In the attached below email, Jim Hansen, NASA's Goddard Space Institute Director, is predicting that we are heading for a catastrophic collapse of the earth if we continue to burn coal or oil sands. He calls it the Venus syndrome -- making the earth so hot that it just spirals into a total evaporation of the oceans. I wonder if this had been modeled in a way that policy makers could somehow absorb the gravity and possibility of this. The powerpoint quote is the following. (please take a look at what he is saying.) Thanks. And have a good holiday season.
Peggy Miller
Highland Winds/High Ground Communities
"The Earth's climate becomes more sensitive as it becomes very cold,
when an amplifying feedback, the surface albedo, can cause a runaway
snowball Earth, with ice and snow forming all the way to the equator.
If the planet gets too warm, the water vapor feedback can cause a
runaway greenhouse effect.
The ocean boils into the atmosphere and life
is extinguished.
The Earth has fell off the wagon several times in the cold direction,
ice and snow reaching all the way to the equator. Earth can escape from
snowball conditions because weathering slows down, and CO2 accumulates
in the air until there is enough to melt the ice and snow rapidly, as
the feedbacks work in the opposite direction. The last snowball Earth
occurred about 640 million years ago.
Now the danger that we face is the Venus syndrome. There is no escape
from the Venus Syndrome. Venus will never have oceans again."
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
James Hansen <[hidden email]>
Date: Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 9:55 PM
Subject: The Venus Syndrome
To:
[hidden email]
To be removed from Jim Hansen's e-mail distribution respond
with REMOVE as subject.
My "Bjerknes Lecture" presentation at the American Geophysical
Union on 17 December 2008 is available as Powerpoint
(
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/AGUBjerknes_20081217.ppt)
and PDF
(
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/AGUBjerknes_20081217.pdf).
It includes a brief discussion of the first 44 charts, prepared so that I
could get through a large number of charts coherently. Ran out of
time in preparation, but remaining charts are reasonably
self-explanatory. Thanks to Steve Nerem, Larry Thomason, Ed
Dlugokencky, Tom Delworth, Gokhan Danabasoglu, and Jonathan Gregory for
providing data and model results, which I was able to partially include
in the limited days that I had for preparation.
Jim
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