Twitter CEO, Elon Musk casually dropped what is being considered a contrarian opinion about climate change when he said that global warming risk is overblown in the short term, ‘but significant in the long term’.
“The world’s on-again, off-again” the entrepreneur said in a tweet.
Recall that this past March, the world’s leading climate scientists released dire ‘final warnings’ alongside the final portions of the sixth assessment report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Scientists on the panel also warned that the rising temperatures will increase the scarcity of both food and water resources for approximately 3.3–3.6 billion people currently living in highly vulnerable regions.
Among other things, their data showed that, between 2010 and 2020, human deaths from extreme weather triggered by climates, floods, droughts and storms grew 15 times higher than past averages in these same highly vulnerable regions.
According to reports, Musk’s fortune skyrocketed on the back of ecologically conscious ventures: from the electric vehicles and energy storage systems manufactured by Telsa Motors, where Musk is CEO, to the solar energy installers SolarCity, which Tesla later acquired.
Read also: Study: Global warming traps energy of ’25 billion atomic bombs’ trapped on Earth
However, over the past year, Musk’s forward-thinking work building a sustainable energy future has taken a backseat to his new public persona as the new owner of Twitter. He the only high-profile celebrity to dismiss climate change this year.
Recall that former President Donald Trump has repeatedly mocked eco-zealots and said nuclear war is a much bigger threat.
‘When I listened to people talking about global warming that the ocean will rise in the next 300 years by one-eighth of an inch and they talk about this as our problem, our big problem is nuclear warming which nobody even talks about it,’ Trump was quoted as telling former Fox host Tucker Carlson late last month.
The scientific community is in agreement that climate change has occurred over the past century and that human activity has ‘unequivocally’ caused global warming up to 1.1°C. But what is still debated politically is the most likely impacts that warming will have, and when.
Recall that a former senior official with Greenpeace Canada, Patrick Moore, had testified before the Senate and in the media that ‘the impact of climate change is wildly overblown’ sharing Musk’s view, in stark contrast to many prominent scientists.
Story was adapted from Mail online.
