How the runaway greenhouse gas effect can destroy a planet's habitability — including Earth's

[Admin]

Scientists watched as a simulated planet was driven from a habitable Earth-like heaven to an inhospitable Venus-like hell as the result of a runaway greenhouse effect, delivering a stark climate message.

How the runaway greenhouse gas effect can destroy a planet's habitability — including Earth's : Read more

 

[float]

To put this in perspective, because alarmism over turning the Earth into Venus with industrial emissions is kinda missing all the terrible stuff that will happen in between that incredibly unlikely outcome, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, around 50 million years ago, global average temperatures rose under 10°C. That was enough that there could be palm trees around the arctic circle.

No climatologist is concerned about human emissions causing this. The cold trap has protected us from much worse than even the worst of current models, at least so far as thermal runaway is concerned. But hey that's quitter talk, maybe we'll get there.

 

[DeadSpeciesWalking]

The concern is not like PETM, but like PTME. PTME was much greater and we are exceeding PTME RoW by a large margin. Referring to the Paleo record is the best comparison we have but the truth is we are in uncharted territory and our climate models have proven their lack of value already. Even PTME comparison may be inadequate given our faster RoW given that Earth system responses to such rapid forcing are unknown. The cold trap argument against Venus-like runaway greenhouse is valid if the current mainstream climate messaging is accurate.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

IYWMTUWYAS, you need to first spell out your acronyms.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

There seems to be a large gap between "just a few tens of degrees" to cause a runaway greenhouse effect and 1.5 or even 2 degrees of temperature rise due to human activities ( and perhaps some natural contribution).

So, I think this "knowledge" is going to be more relevant to our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres than to our effects on Earth's climate.