Elon's quote: "Global warming risk is overblown in the short term, but significant in the long term"
Many ways to read/interpret...but it *can* be pretty reasonable.
Short term: global warming-related problems we face today aren't likely to be noticeably worse tomorrow, next month, or even next year. Likewise, anything we do today to try to prevent worsening isn't going to make noticeable global benefit tomorrow or next year.
But, among the anti-science/right wing/fossil fuels/etc. crowd, the "overblown" part is a straw man. They speak of "global warming alarmists", but that is a boogie man...nobody is saying the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow or next year because of what we do today. They say we need to *act* today (and tomorrow, and next year...) to lessen the impact in 10, 50, or 100 years. Even the most emotional folks demanding action today know that in the short term, the observed consequences will be small...it's not the short term consequences thst are an emergency, but thr emergency is in needing to act today for thr sake of the
longer-term. Because:
Long term: we darn well better be doing things today, or problems will be terrible in 10, 50, or 100 years (for people who actually care about what happens to their kids and grandkids after their own life is over).
In my view, the people complaining of global warming alarmists are the exact opposite sort of alarmist themselves...screaming about how we can't change anything, because of some imagined devastating economic impact if we change anything about the status quo. They want to delay the transition as much as possible, rather than letting it happen. These anti-action alarmists will make all consequences so much worse in the end...with worse environmental results and more catastrophic impacts to businesses thar don't transition.
It would be much more honest for them, instead of sewing doubt about the science or economics, to just say "I don't care about global warming, because I'll be dead before it gets real bad, and I don't care about anybody or anything after that. I just want profits maximizes for old businesses today."