Chicken Little, please call your office. Bill Gates, who had urged radical policy changes “to avoid a climate disaster,” now concedes global warming “will not lead to humanity’s demise.” What a volte-face for the philanthropist, who had averred in 2021 that “we need to transform the way we do almost everything” to stave off apocalypse. Yet like the titular hen of the nursery rhyme, who feared the sky was falling, Mr. Gates seems to have overstated the risk.

Does Mr. Gates’s retreat suggest cracks are emerging in the liberal orthodoxy on climate change? The billionaire writes on his blog that he wants to distance himself from what he calls the “doomsday view of climate change.” He reckons “climate change will have serious consequences,” especially for “the poorest countries.” Even so, the Microsoft founder writes, “people will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” 

It’s not our intention here to begrudge Mr. Gates for seeing the light when it comes to the threat posed by climate change. The tycoon deserves credit for having the courage to pipe up in opposition to the prevailing dogma on the left over the earth’s weather. By contrast, the United Nations chief, António Guterres, is fretting to the Guardian that the world’s failure to meet climate-cooling goals will have “devastating consequences.” 

Mr. Guterres insists that “it is absolutely indispensable to change course.” That’s of a piece with the left’s vision of costly policy shifts designed to achieve zero-carbon emissions. Yet by crimping growth, especially in the developing world, such regulations promise to do more harm than good. Mr. Gates seems to grasp the point that when it comes to these ill-advised ecological interventions, the remedy, so to speak, can sometimes be worse than the disease.

Feature, Mr. Gates says, how “a few years ago, the government of one low-income country set out to cut emissions by banning synthetic fertilizers.” In Mr. Gates’s telling, this well-intentioned proposal had dire consequences: “Farmers’ yields plummeted, there was much less food available, and prices skyrocketed.” He adds that the unnamed “country was hit by a crisis because the government valued reducing emissions above other important things.”

Mr. Gates’s clear-eyed appraisal of that debacle can be said to encapsulate the flawed logic behind the ecological militants’ policy program. Yet the green movement has little tolerance for dissent. Feature how, in 2022, the World Bank chief, David Malpass, was grilled at a climate event by a New York Times reporter who urged the banker to parrot the dogma that “manmade burning of fossil fuels is rapidly and dangerously warming the planet.”

Mr. Malpass, contrary to the accusation of Vice President Al Gore, is no “climate denier.” His priority, though, was to incentivize  growth in poor countries — a surer way to improve the lives of their residents — as opposed to undertaking climate boondoggles that, as Mr. Gates points out, can stifle free enterprise. Yet Mr. Malpass was replaced at the global lender by a leader more eager to transform the institution, these columns griped, into a kind of climate bank.

Which brings us back to Mr. Gates, who now argues that “climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future.” The “best defense” against the changing weather, he now says, is “health and prosperity.” It’s hard to find fault with that assessment. Chicken Little failed to see the error of her ways, but now that Mr. Gates has come around, he might want to have a word with Greta Thunberg.