The Microsoft co-founder says we can use lessons from the pandemic to guide our response to the next crisis.
“Today the greatest risk of a global catastrophe doesn’t look like this (a nuclear war), but like this (a microbe),” said Bill Gates in 2015 during a Ted talk titled “The next outbreak? We’re not ready”, according to Entrepreneur.
Five years later, this warning from the Microsoft co-founder seems like a forecast of the ongoing Covid-19 crisis that has brought the entire world on its knees.
Now, he has penned down a similar warning on climate change.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has warned that while COVID-19 is “awful” the climate change crisis could be even worse.
While conceding it's hard to focus on anything other than the coronavirus pandemic at the moment, Gates said on August 5 that we must accelerate efforts to deal with climate change now to avoid a climate disaster.
"If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and spread the pain out over a much longer period of time," Gates wrote on his blog. "The loss of life and economic misery caused by this pandemic are on par with what will happen regularly if we do not eliminate the world's carbon emissions."
Based on the current number of COVID-19 deaths, Gates says around 14 per 100,000 people have died of the coronavirus. Within 40 years, he said, increases in temperature are predicted to raise global mortality rates by that same figure, but it could be responsible for as many as 73 deaths per 100,000 people by the year 2100.
"By 2060, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly," Gates said.
And economic damage from climate change would be the equivalent of having a COVID-19 pandemic every decade, he said.
