Bill Gates Gets Waffly On Climate Change; Activists Get Nervous

The influential billionaire Bill
Gates has done some rethinking
on how to fund the battle against
climate change. That has climate
activists nervous and has 
the Trump people falsely
crowing they've "won" the
battle against the climate
change "hoax."

Bill Gates caused a stir this past week with his latest hot take on climate change. Climate scientists were not impressed. And they worried the influential Gates would help gut efforts to combat the issue.  

They also worried - correctly - that the Trump and MAGA crowd would twist Gate's words and declare some sort of "victory" over climate change activism.  

Gates' statements weren't radical, and unlike people of a certain political persuasion, he certainly has a firm grasp on facts. 

But Gates' latest thoughts could upend where and how much money is spent combating climate change, and the crises that are caused in part, but not entirely on climate change. 

Basically, Gates is saying that climate change is important, but in the near future, you'll get more bang for your buck if you pour money into global poverty relief than climate change. 

He put his thoughts into an essay he released Tuesday. 

 Gates wrote:

"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. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

"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."

In short, Gates stated what he said was this truth: "Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization."

He said near-term resources should prioritize erasing poverty and disease, and improving the overall wellbeing of humankind. Climate change needs attention, he says, but there are bigger fish to fry, figuratively speaking. 

The bottom line, Gates said, is, "How do we make sure aid spending is delivering the greatest possible impact for the most vulnerable people?"

What's really needed, Gates says, is to increase the wealth of nations to make their people healthier and safer. True, when nations get wealthier, their energy use, and thus carbon emissions go up. But Gates believes we can innovate our way out of spewing these greenhouse substances into the atmosphere. 

However, many climate scientists, like Kristie Eli of the University of Washington, told the Associated Press that faster deployment of green technologies alone is not enough to overcome the rising effects of climate change.

Others said Gates raises good points, but he's framing the question of  climate change incorrectly. 

 Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said on Bluesky: 

"If you take the time to read the whole Gates memo (which I did), the bulk of the content was mostly solid and encouraging. Really!

It was the FRAME that was off -- very, very THAT'S the problem."

"Climate change is not a separate bucket" Hayhoe told Axios. "The reason we care about climate change is that it's the hole in every bucket."

What she's saying is climate change represents a threat that makes all those other problems worse, or creates them when they weren't there originally. 

Other climate experts, like Bill McKibben, note that climate change is already costing a LOT of money and is impoverishing people throughout the world. So if you really want to fight poverty, you have to go full bore on climate change, along with all the other forms of aid out there. 

Another worry is that Gates, who has such influence as one of the world's wealthiest men, might shift too many resources away from climate change. Worse, it might encourage people with an agenda to misconstrue Gates' opinion piece into a call to ignore climate change.

At the same time, Gates; thoughts on climate change and other philanthropic needs might be a victim of changed political realities caused by the very people who deny climate change. 

Like the Trump administration. 

Trump predictably mischaracterized Gates' statements right away. 

"I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax.... Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, ,and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!," Trump blathered on his social  media site Truth Social.

Never mind he didn't win anything, that Gates never made any admission he's wrong, and the billionaire founder of Microsoft doesn't suddenly think climate change is a hoax. 

It also appears that Gates is reacting to the Trump administrations horrifically deep foreign aid cuts, which is making the crises of poverty and death and conflict worse.  So, other groups need to step in, Gates indicated. 

In the absence of the U.S., foreign aid, help from organizations to combat poverty, hunger and disease is greater than ever. 

Critics Gates's essay say such funding is important, but so is money for climate change efforts. Again, it's a matter of not one or the other, but both. 

"Both are utterly feasible, and readily so, if the Big Oil lobby is brought under control," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. 

Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field also has a dual priority approach. "We should invest for both the long term and the short term....A vibrant long-term future depends on both tackling climate change and supporting human development," he said in an email response to the Associated Press. 

Money isn't unlimited. But Gates at least is the only big billionaire I'm aware of who is giving large portions of his wealth to help others. I'm not seeing the likes of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg doing the same thing. 

Maybe Gates isn't quite right in his analysis of climate change funding. And his essay didn't do any favors for those in the trenches trying to combat climate change and encourage others to do so. 

Gates is no hero in my book, but the fact that he's doing something positive is more than I can so for most of the ultra rich.  

Sigh. The Texas February Snow Wasn't Some Strange Plot By Bill Gates

If you put a lighter flame against a snow ball, soot will get
on the snowball. It doesn't mean it isn't snow. Jeez! 

As always, the conspiracy theorists are at it again.  A lot of people live in some strange alternate "reality" where everything is a physically impossible plot by villains to, to, I don't know. The purpose of these weird theories is never clear.  

I'm bringing this up because there's wackos out there who are sure the snow that fell in Texas last month wasn't really snow. It was supposedly something else, deposited for unclear reasons. 

This comes up every time it snows or ice storms hit places that usually escape such winter weather. 

And yes, I'm going to mercilessly mock the conspiracists. There's no getting through to them, ranters are going to rant. 

This time Reuters saw fit to run a fact check on this.  I don't know what good this will do - it won't convince the conspiracy wackos. But, it's fun to roll our eyes at these suckers that are truly born every minute. 

The favorite trick among the conspiracy minded is to hold a cigarette lighter's flame to a snowball to "prove" it's not really snow. This one has been around since at least 2014.

If you do the cigarette lighter trick with snow, it won't be immediately apparent it's melting, and the flame will leave a sooty smudge on the snow.  

So, for the record, according to Reuters:

"(Astronomer Phil) Plait explained that the snow does melt, but it doesn't appear to drip because the remaining snow, which is porous, absorbs the water."

Additionally, under a flame, snow can sublimate, which is a fancy word meaning it goes straight from ice to water vapor without melting into plain water first. 

And that soot on the snowball?  "Plait further explained the chemical process behind the dark mark: It's  not that snowball is scorching or burning, but it's soot adhering to the snowball."

Of course any dummy in Texas would have observed that once it warmed up, you could see the snow melt outdoors and the melt water running down countless storm drains in the Lone Star State. But that would make too much sense. 

By the way, Bill Gates always seems to be the bad guy in these scenarios.  And that just makes the silly more depressing.  If he's such a super-brained villain who wants to control us somehow, wouldn't he do it with something other than fake snow?

As Popular Mechanics tells us:

"Bill Gates is many things - billionaire, philanthropist, synthetic beef advocate - but conspiracy theorists think he and the Chinese government might both benefit from a world where people are blanketed by pretend snow. You'd just think if someone could seed clouds and control the weather, they'd use real snow instead of some kind of slush that has metal in it."

Of course, there are those that thought that Gates, or Joe Biden or somebody controlled the weather to make Texas and surrounding areas freeze.

Even if Gates or Biden could do that - which they can't - why didn't they keep the freeze going to really punish their so called enemies. A week after the cold wave the weather was warm and gorgeous. By the way, as I've explained before, the Arctic freeze was caused by the jet stream, and things up in the Arctic doing weird things. 

To the extent that humans caused it, the only way you could say that is the fact greenhouse gas-induced climate change might have had a role in the rough weather. The operative word here being "might"

It's unclear exactly what Gates or Biden or George Soros or whoever hoped to gain by dumping fake snow or bad weather on Texas, at least in the conspiracy minds.  It goes all over the place.  Biden was pissed that a few Texas were talking about seceding. 5G is always a big one.  The life saving Covid vaccines are really a plot by Gates to inject us with nanoparticles to control our minds, for what I have no idea. 

As if Bill Gates really cares what random Texan thinks. 

The massive power failures that cut electricity to more than 4 million Texans also seems to be fodder for conspiracy. Those power failures were largely caused by the agency that manages Texas electricity - ERCOT - did not plan for the effects of wintry weather on the state's grid. 

Alex Jones, always one to give us some weird fantasy, said Biden blocked the U.S. Department of Energy from increasing power during the storm.

Turns out the Energy Department did the exact opposite:  As the Independent reported. Acting U.S. Energy Secretary David Huizenga, quickly approve a request from ERCOT to temporarily exceed emissions limits to gain more capacity. 

The "fake" snow in Texas has long since melted, I guess proving it wasn't so fake after all. I do forecast, though, a 100% chance of more conspiracy theories from the gullible the next time the weather gets weird. Count on it. 

There really is a sucker born every minute.