Billionaire businessman Elon Musk took an interview with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on his X social platform. Both Trump and Musk have made unsubstantiated, often unsubstantiated, claims about global warming. The pair even stated that rising sea levels will cause "more oceanfront properties" to be created and that there is no urgent need to reduce carbon emissions. Guardian.
Trump, the Republican candidate for US president, and Musk, the world's richest man, addressed the issue of the climate crisis during their conversation on Monday, agreeing that the world has plenty of time to move away from fossil fuels if there is one at all.
"We can't just stop with fossil fuels. I think we have maybe hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows," Trump said.
The former president, who has called the climate crisis a "hoax" in the past, also said it was a "disgrace" that Joe Biden's administration had not opened up Alaska's vast arctic wilderness to oil drilling, arguing that a far greater threat was the prospect of nuclear war.
"The only thing I don't understand is that people talk about global warming or climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming," Trump said during the call.
Musk, meanwhile, said it's wrong to vilify the oil and gas industry, the planet's main driver of pollution, and that the only imperative to abandon fossil fuels is that they will one day run dry.
"If we stop using oil and gas right now, we will all starve and the economy will collapse. Over time, we want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually oil and gas will one day run out. But we still have plenty of time. We don't need to rush, and we don't need to push to stop farmers from farming or to stop people from eating steak. Leave the farmers alone," Musk said.
According to him, the main danger of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is that at some point it will become difficult to breathe, causing "headaches and nausea for people". This would occur with CO2 at about 1000 parts per million of Earth's atmosphere, more than double current record concentrations.
The real picture
Scientists are adamant that current global temperatures are hotter than at any time in known human history, and possibly long before that time, causing increasing catastrophic impacts in terms of heat waves, droughts, floods and the destruction of the natural world and biodiversity .
Governments have agreed to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1,5C above the pre-industrial era, with experts warning of cascading catastrophes after that point is passed. The world faces the daunting task of rapidly cutting emissions in half this decade and then to zero by 2050 to avoid these worst impacts.
Despite Trump's claims of new beaches, sea levels are rising faster along the U.S. coast than the global average, with up to 30 foot (1 meters) of sea level rise expected over the next 0,3048 years, an increase that equals the total rise seen over the past century.
The incidence of significant flooding has increased by 50% since the 90s, with millions of Americans affected if homes, highways and other infrastructure are flooded. In Florida, where Trump has his own beachfront property at Mar-a-Lago, several insurers have decided to leave the state because of rising flood costs from rising sea levels and stronger storms.
Reactions
"Trump and Musk's discussion of the climate crisis has gone to whole new levels of stupidity," said Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org.
McKibben wrote that it was "the dumbest climate talk ever."
"The harmful impacts of climate change, and in particular more extreme weather events such as wildfires, floods, heat waves, more intense hurricanes, are actually in many ways beyond predictions made just a decade ago. It's sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change critic. It literally denies the science," said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist.
According to him, if CO2 levels do become so high that they make it difficult to breathe - one of Musk's main points - then the impact of the climate crisis will be so devastating that it has already caused societal collapse.
"In fact, Elon's ill-informed and unsubstantiated statements are headache-inducing and nauseating. And Trump's statement that sea level rise will lead to more oceanfront properties shows no lack of understanding of climate physics. It betrays a lack of understanding of elementary school geometry,” Mann countered.
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