Forget about coronavirus, Bill Gates says climate change is “even scarier” than the COVID-19 pandemic; warning the current ‘shutting down’ is ‘nowhere near sufficient’ to stop climate change

Microsoft co-founder is back in the news with another warning. This time, it is not coronavirus but climate change. In early September, we wrote about Gates after he warned that “climate change is an even harder problem than the coronavirus pandemic.” Gates estimated 3 million people could die by 2100 if climate change is not stopped.

Forget about coronavirus, Bill Gates says climate change is “even scarier” than the COVID-19 pandemic; warning the current ‘shutting down’ is ‘nowhere near sufficient’ to stop climate change

Now, Gates is doubling down on his earlier warnings about climate change. In a speech at the annual meeting for the National Academy of Medicine, Microsoft co-founder said climate change as “even scarier” than the COVID-19 pandemic. He added:

 ‘Shutting down’ economy ‘nowhere near sufficient’ to stop climate change. “COVID has been incredibly devastating,” he said. “We can’t even measure all the negative effects. Climate is the same. It’s even scarier.”

Gates said the amount of carbon emissions reductions gained from the pandemic were “quite modest,” despite the drastic drop in air travel and car travel.

“Simply shutting down is not going to get to our goal, so just as we need breakthrough innovation for COVID-19, we also need that to get rid of emissions from all the different sectors and bring down climate change. This crosses many areas — how we make electricity, how we make industrial products, grow food, cool our buildings and all of transportation.”

Back in September, Gates said that: “The pandemic illustrates that government didn’t look out for us despite the warnings that were out there. Climate fits that same paradigm. Sadly, the problem gets worse and worse, and there isn’t a solution like a vaccine where you can spend tens of billions of dollars and bring it to a close. No, climate change is much harder. The damage that will be done every year will be greater than what we’ve seen during this pandemic.”

“As bad as COVID-19 has been, the damage of climate change will be even worse, and there won’t be just an intervention like a vaccine to bring it to an end,” he said. “Just changing our behavior will only take us a limited distance. We have to have advances in science and innovation to solve the problem.”

In his August blog post, Gates wrote at the time that considering that “more than 600,000 people are known to have died from COVID-19 worldwide” as of August 3, Gates estimated that on an annualized basis, “that is a death rate of 14 per 100,000 people.”

Gates later compared and projected what the consequence would be if climate change is not addressed. Gate wrote:

How does that compare to climate change? Within the next 40 years, increases in global temperatures are projected to raise global mortality rates by the same amount—14 deaths per 100,000. By the end of the century, if emissions growth stays high, climate change could be responsible for 73 extra deaths per 100,000 people. In a lower emissions scenario, the death rate drops to 10 per 100,000.

Gates went to infer that, “by 2060, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.” Gates projected that by 2100, 600,000 times five could die if climate change is not addressed