Live event Tuesday: The Bill Gates climate memo
Join me for an urgent virtual discussion with leading climate scientists.
Bill Gates ruffled some feathers last week. In a memo titled, “Three tough truths about climate,” the billionaire investor and philanthropist wrote that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” and that people “will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
“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,” Gates wrote.
Especially coming from a man who’s spent large sums supporting clean energy, the memo — published just ahead of this month’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil — is generating lots of attention. Science deniers are thrilled. President Trump wrote on social media that “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.”
That’s not what Gates said; he called global warming a “a very important problem” that “needs to be solved.” But he also made a bunch of claims that left me scratching my head. I found myself wondering: What do actual climate scientists think?
So I emailed some climate scientists and asked if they’d get together and talk with me. To my great delight, they all said yes!
So I’m excited to announce Climate-Colored Goggles’ first live event, co-sponsored by Covering Climate Now. Please RSVP here and join us tomorrow, Tuesday Nov. 4, at 1:30 p.m. PT/4:30 p.m. ET. You’ll get the link to join in your inbox.
I’ll moderate the discussion, followed by an opportunity for audience Q&A (with priority given to journalists). We’ll go for about an hour.
We have a fabulous group of scientists lined up:
Kim Cobb, Brown University
Zeke Hausfather, Berkeley Earth
Katharine Hayhoe, Texas Tech University
Daniel Swain, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources
Can’t make it tomorrow? That’s OK! I’ll share the recording in a future newsletter so you can watch on your own schedule.
This event will be free for all Climate-Colored Goggles readers, whether or not you’re paying for a subscription. But similar events going forward will be available only to paid subscribers.
I’ve also made every newsletter available to all readers so far. I’d love to keep using the paywall as little as possible, but that will depend on lots of folks subscribing to support my work. So please subscribe, if you haven’t already.
On that note — see you tomorrow!