| | | GG, Unfortunately for Elon, he has been misled by the conventional wisdom about Earth being a lovely garden of Eden in perfect balance, but people have started running a global chemical experiment that has been proven with Settled Science to cook the Earth and raise sea levels by 10s of metres.
He then thinks that when the buried carbon has been burned, people will then have to do something anyway, so we should invent the alternative now.
He sees it as stupid to think anything else, so of course doesn't, because that would be stupid, which he isn't.
Operating from false premises is fatal. Our son is dead from the false premise that a vegetarian diet is a healthy diet. I had that same false premise. Too late he discovered that vitamin B12 is an essential ingredient for brain function. That's the price of false premises. Bung information.
Elon is simply assuming what everyone says is true. It seems kind of logical that Earth is in balance and it does seem to be so on our short human time scale. Though observing weather should give us a hint that maybe it's not. But a bit of knowledge of geology shows that Earth is not and never was in balance. It's a one-way billions of years long process and we're part way through the ecosphere time, but hundreds of millions of years into the animal stage.
Only a few hundred million years ago, CO2 was at 8000 parts per million in air. Plants and fauna conducted a great tragedy of the commons consumption of that natural resource, with geological processes burying the carbon in stupendously vast deposits of limestone, oceanic crust, coal, tar, oil, gas, peat. CO2 got down to homeopathic last gasp plant starvation levels.
There is no need to worry about more CO2 as far as the actual chemistry of the world is concerned. It's not a new chemical like CFCs or lead from petrol in our air. It's not a chemical experiment. That experiment on CO2 has been running for a billion years, with levels going down down down and now we have raised them back just a bit. Elon has got the chemical experiment idea wrong too. There is no balance and there is no chemical experiment.
He then goes on to make another mistake which is to believe the simplistic Settled Science predictions by Michael Mann Made Warmongering computers - garbage in = garbage out. It's worse than that because even with good data going in, the models are ridiculous and simplistic and do not represent reality. No clouds, no Gulf Stream CO2 sinking, no cosmic rays, no sun cycle allowing for 100 years of solar minimum, no deep ocean currents, no ocean temperatures, no snow cover variation, no plant cover variation.
Even so, electric cars are a great idea. I have been surprised for 30 years that diesel and petrol cars could continue to be competitive with electric cars with four moving parts = the wheels and rotors of the motors. Of course the doors, windscreen wipers and springs and steering move on electric cars. The absurdly complex Gordian knot of the engine and drive train have stayed competitive despite being horribly inefficient.
When the human population implodes after 2037, even without catastrophically cataclysmic calamity such as bolide bullseye in the Pacific ocean an H5N1 humanized flu, or glaciers coming down to London, Peking and New York, or WWIII, people won't be worrying about CO2 in air.
Mqurice |
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