Doomsday cultists gotta doomsday cultist. It’s all about attempting to scare people into giving up their money and freedom to Government
A runaway greenhouse effect turned Venus into ‘hell.’ Could the same thing happen here?
Is there a temperature rise number that will result in a runaway greenhouse effect sending the Earth towards the fate of Venus?
— Richard, New Boston NH
Once upon a time, around small yellow sun, there existed a world with a rocky surface and a molten core. It harbored water and may even have been hospitable to life.
Then the planet got hot — really hot. Its atmosphere filled with heat-trapping gases. Water evaporated into its atmosphere and then was lost to space. Whatever mechanisms the planet may have had for balancing its climate were broken. Nothing, not even a robot, could survive there.
That would be Venus, which is much closer to the Sun, rather than being in the “Goldilocks zone“.
Human-driven climate change will never get quite as bad as that, said Giada Arney, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. But the story of Venus’s transformation from potentially Earth-like planet to the “closest thing to hell in our solar system,†she said, holds important lessons for people navigating a warming world.
Climate change is a much more immediate concern. Much the way a warming sun broke Venus’s temperature control system, humans have disrupted Earth’s natural cycle by burning fossil fuels, scientists agree. The buried carbon of ancient organisms that would otherwise have stayed locked up beneath Earth’s surface is now being released release at least 60 times as fast as it would under as natural processes. The planet is heating up at a rate of about 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit per decade –faster than any known change over the past 4.6 billion years.
Good grief. They have no direct observations of this assertion.
We’re unlikely to see our planet become Venus anytime soon, Byrne said, even if we burned every gallon of oil and ounce of coal currently in the ground. Earth’s average temperature would have to rise by dozens of degrees Fahrenheit to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, and the worst climate change scenarios don’t project warming greater than 8.1 degrees by the end of the century.
“But I think it’s certainly worth us being humble,†Byrne said. “Planetary systems are kept in a very fine balance … and it’s important for humans to realize it doesn’t take very much to tip the balance and really fundamentally change things.â€
Hogwash. Utter unhinged hysterics. Anyhow, the answer to the headline question is “no”. But, you should still give up your money and freedom to be “humble”.
