“Bill Gates has been rightly slammed for his anti-scientific memo calling for shifting our focus away from ‘near-term’ emissions cuts. Tragically, that shift could cause the very doomsday scenario he dismisses.” (Joe Romm, below)
Doomism is alive and well at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, despite Michael Mann’s advice to the contrary. It exists in the person of Joe Romm, Mann’s colleague. Maybe the two need to meet to figure out how to alarm but not be alarming….
“Gates is wrong,” Joe Romm reports. “Global warming could well ‘decimate civilization’, but his ‘strategic pivot’ would make catastrophic warming far more likely.” Doomster Romm continues:
Bill Gates has been rightly slammed for his anti-scientific memo calling for shifting our focus away from “near-term” emissions cuts. Tragically, that shift could cause the very doomsday scenario he dismisses.
Gates: “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” But scientists are much better at foreseeing the future, so we know that taking his advice will sharply boost chances for catastrophe.
By catastrophe, I mean 4°C (7°F) warming or more by 2100—warming so rapid and hellish, there was a “scarcity of any scientific literature” on it until nearly 2010. This possibility seemed to have faded in recent years as nations rushed to make major climate reduction pledges after Paris in 2015.
Yet, it was never off the table. We just fooled ourselves into thinking that lofty goals of 1.5°C or “well below 2°C,” repeated like mantras—coupled with a clean energy revolution—were enough to avoid the worst. Even Gates was fooled.
The predicament is our fault by our “inaction” (as if the suite of government mitigation policies were not tried and failed). Romm continues:
But despite pledges of “net zero” emissions by midcentury by every major nation, none of the top 10 emitters has policies and actions in place that would keep warming by 2100 below 3°C.
The world’s top scientists found in their 2023 IPCC assessment: “The continuation of policies implemented by the end of 2020 leads to global warming of 3.2°C by 2100.” In June 2025, Climate Interactive modelers projected 3.3°C (6°F) warming based on existing policies. And these are business-as-usual projections—NOT worst-case scenarios—although the UN called such warming “catastrophic.”
Yet there’s a good chance the climate is much more sensitive to CO2 than people expect. The 2023 report found, “The likely range of equilibrium climate sensitivity has been narrowed to 2.5°C to 4.0°C (with a best estimate of 3.0°C) based on multiple lines of evidence.”
So most use 3°C—but the distribution is skewed. “Likely” means a two-thirds chance. So, 4°C or higher is very plausible. Indeed, the IPCC can’t “rule out … values above 5°C.”
But surely we can do better than existing policies? We can—but we choose not to. And Gates’ pivot would ensure we don’t. We’ve dawdled through 30 COPs, and emissions are 50% higher than when we began. We have the real solutions, but—overwhelmed by misinformation, false promises, bad actors & bad decisions—they’re not growing nearly fast enough.
Romm concludes:
Gates doesn’t even realize he needs the very rapid emissions cuts he dismisses to claim warming will stay well below 3°C. But if we follow his advice, a catastrophic fate for humanity becomes a very real possibility.
Joe Romm will not put a date or severity estimate on his “a catastrophic fate for humanity becomes a very real possibility.” But he should be reminded: the neo-Malthusian end-is-near rhetoric has grown stale with so many predictions falsified. Yet kicking and screaming he goes, along with Michael ‘Climategate’ Mann at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.
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Also see “Angry Michael Mann Isolates Himself (climate exaggeration backfires)” August 21, 2025. Other posts on Romm can be found here.
Ted Nordhaus explained why, unlike Gates, doomsters can’t recant. Some quotes from his paper:
Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist, And why so many climate pragmatists can’t quit catastrophism.
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/why-i-stopped-being-a-climate-catastrophist
My synopsis: https://rclutz.com/2025/08/14/why-climate-doomsters-cant-recant/
Why do so many smart people, most trained as scientists, engineers, lawyers, or public policy experts, and all who will tell you, and I say this not ironically, that they “believe in science,” get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?
There are, in my view, several reasons. The first is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to stubbornly hold onto erroneous beliefs because they are more expert at defending their political views and ideological commitments.
The second reason is that if you make a living doing left of center climate and energy policy, there are strong social, political, and professional incentives to get climate risk wrong. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. There is little tolerance on the Left for any expression of materialist politics that challenge foundational claims of the environmental movement. Meanwhile the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk for which there is no consensus whatsoever.
Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic specter of climate change. “Why bother with nuclear power or clean energy if climate change is not a catastrophic risk,” is a frequent response. And this view simply ignores the entire history of modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon intensive technologies to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner than coal.
But as a practical matter, there is no evidence whatsoever that 35 years of increasingly dire rhetoric and claims about climate change have had any impact on the rate at which the global energy system has decarbonized. And by some measure, the world decarbonized faster over the 35 years prior to climate change emerging as a global concern than it did in the 35 years since.