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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

What the Gates Foundation is wonderful, laudable, noble, and good. I am disappointed to not see mention of any environmental accomplishments in the list, though. Long term, the threats posed by climate change are far more of a threat than any disease.

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That doesn't seem to be true. According to the WHO, climate change has the potential to cause 250,000 deaths per year in 2030-2050. When it comes to disease, malaria alone kills between 376,000 and 755,000 people per year - right now.

Sources: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/premature-deaths-m... http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/

As one noted in the article ""almost certainly an underestimate", because a number of climate-health relationships are not measurable due to lack of adequate data".

Milder winters expand the range of disease-carrying insects, increase risks of wars or famine with less water, mass migrations leading to political instability, more extreme weather events like draughts and flooding leading to failed crops and other natural catastrophes...

Meanwhile much of the WHO estimate is for people dying due to heat exposure. Easy to quantify, important to know - but nowhere near the full picture.

Since there is a lot of uncertainty as to what the negative impact of global warming might be, doesn't it make sense to focus on the people who are dying right now?

It depends on your risk/reward curve, and your probability estimates.

Malaria is unlikely to get much WORSE than it is now. But if you think that global warming has a chance to cause catastrophic damage, two or three orders of magnitude more than malaria is causing today, then you should estimate the probability that you can impact global warming and do the EV calculation.

No, not really. Only looking at the present without taking the future into account leads to a lot of problems. We have to tackle both.

> ""almost certainly an underestimate", because a number of climate-health relationships are not measurable due to lack of adequate data".

How can the very lack of evidence and data logically support a claim that any estimate is either too low or too high with any "certainty"?

I suspect they did a "conservative estimate" that pops out "almost certainly at least this many people will die due to effects we understand pretty well. Other, largely independent effects could be lurking that we don't understand."

There is good news on that front too. Malaria deaths worldwide have been halved in the past decade : http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30375202

2030-2050 is still early days for climate change. The real fun is probably 2100 and beyond.

Long term, the threats posed by climate change are far more of a threat than any disease.

As another reply has already noted, that seems incorrect even for just one disease that the Gates Foundation is working on eradicating. That would be even more incorrect with reference to "any" disease, meaning even diseases that are in the top five worldwide as causes of death. Most people will survive global climate change by adjusting to local weather, the same as most people long have done throughout human history. People in the Netherlands have already figured out how to live below sea level, people here in Minnesota have already figured out how to live in a place with wild annual extremes of temperature, and so on.

Are you saying rich countries can figure out how to deal with it so everything is OK?

On one hand, Bill himself seems to support rather strongly "energy miracles" [1] as well as some sort of carbon tax (he thinks certainty is important)[2]. But the Foundation notably does not address any carbon issues, instead looking for opportunities to provide aid where the climate is creating harm.[3]

1. http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates?language=en

2. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-roll...

3. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informatio...

From my culture, this is arguable. What Gates is displaying is concrete evidence of progress... What you're saying there isn't any mention of is still argumented largely on if it's a real threat, or not... If it is a real threat, it will take a LOT of change and human resources to correct. I think every bit of this is a step in the right direction. If humanity cannot survive with what they're presented with now, how can they with what they're presented with tomorrow?

Solar Photovoltaic panel prices have fallen 75% from where they were just four years ago. In giant swaths of the world solar is the cheapest form of new energy, cheaper than coal & natural gas.

This is the most important graph of this century:

http://fund-balance.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Solar-Mod...

It was made in 2012 when solar costs were $1 per watt. The Chinese solar industry has gotten the price down below .50 per watt this year.

Solar PV panels are going beyond grid parity. 70% of the power generated by a coal plant is wasted in the transmission line before it reaches your home. The data has spoken and solar has won.

I believe this is the development that will let us avoid run away catastrophic warming.

Humans are rational actors when presented with cost-based options. Politics, biases and ideology fall away when looking at price.

And ramping up and scaling production of high demand items and bringing cost down in the process is where modern capitalism shines ie. the relentless deflation in consumer technology (pcs, tablets, flat panel displays)

In order to avoid catastrophic warming we have to reduce emissions by something like 80% by 2050. That seemed a pipe dream before cheap solar panels, now it feels inevitable to me.

Cheap solar is the energy miracle Bill has been waiting for. I hope that he includes it in his 2015 post when solar is $.25-.40 per watt.

> Humans are rational actors when presented with cost-based options. Politics, biases and ideology fall away when looking at price.

Really? Explain Verblen Goods[1].

Fact is, while price drops do help businesses, there are other complications with home solar - utility companies need to simplify net metering so I don't have to either go off-grid or calculate exactingly to prevent wasted collection. Install costs are also high. Furthermore, there are many houses with many natural gas appliances that reduce the benefits (you're still paying utilities for gas and likely a lot in winter).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Be that as it may, Gates has the most leverage to solve the problems he does. Climate change is 80% a political problem. Convince the G-7 to pass carbon taxes or cap-and-trade and you've solved climate change. Anything less and you've probably failed. Contrary to rumor, money is not an effective means of effecting political change, outside of maybe a little bit of graft and corruption on the side.

I am not a climate expert, but I think you're grossly downplaying the complexity of the climate change problem. There are so many factors in play. Its not just a matter of CO2 emissions. There is methane from animal livestock, contrails from aircraft, cloud cover, methane hyderates in the ocean, sunspot activity; Even the average reflectance of the earth's surface(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo). Every year the scientist's models and theories seems to be changing. All we seem to know for sure is that global average temperatures are indeed rising.

I have the sneaky (unscientific) suspicion that whatever drastic measures we would inevitably have to take to curb CO2 emissions is going to open its own can of worms. The footprint of human activity is simply that large.

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