George Samuelson
After decades of making people feel guilty for simply living, the billionaire philanthropist now admits that he had the science wrong all along.
After decades of making people feel guilty for simply living, the billionaire philanthropist now admits that he had the science wrong all along and mankind is not perched on the precipice of destruction due to a warming planet.
For the past half a century or so, earth's inhabitants have lived under the illusion that cataclysmic climate change would soon decimate civilization. And the evil culprit was man himself. Every single human activity - from eating a hamburger to driving an automobile to boarding an aircraft - was declared complicit in turning the planet into a scorched, uninhabitable rock in just a few short years. This sort of thinking had an immeasurable impact on the collective psyche as it placed the world on a massive guilt trip.
Today, after years of mindless fearmongering, Bill Gates has changed his gloomy tone, admitting that there is hope for mankind after all. "Although climate change will have serious consequences-particularly for people in the poorest countries-it will not lead to humanity's demise," Gates admits in a 17-page memo. "People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further." (Gates's admission came just one day after the UN said humanity had missed its goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C, with the UN Secretary General warning of "devastating consequences" for the planet).
Perhaps if the Microsoft co-founder and college dropout held a degree in climatology, which he does not (he also does not hold a degree in virology, which did not stop him from dictating to the world about Covid-19 vaccines), we would have been spared years of political infighting, unnecessary expensive projects and bad decision-making on behalf of opportunist politicians. In hindsight, however, it is strange that so many people were duped by Gates and company when the science was so obviously wrongheaded.
The popular claim among the doomsayers proclaimed that many climate change impacts have been observed in the first decades of the 21st century, with 2024 the warmest year on record at +1.60 °C (2.88 °F) since regular tracking began in 1850. Yet, as is finally being recognized by many scientists, the year 1850 was a mere blink of an eye ago in terms of the Earth's age and there have been many fluctuations in global temperatures before that year. In fact, scientists have discovered that instead of a cooler planet prior to 1850 and the Industrial Revolution, there were long periods of time - millions of years ago - when ice caps on mountains had disappeared and the glaciers at the North and South Poles were almost nonexistent. Yet the planet did not die, it thrived.
Meanwhile, before the climate change alarmists had seized the narrative, climatologists were warning of just an opposite scenario - a global ice age, which are said to occur every 10,000 year or so (We are about 10,000 years into the current warm period called the Holocene). The fact that we are due for another ice age could actually offset some of the worst features of a warming planet, including rising sea levels, extreme weather patterns and out of control wildfires, which are mostly cyclical phenomenon. The planet has survived climate fluctuations before and it will survive them again.
In any case, it's worth remembering what the human race has had to endure in the face of bad science. As Greta Thunberg, 22, the passionate climate change alarmist, penned in an opinion piece for The Guardian: "But the climate is not just changing. It is destabilising. It is breaking down. The delicately balanced natural patterns and cycles that are a vital part of the systems that sustain life on Earth are being disrupted, and the consequences could be catastrophic."
Long before Ms. Thunberg had seized the spotlight, which saw her preach to global leaders from the pulpit of the United Nations, climate Cassandras have been making their apocalyptic warnings. In 1992, U.S. Senator Al Gore released the New York Times bestseller, 'Earth in the Balance,' which sounded the false alarm on global warming. To put it briefly, we were warned that if mankind did not stop polluting the atmosphere with carbon emissions in one decade the planet would be toast. Well, a decade came and went and that book was followed up in 2006 with another Gore tome entitled, 'An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It.'
It was in 'An Inconvenient Truth' where the politician and environmentalist proclaimed that people would have to get used to the idea of radically changing their lives. In a section called 'The Politicization of Global Warming', Gore stated: "As for why so many people still resist what the facts clearly show, I think, in part, the reason is that the truth about the climate crisis is an inconvenient one that means... we are going to have to change the way we live our lives."
In other words, here was a universal crisis that would allow for particular governments to assert direct control over people's lives. This could best be described as 'authoritarian environmentalism' based on the projections of around half of the scientific community (the remaining dissenting voices were largely ignored by the media). The imminent dystopian scenario awaiting mankind was captured in an article published by the World Economic Forum shockingly entitled, "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better."
In the 2010s, amidst this relentless cloud of doom, the Democratic Party unveiled its Green New Deal, which aimed to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and called for the U.S. to shift away from fossil fuels. The plan was shot down in the Senate in March 2019, yet when Joe Biden won the presidency later that year, many of its ridiculously ambitious proposals went into effect.
One notable result of the left's delirious desire to achieve "net zero emissions" by 2030 was the cancellation of the Keystone XL, a 9 billion dollar project that would have brought 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Canada's Western tar sands to U.S. refiners. As a result of that calamitous decision, the American people lost an opportunity for a safe and easily accessible form of energy, as opposed to the current one that flows from the unpredictable Middle East. There was also the question of thousands of good-paying jobs lost in the bargain.
All told, the bad science peddled by Gates and his ilk surrounding the myth of climate change cost global taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars if not more. It was an exorbitant lesson and one that must never be repeated.