Bill Gates Warns Against Denying Climate Change (usatoday.com)

Reader JoshTops shares a USA Today report: Bill Gates warned against denying climate change and pushed for more innovation in clean energy, during an event Friday at Columbia University in New York. The billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder joined friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett for a question-and-answer session with students. "Certain topics are so complicated like climate change that to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult and particularly when people take that complexity and create uncertainty about it," Gates said. The planet needs to find reliable, cheap and clean energy, "the innovations there will be profound," Gates said. In December, Gates announced that he and a group of investors would invest more than $1 billion in Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund that aims to finance the development of affordable energy that will reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Comments

Urgent Issue

[JimSadler]

Population explosion is part of the dire fact of global warming. It is an emergency issue and is about to bite us so hard we may not survive.Our military leaders consider it the number one threat to American security. There is wonderful progress on generating energy with less climate disruption yet we are still going to sink ever lower as every single person we add to our national or world population amplifies global warming and all forms of pollution. Every new home and new road and new farm is a blow struck against nature. Yet our politicians are unable to talk about restricting births or rolling back developed areas into natural areas.

Re:Terminology and Bait-and-Switch

[MrL0G1C]

Because if you are really trying to solve AGW, well, there is nothing to solve, because we are not going to stop catastrophic warming. I mean, years ago they were saying we have just just 3 years to save the planet, and such like, and yet a decade later we are still trying to get the world to agree to some such. Add up the calories, it doesn't matter if you "must do something" or "must make a start" or "head in the right direction"... we will not get there, the warming is locked in, and the amount we can reduce it by is negligible at this point.

The idea is to stop *further* warming other than what is locked in. And yes we can make a huge difference.