Above, famously clear explanation of climate change by Elon Musk from 8 years ago..
Now, we have last night’s bizarre and baffling “interview” with Donald Trump, downplaying climate risks, that Trump has called “a Hoax.”
It can only be called Weird.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk both made discursive, often fact-free assertions about global heating, including that rising sea levels would create “more oceanfront property” and that there was no urgent need to cut carbon emissions, during an event labeled “the dumbest climate conversation of all time” by one prominent activist.
Trump, the Republican US presidential nominee, and Musk, the world’s richest person, dwelled on the problem of the climate crisis during their much-hyped conversation on X, formerly known as Twitter and owned by Musk, on Monday, agreeing that the world has plenty of time to move away from fossil fuels, if at all.
“You sort of can’t get away from it at this moment,” Trump said of fossil fuels. “I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows.” The former US president added that rising sea levels, caused by melting glaciers, would have the benefit of creating “more oceanfront property”.
Trump, who famously once called the climate crisis a “hoax”, also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration did not open up a vast Arctic wilderness in Alaska to oil drilling, claimed baselessly that farmers are having to give up their cattle because of climate edicts and that a far greater threat is posed by the prospect of nuclear war.
“The one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” Trump pondered during the exchange.
Musk, meanwhile, said it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry, the key driver of planet-heating pollution, and that the only imperative to ditch fossil fuels was that they will one day run dry.
“If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse,” said Musk, who is also chief executive of the electric car company Tesla. “We do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of oil and gas.
“We still have quite a bit of time … we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.”
Musk said the main danger of allowing carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere was that at some point it will become difficult to breathe, causing “headaches and nausea” to people. This would occur with CO2 at about 1,000 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere, more than double the current record-breaking concentrations.
Scientists have been clear that current global temperatures are hotter than at any point in human civilization, and probably long before this time too, which is causing mounting disastrous impacts in terms of heatwaves, droughts, floods and the destruction of the natural world.
Governments have agreed to restrain the global temperatures rise to 1.5C above the preindustrial era, with researchers warning of cascading catastrophes beyond this point. The world faces the steep task of rapidly cutting emissions in half this decade, and then to net zero by 2050, to avoid these worst impacts.
Despite Trump’s claims of new beaches, sea levels are rising faster along the US coastline than the global average, with up to 1ft of sea level rise expected in the next 30 years – an increase that equals the total rise seen over the past century, US government scientists have found.
Instances of significant flooding have risen by 50% since the 1990s, with millions of Americans set to be affected as homes, highways and other infrastructure are inundated. In Florida, where Trump has his own coastal property at Mar-a-Lago, several insurers have decided to exit the state due to the increasing costs of flooding from the rising seas and fiercer storms.
Trump and Musk’s discussion on the climate crisis, therefore, “spelunked down into entirely new levels of stupidity”, according to Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org. McKibben wrote it was “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”.
“The damaging impacts of climate change, and in particular from more extreme weather events, such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, more intense hurricanes, are actually in many respects exceeding the predictions made just a decade ago,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist and author. “It is sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change denier, but that’s what he is. He’s literally denying what the science has to say here.”
Bill Mckibben Substack quoted, and commented, on some parts of the transcript:
But I think if you just keep increasing the cost per million in the atmosphere long enough, eventually it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe. People don’t realize this. If you go past a thousand parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea.
And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range. We’re adding, I think about roughly two parts per million per year. So, I mean, it still gives us, so what it means is like, we still have quite a bit of time, but so there’s not like, we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that.
What Musk is explaining here is that he didn’t buy Tesla because he thought he could help solve global warming—he doesn’t care about global warming at all because he doesn’t think it’s real. He’s mildly worried about what we used to call ‘peak oil,’ the idea that at some point we’ll run out of hydrocarbons. But the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? That will only become a problem at 1,000 parts per million, and only then because of its direct effects on human beings. What he’s talking about is research from about five years ago that showed that once you got levels of co2 that high inside buildings you “may cut our basic decision-making ability by 25 percent, and complex strategic thinking by around 50 percent.”
One should check the co2 levels at Musk’s studio and at Mar-a-Lago, but of course that’s not what anyone else is talking about when they assess dangerous levels of carbon in the atmosphere. The historic level of co2, for all of human civilization prior to the Industrial Revolution, was about 275 parts per million. It’s now at about 420 parts per million, an increase of fifty percent. Scientists think that anything above 350 parts per million is intensely dangerous. Here’s how Jim Hansen and his colleagues put it in 2008:
If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.
https://electrek.co/2024/08/13/elon-musk-is-wrong-about-climate-change/
“For example, a basic understanding of geometry shows us that higher sea levels result in less shoreline, not more as Mr. Trump suggested.”
It isn’t geometry as much as topography that we should consider. During the Permian, when much of the Midwest was underwater, there was a lot more shoreline. (The Guadalupe “Mountains” are actually a giant Permian reef.)
“It can only be called Weird.”
Nope. It can also be called Stupid, Perverse, Petulant, Pathetic, Immature or Sociopathic. Neither will grow out of their Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
When Captain Ketamine and Admiral Adderall join forces, there’ no telling what kind of fever dream they can produce.
We’re at 1.5 now, 2° almost certain by 2040. So nope. 2050-anything is a mass murder-suicide pact, a contract on humanity. To prevent utter unimaginable ecological, social, political, & psychological cataclysm, we have to cut fossil fuels, industrial ag, & deforestation at least 90%, inequality & Wetiko disease by half, all before 2035.
Whether the conversation was stupid is immaterial, as it was certainly an exhibition of the Mango Mussolini’s metastasizing malignant narcissism with coexisting psychosis & terminal nihilism.
I would pay, what would be a lot of money that I don’t have, to have Kamala say those words to trump live during a debate: “Mango Mussolini’s metastasizing malignant narcissism with coexisting psychosis & terminal nihilism”. Thanks for that description.
Musk is known for changing his mind and seems to have no problem updating his opinions. In this latest iteration about climate change, he’s flat out wrong. But I also think he’ll revert to reality’s arbitration of his beliefs about it and this will win out in the end. Eventually. Hopefully sooner than later but political tribalism does funny things to people’s minds.
Weirdo’s on ketamine behave very weird.