How will the world end? A giant meteor? Zombie apocalypse? Death Star target practice!? One scientist thinks our planet’s death knell is going to be climate change, on an epic, terrifying scale…but, fortunately, not the kind we need to worry about. The “runaway greenhouse”—which is thought to have happened on Venus in the past—is basically a climate change worst-case scenario: We reach a critical point where the atmosphere is so thick with greenhouse gases that no sunlight can escape back into space, the planet heats uncontrollably, the oceans evaporate completely, and things get, well, pretty uncomfortable, to put it mildly. “Everything is really quite dead at that point,” Colin Goldblatt, a planetary scientist at Canada’s University of Victoria, says in a chipper English accent. Goldblatt has been working to understand whether a runaway greenhouse could ever happen on Earth. Scientists have long believed that even with extreme greenhouse gas concentrations, our sun simply doesn’t heat the planet enough to trigger this effect. But using a series of custom computer programs that model incoming sunlight, greenhouse gas concentration, radiation absorbed by water vapor, and a host of other physical factors, Goldblatt has revised that threshold down, and in a paper published today in Nature Geoscience says that a runaway greenhouse could kick off with the amount of sunlight we get today.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 20:48:55 +0000
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