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Musk the Climate Warrior & Superconducting Cables

“People Don’t Realize This” about Climate Change, Elon Musk Says

TED Conference via Flickr

One of the strangest — if not the strangest — things to happen in the US election campaign was Elon Musk’s discussion with Donald Trump. In case you missed it, they had a truly bizarre conversation about climate change, in which Trump said we should worry about nuclear warming and Musk claimed that high levels of carbon dioxide lead to headaches and nausea. Really? I’ve had a look.

Musk:“Obviously my view is like, we do over time want to 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 parts 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.”

Trump: “But, you know, 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.”

First of all, let’s get a sense of the numbers. The current Carbon Dioxide concentration in the air is about 420 parts per million, ppm for short. That’s roughly 0.04 %.

That is much higher than the pre-industrial level, which was roughly 280 parts per million. 

But. If you look at the history of our planet, you will see that in the past the carbon dioxide levels have been much higher than they currently are. Indeed about 50 million years ago, they were above 1000 ppm. 

If you look back to about 500 million years, they’re believed to have been above 5000 ppm.

This long-term history of our atmosphere is often brought up by people who claim that no action is needed on climate change. It’s all natural, it’s happened before. The Earth was once a molten ball of lava, so it’s okay if we burn it down.

The problem with the “it’s natural” argument is that humans have only existed for about 300,000 years. We have never experienced carbon dioxide levels as high as they are now. And the levels are rising incredibly quickly. 

Neither we, nor other species on this planet, have time to adapt by natural selection — this would take tens of thousands of years at best.