When Bill Gates Yelled At Me About Climate Change

Bill Gates was yelling and screaming at me. Turning beet red. Waving his arms. Bullying, condescending, mocking. In public, no less.

It was August, 2010 at the Techonomy Conference at Lake Tahoe. The month before, I watched Gates acknowledge the problem of climate change for the first time at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

This was most welcome, yet, curiously, Gates claimed that climate change was mostly a problem for poor people in the tropics. It would not affect North America and Europe very much. New York and Miami under water—not a problem. Heat wave deaths, fires, wildfire smoke in the Pacific Northwest, stronger hurricanes, ocean acidification—not to worry.

At the Tahoe conference, I told the head of Gates’ private office that this could be embarrassing to Bill. He encouraged me to talk to Gates about it, introducing us in the hallway between workshops.

“Thank you for getting involved in the climate issue. We need you,” I said. “I wonder if I could introduce you to scientists who study North American impacts. They will be quite severe, including to Seattle and the Cascades.”

Gates turned red and started waving his arms at me. In a loud voice, he growled “Who the hell are you? I talk to the world’s top climate scientists.”

“Well, a friend of mine, Dr. Heidi Cullen, for example, has just published a book about North American impacts. She’s also the chief climate scientist at the Weather Channel,” I responded.

“The Weather Channel! You get your information from the Weather Channel!” Now Gates was beet red, mocking and gesticulating even more. Heads were turning as people watched this spectacle in the hallway. “You should meet a real climate scientist,” he said while pointing to physicist David Keith, then with the University of Calgary, later with Harvard and the University of Chicago.

“Ok sure, I’ll do that, and send you more information,” I said, trying to get my heartbeat to slow after this outburst. I then went to David Keith and told him what had happened.

“Yes, we’ve been trying to help Bill understand this isn’t just about the tropics,” Keith explained.

This was almost 15 years ago but, in his much-covered memo last week, Gates still doesn’t seem to get it. He is still claiming climate disasters will mostly affect poor people in the tropics. Parroting the climate “delayer” and Wall Street Journal editorial page favorite Bjorn Lomborg (who Gates funds), he insists we should focus on other “more urgent” issues like health and agriculture in Africa.

In a quote right out of The Onion, he said “temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate” and we should not focus on short-term emission goals.

For a smart guy, who truly does care about the health and well being of people in poor countries, this is illogical. The higher temperatures go, the closer we get to people in the tropics literally dropping dead outside from “wet bulb” temperatures, making it hard to grow crops or even work in the fields.

More mosquito-borne illness will hit people and at higher elevations. Meanwhile, it is precisely the emissions of the next several years that matter, because they risk putting us above the threshold for a livable climate for civilization, and for dangerous tipping points in the life support systems of our planet. (Carbon can last millennia in the atmosphere).

Ok, so, as Gates claims, climate “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” ignoring all the suffering already here, and guaranteed to get worse as temperatures rise. Humanity may make it, but can our civilization survive the abandonment of the coastal cities of the world along with massive refugee flows it will cause? Can Europe survive the Gulf Stream shutdown likely to come if we keep polluting, making it too cold to grow food? Already, insurance markets are straining from the cost of extreme weather, and this is just the beginning.

As climate scientist Michael Mann puts it, “climate change is the greatest threat of all to people in the tropics.”

Is Gates really that clueless? Does he just have excessive faith in carbon-removal or sun-blocking technology that does not exist yet, while continuing as usual to dismiss the viability of solar/wind/water/storage? Or is he mostly responding to Trump, whose support Microsoft needs for its race to AI dominance?

I doubt it is that simple. Yet Gates caused so much confusion last week, and Trump rushed to embrace him.

Gates isn’t the only one engaged in “climate hushing” not denying climate change, but downplaying its importance and talking about it less and less.

I’m sorry to report that the New York Times is hushing, too. While its news section continues to do truly outstanding climate reporting (although editors often relegate it to the back pages and low down on the web site), the opinion section and columnists have been disappointing. (Regardless, the NYT continues to be the best newspaper in our country by a long shot.)

The Times has yet to run even one editorial decrying Trump’s assault on a livable climate. Not one. This although a hotter planet will literally be Trump’s longest-lasting legacy. After many months, they did run an editorial opposing Trump’s war on clean energy. Hallelujah. Yet it began: “You do not have to care about climate change to believe that clean energy is an important and strategic resource.” WOW, ok, talk about framing. The NYT opinion section is legitimizing not caring about climate change in the first sentence. You don’t have to care about it?

In another editorial called “Moving to the Center is the Way to Win” the Times editorial board praised as “moderate” Congressman Jared Golden of Maine pushing “opening up oil and gas production to lower fuel costs.” First, that will not lower costs on the world market. But legitimizing more planet-heating pollution isn’t “moderate”—it’s a recipe for guaranteed economic destruction and suffering. Maybe they should put a climate scientist on the editorial board.

There is not one regular columnist on climate and clean energy at paper. Not one devoted solely to the most important issue facing humanity—which, if we don’t solve, will keep us from solving the others. The brilliant David Wallace-Wells now only writes about climate occasionally (and thank goodness for at least that). Aren’t climate and energy as important as Foreign Affairs or gender issues? Hooray for the Times focusing on the dangers of nuclear war. Climate is every bit as big a threat.

The talented Times columnist Ezra Klein certainly knows climate change is a threat. Yet he has yet to devote one column or podcast to the impact of Trump’s oil-soaked, corrupt war on planet earth (he has explored the attack on clean energy).

What the White House is saying, to recall the famous Daily News headline, is TRUMP TO NEW YORK: DROWN. But this isn’t worth a show or column so far. Does Ezra think everybody already knows? Polls show many largely do not. Worse, in an October 24th column Klein excoriates Democrats for abandoning the working class, calling them “a party that moves sharply left on culture, on climate, on guns, on immigration.” By “left on climate,” does he mean telling voters the scientific truth? There are ways to get it across, yes, even to the working class. But not if you don’t talk about it.

And this is precisely the problem. Recent Yale studies have shown that only 12% of Americans see or hear anything about climate change on social media, where the majority now get their news. Sixty-six percent report they “rarely or never” see or hear anything about the issue in the media, or from their friends. A recent poll by the Forest Stewardship Council with polling firm Ipsos shows a decline globally over the past two years in the proportion of people rating climate as a top concern. Climate hushing has its consequences.

A recent analysis by the Washington Post of social media, podcast appearances and speeches by Congressional Democrats show that mentions of climate have markedly decreased since 2022. There are noteworthy exceptions, like the steadfast Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

And to top it all off, today’s parasocial influencer in chief, Joe Rogan, keeps spreading falsehoods to American men on his top-rated podcast. In a recent episode featuring, of course, the long debunked and cranky contrarian octogenarian Dr. Richard Lindzen, listeners heard the complete nonsense that there is “no correlation” between temperatures and CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Rogan repeated the usual trope that because the climate has changed before, this is nothing new, even though humans are now clearly in charge of the thermostat. Rogan apparently knows better than all the major scientific institutions in the world. He thinks scientists are in a conspiracy to make money, ignoring the real conspiracy by fossil fuel companies to knowingly ruin a livable earth for profit and lie about it since the 1970s.

So what should activists do in response to all this climate hushing?

TALK MORE ABOUT HOW CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS THE PEOPLE AND PLACES WE LOVE. Spend more time and money reaching the public with the truth. The right and its fossil-fuel backers have focused on marketing and communications. They have built a massive digital influence infrastructure.

The climate movement largely has not, thinking that somehow smart policy and science are enough. Research from the Potential Energy Coalition shows that the public responds to climate messages that tell the truth about the risks we face The solution to climate hushing is climate amplification.

David Fenton, a FrameLab contributor, is the author of The Activists’ Media Handbook: Lessons from 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator. davidfentonactivist.com