Could earth end up like venus from global warming?

[pie]

If we don't stop global warming, could our earth end up like the planet Venus?

 

Venus has surface temperature of 900 degrees, which would evaporate the oceans, and kill all life on earth.

[HydrogenBond]

Global warming would probably never get that hot because such heat would radiate into space, earth being so far from the sun.The temperatures that are possible would be uncomfortable but liveable. The northerners might enjoy the endless summer. The heating would alter the thermal gradient between the equator and poles, first increasing, than gradually decreasing, as the polar caps shrink and melt away. Weather would initially change drastically but would then moderate with the lowering of thermal gradient. The melting of the polar ice caps would give inland dwellers a chance for beach front property. Without fall, winter, spring in much of the world, the plants would live year round turning more CO2 into biomass. This extra biomass could reverse the trend.

[UncleAl]

If we don't stop global warming, could our earth end up like the planet Venus?

Venus has surface temperature of 900 degrees,

900 degrees in whose temperature scale? Venus is closer to the sun - look it up. The local solar constant varies as the inverse square of the distance. If the Earth were bone dry and had a CO2 atmosphere it could not get as hot as Venus.

 

Earth's historic normal state is either hot wet jungle (e.g. Carboniferous Era) or glaciation. Everything in-between is merely transition. We are still warming up from the last glaciation. Do you like the idea of colonial Jamestown, sitting at the end of a southern estuary, being frozen down to -40 (and that works in both F and C)?

[CraigD]

In the 1970s (perhaps earlier – that’s when I first heard of it), some ecological conservation advocates spread the idea of something called “the Venus syndrome”, which talked about manmade emissions raising global temperatures, which in turn would cook various gasses out of the Earth’s crust, causing more warming, more cooking, and so on, till the sulfuric acid rains fell, and the earth became a dark, hot, pressurized hell.

 

According to this idea, Venus was once nice and earthlike, ‘til this happened there, possibly due to the folly of technologically advance Venusians. A variant had a few surviving Venusians fleeing, ancient astronaut style, to earth, losing their technology and cultural identity, eventually regaining it, until they … are us, about to repeat their ancient mistakes.

 

The science of the idea was imaginative to the point of ignoring pretty much any actual data about the composition of the Earth or Venus, though in those days much less was known about Venus than now. It think it was really a kind of allegory, a fairy-tale using science terms, meant to increase awareness of ecological conservation issues, but a lot of pretty well educated science and math types seemed to take it seriously, spreading it via an unwritten tradition.

 

All real science suggest that Venus was never earthlike, and earth will never be Venus like (except perhaps in 4-5 billion years, where some scientifically respectable scenarios predict the Earth will be a Mercury or Venus-like distance from the red dwarf Sun, though most of those predict the Earth’s atmosphere being baked off, not made super-dense)