Greta Thunberg, please pick up the red courtesy phone.

Bill Gates just stunned the world, not to mention the generation of young eco-warriors he helped spawn, by doing a major reversal on the subject of climate change.

In a whitepaper entitled “Three tough truths about climate,” Mr. Gates explained “What I want everyone at COP30 to know.”

And presumably, what Gates wants the rest of the world to know as well. Namely, that we are not all about to die from climate change.

Gates explains:

“There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this: In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us — just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature. 

Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong.”

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates declared. “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 lamented. “It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change.”

“Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries,” he proposed. “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. 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.”

This “people-centric” focus is a major departure from the current prevailing wisdom among progressive academics and eco-activists.

Why this sudden shift?

Perhaps Mr. Gates has noticed the dangerous uptick in political violence that has been haunting in the U.S. lately. Those surprised by the current climate of political violence being tolerated by the left aren’t familiar with some of the tactics and rhetoric of some of the climate-doomsday groups have been employing for years.

It seems that people convinced the whole world is about to die from climate change started to believe that an “any means necessary” strategy was a moral imperative.

Will they listen to Gates now?

“I know that some climate advocates will disagree with me, call me a hypocrite because of my own carbon footprint (which I fully offset with legitimate carbon credits), or see this as a sneaky way of arguing that we shouldn’t take climate change seriously,” he offered. “To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.”

Gates attempted to establish his progressive bona fides thusly:

“I’ve been learning about warming — and investing billions in innovations to reduce it — for over 20 years. I work with scientists and innovators who are committed to preventing a climate disaster and making cheap, reliable clean energy available to everyone. Ten years ago, some of them joined me in creating Breakthrough Energy, an investment platform whose sole purpose is to accelerate clean energy innovation and deployment. We’ve supported more than 150 companies so far, many of which have blossomed into major businesses. We’re helping build a growing ecosystem of thousands of innovators working on every aspect of the problem.”

“Sometimes the world acts as if any effort to fight climate change is as worthwhile as any other,” Gates pointed out. “As a result, less-effective projects are diverting money and attention from efforts that will have more impact on the human condition: namely, making it affordable to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions and reducing extreme poverty with improvements in agriculture and health. In short, climate change, disease, and poverty are all major problems. We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause.”

It’s also possible that Gates senses cracks emerging in the science behind climate change, and in particular the most dire of the “doomsday” predictions.

“Scientists for years said they had proof that climate change was accelerating sea level rise,” journalist and environmentalist Michael Shellenberger posted to X this week. “But that’s not what the evidence shows. They knew the truth and misled the public. And now I have a long email exchange with a top scientist that shows how they did it. Massive scandal.”

“For years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has claimed that human-caused climate change has accelerated sea level rise. But that claim is false. There is no scientific evidence of accelerated sea level rise since the mid-19th Century, and thus none showing human-created emissions caused an acceleration in recent decades. This does not mean that climate change isn’t happening. It is. It simply means that it has not caused the sea level to rise at a rate any higher than one would expect without human-caused climate change. Not only that, but the top scientists know this fact and have deliberately misrepresented it for years, deceiving the public.” — Michael Shellenberger

Mr. Shellenberger’s own climate change journey, from doomsday prophet to moderator, came after he noticed his own teenage daughter was growing despondent over the prospect of climate change, convinced she would never be allowed to grow up.

Far too many impressionable people still wholeheartedly believe this. Meanwhile, the individuals and corporations who profit from pushing doomsday climate predictions make no lifestyle changes, buy oceanfront real estate, pay their mortgages, and save for retirement.

It’s almost like they never believed their own predictions in the first place.