Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft founder who has served as a prominent advocate for prevailing narratives that fuel the climate alarm movement, set the climate debate on fire this week with a long essay signaling a major shift in direction.

Rather than continuing efforts to use atmospheric content of carbon dioxide as a global thermostat, Gates now advocates a refocusing on efforts to mitigate for the impacts of climate change and dedicate more funding to “the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”

Gates’s belated endorsement of an alternative approach long advocated by many critics of climate alarmism is laudable. But one must wonder what took him so long. 

One argument Gates puts forth to justify his shift in narrative is, as he puts it, “surprisingly, excessive cold is far deadlier, killing nearly 10 times more.” But that only comes as a surprise to those who haven’t been paying attention to data that has long been in the public domain. Australian analyst Bjorn Lomborg, himself a believer in man-cause warming theory, has regularly made the same point for years now.

Gates also

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