By Wilfred Reilly
Saturday, September 05, 2026
The world is not coming to an end — again.
In October 2025, Microsoft’s Bill Gates — long the worst sort of climate doomsayer — published a lengthy memo explaining that, while global climate change
is real, “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” According to Gates, the
“doomsday view of climate change” that says it “will decimate civilization . .
. is wrong. . . . People will be able to live and thrive in most places on
Earth for the foreseeable future.”
The desktop baron argues for reevaluating temperature
targets, writing that strict focus on near-term temperature and emissions goals
is an imperfect measure of progress. Most important, he now advocates a policy
shift toward maximizing “human welfare” and human flourishing — shifting much of the
absurdly inflated climate budget toward projects fighting disease, famine, and
poverty itself. In summary, the climate problem exists, but the cutting-edge
view today is that it is fairly minor in comparison with other issues and can
best be combated by human initiative.
Gates’s memo had a familiar ring to it. As I note in my
upcoming Broadside/HarperCollins book Confidently Wrong, one
of the defining features of upper-middle-class life during the past 50–60 years
has been scientists, activists, and public intellectuals making the most
horrifying kind of doomsday predictions — which invariably fail to come true.
Remember the Club of Rome and the Limits
to Growth report?
Back in 1972, a group of top academics used then-advanced
regression analysis to argue that the planet at some point must run out
of key resources. Quite specific dates were provided for this global
near-apocalypse. And then not one of the predictions came true. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry noted 40 years
later, in his teasingly titled “Time Has Not Been Kind to the Limits to
Growth,” the report “got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the
greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness.”
Because of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture and horticulture,
humanity’s food supplies have not collapsed. In fact, Perry reports,
“malnourishment has dropped by more than half,” from well over 30 percent of
the world population to about 15 percent. “Nor are we choking on pollution,” as
electric, hybrid, and even hydrogen vehicles have replaced many of the
high-dollar gas hogs of the past. In fact, the annual risk of pollution-caused
death has shrunk from one in 500 to one in many thousands since 1900. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, given their think tank’s focus, the AEI boys argue that the
real solution to environmental problems is innovation, driven by “economic
growth.”
This same lesson — that resources are obviously not
infinite but new supplies of them can be found or
even grown if we turn to human ingenuity — applies in the case of “peak
oil,” perhaps the ultimate recurring boondoggle prediction. As every
commodities investor knows, Very Serious People have predicted, on a dozen
separate occasions, that the earth is going to run dry of key fossil fuels in
the near future. As Forbes notes, peak oil is at some level “grounded
in reality.” Oil is “a finite natural resource, produced over a geological
timespan, whereas demand continues to climb.” However, given different computer
models and continuing exploration by the oil companies, “nobody can quite agree
on when we will reach the point of Peak Oil or even what will cause it.”
At present, as noted in Forbes, glacier-tapping Norwegian energy
giant Equinor predicts a deadline year of 2028. American consulting giant
McKinsey, running what strikes me as a better model, guesses 2035 or so. Not
until “approximately 2040,” says OPEC. Per British Petroleum (BP), “peak oil
[will] not hit until 2050 based on known oil resources with the application of
today’s technology. For good measure, the contrarian Saudis — who perhaps look
down on new North American resource fields — argue that peak oil has already
occurred, as far back as 2006. Meanwhile, new drilling projects, now assisted
by AI and vastly better machine technology, launch annually.
A piece of this kind could go on almost forever,
documenting similar blooper projections huge and small. In the first category,
we can recall Paul Ehrlich, whose best-selling The Population Bomb argued, among other things, that
“the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and “hundreds of millions of
people are going to starve to death” during the 1970s and 1980s. Entire
nations, such as England and India, “would not exist . . . in the year 2000.”
Even the United States would experience “water rationing by 1974 and food
rationing by 1980,” with perhaps 65 million Yanks starving to death. Of course,
none of this happened: Among other things, Ehrlich — a professional
quantitative analyst — failed to predict the Green Revolution, feminism and
female birth control, anti-natalism, and global mass migration. Oops.
Among smaller-scale hysterias, we might place global cooling, “killer bees” and
the Great Northerly Migration of invasive species, acid rain, the ozone hole(s), and the “Hammer and the Dance”-era Covid-19 numbers. And, let us
never forget one that absolutely terrified me and my girlfriend in high school
— the idea that tens of millions of American heterosexuals were in very serious
danger of contracting AIDS, from R-rated hook-ups or even peripatetic
mosquitoes. Michael Fumento, author of The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS,
truly did God’s work by helping dispel this last largely false panic.
Quite a list. So: How, explicitly and exactly, did all of
these proposed past apocalypses come to not end the world?
Well, in many cases, the initial numbers involved were
simply wrong. Scientists (for example) rashly included a worst-case-scenario
doomsday prediction in a serious paper, reporters focused on that one model
when drawing up the headlines for major stories (“If it bleeds, it leads!”),
and society wound up down-road with someone like Congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez saying that old Mum Earth has just “twelve years left.” This was likely
the Club of Rome’s problem: Bad inputs or regressions inevitably produce bad
outputs. GIGO, as they say in IT.
The other possibility is equally common and in fact more
hopeful: human beings came together to fairly easily solve a real-enough
problem. This is what happened with the ozone hole — R.I.P. to effective “CFC”
hairspray and the big-haired ladies of the 1980s and 1990s — and what archetypally
happened to resolve the “Y2K” problem. In 1999, “some Americans stocked up
on food, water, and guns in anticipation of a computer-induced apocalypse.” But
“years of behind-the-scenes work” by computer programmers and other wonks had
already changed 99 percent of all potentially dangerous code, and nothing of
note occurred . . . again.
Something very close to this latter scenario will almost
certainly happen with climate change. More than a dozen U.S. companies manufacture excellent seawalls,
some of them miles long. If global saltwater levels really do begin to rise,
the leaders of beach-front cities are not just going to stare dully at the
incoming waves until they drown.
You are not going to die (from some epic disaster). Start
living like it.
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