gore
And all the greenhouse gas pollution is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima Class Atomic bombs exploding every single day on the Earth. That's what's boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees.
- [05:06]
Roman
Then roughly just a year later in 2024, you had that same apocalyptic doomsday message echoed by the UN Secretary General who said the following during a United nations environmental assembly Quote, our planet is on the brink, ecosystems are collapsing, our climate is imploding, and humanity is to blame. And so obviously a stark contrast to the much more measured statement coming from Bill Gates just a year later. And so, given this new development, as well as at least supposedly this new paradigm wherein we can actually discuss this topic openly, I think it's a good opportunity to look under the hood and examine how exactly these doomsday narratives were pushed over the last several years. Because despite the huge number of articles that have been published and speeches like this saying basically that there's universal consensus in the scientific community surrounding the climate, not all scientists agree. And the ones that don't agree, they're not quacks. Case in point, you have Mr. John Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize in physics back in the year 2022. And Mr. Clauser, he saw the data a bit differently. Speaking about the topic, here's what he said. The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that, that threatens the world's economy and the well being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock journalism, pseudoscience. In my opinion. There is no real climate crisis. And so the question that naturally arises out of this is how can there be such a vast discrepancy on a topic as extensively researched as the climate? I mean, this isn't like a small difference of opinion. These are two completely different views of on the very fundamentals, on the one hand you had people saying that the oceans are literally being boiled and the Earth is on the brink. On the other hand, you have people saying there is no real climate crisis at all. Well, we here at the Epoch Times, we were able to speak with Mr. Stephen Koonin. He's a theoretical physicist, a faculty professor over at NYU, and he was previously the Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. department of Energy under President Barack Obama. And having studied the production of climate related data for the last several decades, Professor Koonin told us here at the Epoch Times, that I've watched a growing chasm between what the politicians, the media and the NGOs were saying and what the science actually said. Nobody has an incentive to portray scientific truth and facts. Now, Professor Koonin published a book several years ago titled what Climate Science Tells Us, what It doesn't and why It Matters. That book went on to become a bestseller and, and what it essentially did is to analyze the process by which climate data goes from these dense thousand page scientific reports into headline news for public global consumption. If you want to check out that book for yourself, I'll throw a link to the Amazon page for it. You can find it down in the description box below which I should mention is that description box right below those like and subscribe buttons, both of which I hope you smash so this content can reach ever more people. Now according to his book, one of the most ubiquitous sources of this top line climate data is it comes from an organization called the ipcc, which stands for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This particular organization was established back in the year 1988 by both the United nations as well as the World Meteorological Organization. And according to their website, the IPCC is a collection of scientists and government appointees that are dedicated to assessing the science on climate change. And as a practical matter, the ipcc it functions as both a scientific body but also as a political body. The IPCC does not conduct its own research, but rather assembles teams of hundreds of scientists in working groups that collect reports from scientific journals regarding climate change, its effects, and what should be done about it. About every seven years, an IPCC working group, called Working Group 1 synthesizes the latest reports into assessment reports, often several thousand pages thick, which are then reviewed and edited by government appointees from the 195 member nations. Now, two years ago, in 2023, the IPCC released their sixth assessment report. You can see it up on your screen. However, the information compiled in that report, while seemingly objective, was perhaps a little bit less so. Quote the information on which the assessment reports are based often has a bias from the start, critics say, because research grants typically fund studies that support the prevailing narrative on climate change, and because scientific journals often avoid publishing studies that suggest climate change is not dire. Meaning that because most scientific journals have fallen in line with the prevailing position regarding climate change, papers that don't conform to that prevailing conclusion have a hard time getting published. And actually those papers have a hard time even getting funded in the first place, given the fact that research grants are typically not doled out too easily on studies which might poke holes in the climate change narrative. And so even if you wind up compiling thousands of these types of studies, you might assume that you're getting an accurate picture. However, because there is distortion at the level of the journals themselves, all the underlying conclusions in the studies, they've fallen into a type of groupthink. For instance, when describing this whole situation, you you have Professor William Happer, who is a professor of physics over at Princeton University. He told us here at the Epoch Times, the Following quote, any literature that supports alarmism is promoted and any that does not is rejected. The source of much of today's climate data comes from centers whose generous funding would cease if climate hysteria were to abate. Likewise, you have Professor Richard Lindzen, who is a professor of meteorology over at MIT and who actually by the way, served as one of the scientists on Working Group 1 at the IPCC which actually releases their assessment reports. And he told us here at the Epoch Times the following quote, the IPCC itself is only studying anthropogenic man made climate change. It doesn't do anything regarding natural climate change. And there's a severe technical shortcoming because you can't do things like attribution unless you know what natural variability is. And here's the interesting part. Despite all that, Professor Koonin, he told us that quote, when you read the assessment reports, focusing mostly on the science, they're actually pretty good. The data presented in the assessment reports is a relatively sober analysis. However, it provides little support for the narrative of climate catastrophe, at least as far as what has been observed to date. As a concrete example of what he means by this, if you look at chapter 12 of the most recent assessment report, you'll find the IPCC's assessment on the impact of extreme weather events and the tables that they provide in that chapter. It show that extreme weather events that have already emerged are limited. Furthermore, it states a low confidence for any increase in floods, rainstorms, landslides, drought, fire, weather, cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, sandstorms, dust storms, hail, sea level rise, coastal flooding and erosion. It also indicates a low confidence regarding a decrease in snow, glaciers, ice sheets as well as lake river sea ice beyond the Arctic region. Furthermore, it's perhaps worth noting that those assessments from the UN's IPCC are, are actually supported by the findings of other organizations as well. For instance, the national oceanic and Atmospheric administration conducted a 30 year analysis of tornado trends and they found that, quote, the number of strong and violent tornadoes hasn't varied much since 1970. Likewise, another report in Nature magazine from the year 2022, it found a, quote, declining tropical cyclone frequency under global warming. On average, the global annual number of tropical cyclones has decreased by 13% in the 20th century compared to compared with the pre industrial baseline. Likewise the Drought Severity Index which is published by the epa, it shows that quote, no material increase in droughts in the United States between 1895 and 2020. And so given this underlying reality, you might have a very obvious question if all these different analyses, including I should mention the analysis from the UN themselves. If all of them say one thing, why are news reports inundated with the our climate is imploding and the oceans are boiling narratives? And the answer to that question appears to be twofold. Firstly, the public statements coming from both the IPCC as well as the un, they often diverge dramatically from what their own scientific reports actually say. And then secondly, the predictions of a dire future are based on models rather than observations. That's because alongside each of these assessment reports, the IPCC also releases a summary for policymakers. This summary, it distills down the large amount of data in the full report to just a short list of bullet points. Furthermore, to make it even easier for news outlets to I guess follow the correct narrative, the ipcc, it also produces headline statements as well as press releases to provide a concise narrative on climate change. Here is how Professor Koonin described the effect that all this has. Quote, the assessment report gets boiled down to the summary for policymakers. And while it's drafted by scientists, a small number of them, the government have to approve the summary line by line. And so you already have the potential for, let's say non scientific factors. Entering the summary for policymakers itself is 20 to 30 pages and the media have to cover that and they typically will cherry pick the most extreme parts of it. So that's how we get the distortions and then that is exacerbated by the politicians and seeing opportunity and distortion and the NGOs. And so, just as an example of what he means by that, despite having no increase in the number of tornadoes, cyclones, droughts, wildfires or floods that's attributed to climate change, the most recent IPCC headline statement, it warns that, quote, there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all with a very high confidence. And so this actually all gets to the very heart of the matter. Because much of the basis for climate alarmism comes not from observation, but rather from computer models, models that are thought to be highly accurate. For instance, the USDA conducted a study of climate models during a 50 year period between 1970 and 2020. And well, here's what they found. Observed changes in temperature and precipitation have generally been consistent with with the changes projected by earlier models. The accurate projections of future climate and hind casting of past climate makes us confident that models can reliably project changes in the climate. However, here too, if you look beneath the surface of the climate modeling industry and you just peel back a few layers, it all becomes questionable how reliable these projections actually are. To that point, speaking about these IPCC models, here is what Professor Koonin told us here at the epoch times, quote the IPCC draws upon its predictions based on average results from dozens of models which disagree wildly with one another. The average surface temperatures generated by the models in IPCC reports vary among themselves by around 3 degrees Celsius, or three times the amount of warming observed throughout the 20th century. The assessment reports downplay this embarrassment by focusing not on the actual temperature predictions where models diverge, but but rather on the predicted change in temperatures where models are more likely to coincide. Then on top of that, there's the process of tuning the models. Quote the models typically divide the earth up into grid cells, each a few tens of square miles. These grid cells are tuned in a process of hardwiring. The results from the cells to manual account for more random elements like cloud formations, storms or humidity, which the models can't predict but are material to temperature changes. Professor Koonin then went on to outline some of the problems that are present in that tuning. There are hundreds of such parameters because the climate system is complicated and has many different dimensions. And so as people tune the parameters differently, they get different results. Tuning also helps the models show results closer to observed data. But this highlights another shortcoming of the models. While purporting to predict the future, they often fail to reproduce historical temperatures. They also struggle to separate human influence from natural phenomena or all of which elevates the uncertainty of model predictions regarding human behavior. If you're trying as a politician or NGO or company to promote a narrative, you don't want to talk about the uncertainties. You just want to say it's going to be 5 degrees warmer and the world is going to hell. But obviously, I think we all know up until last week with the publishing of Bill Gates new memo. If you question that official narrative, well, you are likely to be branded a climate denier. However, here's the thing. If you take away all the hyperbole, here is what the underlying data actually shows us. At least according to Professor Koonin. Modest warming since the 1900s, 1.3 degrees Celsius at the global level. Despite that, by whatever measure you want to use, lifespan, nutrition, gdp, death rates from extreme events, it's all going in a positive direction. Sea level rise is continuing at just about a foot a century, but the actual and projected economic impacts of warming are are in the noise. Even the IPCC says it's small compared to many other things that determine human well being. And it's exactly the economic impacts that usually are not discussed. According to a report that was published by the Heritage foundation, quote modeling the costs and benefits to the United States of complying with the Paris Agreement and meeting the Biden administration's goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030 predicts these policies would reduce global temperatures, but by 0.5 degrees at the end of the century. Even with theoretical efficiency, we find the cost of the policy to be staggering. The economy would in aggregate lose $7.7 trillion of GDP through 2040, which is $87,000 per family of four. That's already pretty bad. But consider that's what the developed world will suffer in terms of the developing world, meaning the third world, if you would call it that, depriving them of fossil fuels will have absolute severe consequences. To that point, you have Professor Lindsen from MIT tell us the the billions of people who don't have energy, who don't have modern conveniences, they will be condemned to perpetual poverty. CO2 has played an important role in increasing agricultural productivity. So we'll see everyone paying more for food and more people starving. You are already seeing tragic consequences even in the United States where a whole generation of kids has been told that they have no future. They're not having children themselves because what's the point of having children in a world that's going to self destruct? Which actually brings us back full circle to Bill Gates memo. One of his central arguments is that the money currently being spent to supposedly fight climate change has not been spent well, to the detriment of other projects that could actually help human development. And by helping human development and getting people out of poverty, it'll make them more resilient to any climate related issues that might come down the road. Quote Is the money designated for climate being spent on the right things? I believe the answer is no. Sometimes the world acts as if any effort to fight climate change is as worthwhile as any other. As a result, less effective projects are diverting money and attention from efforts that will have more impact on the human condition. He then later goes on to give a more concrete reason to promote third world prosperity over over amorphous climate projects. A few years ago, researchers at the University of Chicago's Climate Impact Lab ran a thought experiment. What happens to the number of projected deaths from climate change when you account for the expected economic growth of low income countries over the rest of the century? The answer? It falls by more than 50%. This finding is exciting because it suggests a way forward. Since the economic growth that's projected for poor countries, which 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. And so, there you have it. If you'd like to read the entirety of Bill Gates new memo, I will throw a link to it. You'll be able to find it down in the description box below alongside the links to all my research notes for the rest of this episode and leave your thoughts in the comments below. Do you agree with Bill Gates assessment that focusing on human health and prosperity is just the best way forward overall? Or do you disagree with him and you believe that the world is ending so soon that we should divert all resources going to any other project to battle the climate change issue? Love to know your thoughts. Please leave them in the comments section below. I'll be reading them tonight as well as well into the week. And then until next time, I'm your host Roman from the Epoch Times. Stay informed and most importantly, stay free.