by meagain on August 13, 2024 12:15 pm
Here is Bill McKibben on just the climate portion. I don't know which of Musk and Trump is the bigger idiot.
"I’m only going to talk about the climate parts of the two-hour colloquy, but I have no doubt experts on other areas could make the same hay. Still, on this issue they spelunked down into entirely new levels of stupidity. Not at first—at first Trump just gave his standard riff about how it was no problem if the sea level rose because it would just create “more oceanfront property.” This is of course offensive and ridiculous—right now people around the Gulf are trying to figure out how to pay skyrocketing insurance bills, and it’s not much help to them to point out that the guy two streets back will have a better view when their house topples into the sea. But it’s also just factually wrong, if you think about it for even two seconds: a rising ocean clearly reduces the amount of oceanfront property. If Florida goes underwater there will be a new stretch of seafront along what’s now the Georgia border—but the amount of oceanfront will be greatly reduced. If you lie in the bath with your stomach sticking out of the water, and you keep the tap running, eventually the oceanfront around your belly button will simply disappear. This is not hard.
Still, who cares—it’s just the kind of dumb talk we’ve gotten used to. It was when they got into details that the real trouble emerged. I’m going to give you a big dose of transcript here, and please read it
Musk: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I should probably say something about like, you know, maybe my views on, you know, climate change and oil and gas, because I think I'm probably different from what most people would assume.
Because my views are actually pretty, I think moderate in this regard, which is that I don't think we should vilify the oil and gas industry and the people that have worked very hard in those industries to provide the necessary energy to support the economy. And if we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse. So it's, you know, I don't think it's right to sort of vilify the oil and gas industry.
And I, you know, the world has a certain demand for oil and gas and it's probably better if the United States provides that than some other countries. And it would help with prosperity in the US. And at the same time, obviously my view is like, we do over time wanna move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of, I mean, you run out of oil and gas.
It's not there, it's not infinite. And there is some risk. I think it's not, the risk is not as high as, you know, a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming.
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.
And of course time has proved them right. We’re now living through the hottest temperatures in 125,000 years; it’s causing crazy levels of flood and drought, fire and storm. The poles are melting. The latest study predicts that the great currents of the Atlantic will collapse between 2037 and 2064, with a median prediction of 2030.
by HatetheSwamp on August 13, 2024 12:17 pm
meagain,
It's good to have you in the dialog.
by Indy! on August 13, 2024 5:32 pm
by HatetheSwamp on August 13, 2024 9:16 am
"Elon Musk’s conversational interview with former President Trump on Monday evening pulled in a combined 1 billion views, according to the tech billionaire."
So let's see. If we can believe Leon Musk is giving us the REAL numbers (for the first time ever) and 73M watched the interview after the initial brain fart from the so-called "tech genius" , Leon - and then all the people who "talked about it later" added up to "1B people"... Let's see what Game of Thrones did last night...
12M initial viewers
100M Tweets
1000 Retweets of those tweets
1.5 B phone calls between people talking about the GoT cliffhanger
14B calls with people checking to make sure they had the time right for the next installment of GoT
Multiple everything by 4 people in the room with each person tweeting or calling and that means...
100 quadrillion people watched Game of Thrones last night.
by Indy! on August 13, 2024 5:35 pm
What a dumbass. No wonder twitter is going out of business.
