Bill Gates Backtracks on Climate Change Doomsaying: ‘Will Not Lead to Humanity’s Demise’

By Brittany Bernstein

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

 

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates now says climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” despite having spent years fearmongering over rising global temperatures.

 

Gates authored a surprising blog post on Monday advocating for climate activists to move away from the “doomsday outlook” they have spent years peddling.

 

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” wrote Gates, who has spent billions of dollars on climate-related initiatives. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

 

Gates’s post represents a sharp departure from his prior rhetoric on the issue; he previously claimed climate change “will be one of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on — greater than landing on the moon, greater than eradicating smallpox, even greater than putting a computer on every desk.”

 

Just four years ago he wrote a book on How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, and he has suggested climate change “could be worse” than the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

However, Gates now suggests “we should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature.”

 

He is calling for a “strategic pivot” in addressing climate change and says rather than focusing on trying to limit rising temperatures, climate advocacy should focus on efforts to prevent disease and poverty.

 

Gates’s post comes ahead of the COP30 U.N. climate summit, which will take place in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém next week. He said the summit is “a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives.”

 

“Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare,” Gates wrote.

 

“The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”

 

Gates’s comments come nearly a decade after world leaders adopted the Paris climate agreement, with the goal of limiting temperature warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

 

Gates now calls that goal unrealistic.

 

The billionaire’s comments put him at odds with the UN secretary general, who on Monday warned of “devastating consequences” for the world as the UN said leaders had failed its goal of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

 

“The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs,” UN Secretary General António Guterres told The Guardian.

 

“It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon,” he added. “We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”