Bill Gates' shift from "doomsday" climate warnings to a focus on improving human lives is triggering sharp reactions from scientists and activists.

Gate's article is here. It's hard to summarize because he anticipated common criticisms and mostly avoids binary thinking:

To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.

But maybe the best way to summarize it is that although an increase in global average temperature has bad effects on everything else, he thinks it's not the best way to measure human welfare:

Temperature is not the best way to measure progress on climate.

...

Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.

Gates seems to be a big believer in economic growth:

What happens to the number of projected deaths from climate change when you account for the expected economic growth of low-income countries over the rest of this century? The answer: It falls by more than 50 percent.

Economists are big on economic growth and it's easy to see why: if you compare what life is like for average people in a poor country to a rich country, it's clear that people in rich countries are better off in most ways. So, if you can help poor countries become rich (or at least middle-income), that's a very high-impact intervention.

At least, if you can figure out how to do it. It's more easily said than done.

My criticism of economic growth as a metric is that this is a very zoomed-out way of thinking. Some kinds of economic growth are surely more valuable than other kinds, and GNP doesn't make distinctions.

Still, the specific projects that Gates calls out in the article seem like good ones.