“When people think about climate, they think about making electricity and about passenger cars mostly. Approaching the monumental crisis as a problem to be solved, he provides us with a plan to bring carbon dioxide emissions down to zero by the year 2050.

Not for him a horrified paralysis as the world ends in fire or ice. Politics very much included.Reading How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates’ new book, you are struck by his belief that the world can be changed for the better, perfected, saved that humankind can stop climate change if we sincerely tried. it’s wonderful that Gates has decided to work hard on climate questions, but to be truly helpful he needs to resolve to be a better geek - he needs to really get down on his hands and knees and examine how that power works in all its messiness. If he had, he might have understood more clearly that the things that really interest him - advanced nuclear power, for instance, where he describes his considerable investments - are more about mopping up: He’s absolutely right that we should be investing in research across a wide list of technologies because we may need them down the line to help scrub the last increments of fossil fuel from the system, but the key work will be done (or not) over the next decade, and it will be done by sun and wind. One wishes Gates had talked, for instance, with Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, whose team has calculated how almost every country on earth could go to 80 percent renewable energy by 2030.

And yet, his miscalculations are important, because they are widely shared. it’s perhaps not surprising that he’s still catching up. Gates - who must have easy access to the greatest experts the world can provide - is surprisingly behind the curve on the geeky parts, and he’s worse at interpreting the deeper and more critical aspects of the global warming dilemma.

It is a disappointment, then, to report that this book turns out to be a little underwhelming. This new volume could not be more timely - it emerges after a year that saw the costliest slew of weather disasters in history, and that despite a cooling La Niña current in the Pacific managed to set the mark for record global temperature.

Gates how to avoid a climate disaster