I'm not worried about it getting a little warmer, about coastal cities and populations getting flooded and destroyed, or about the mass extinctions. I'm worried about something much worse.
I'm worried about the runaway effect that no one talks about. The warmer it gets, the faster it gets warmer and hotter. Global warming happens at an exponential rate. What that means is that it won't get warmer: 1 degree 2 degrees 3 degrees 4 degrees. It will get warmer 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32... It's due to a feedback effect that causes the result to be continuously added back into the increasing cause of the problem.
As it gets warmer the oceans lose their ability to reabsorb Co2. As the earth gets warmer the massive amounts of methane trapped in the Siberian permafrost will be released into the atmosphere. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than Co2 and this gets the warming happening even faster. As the waters rise and drown vegetation, that dead vegetation also releases methane causing the warming to get even faster.
So what happens? What does it matter if all life on earth is wiped out in the next few thousand years? It will come back right?
The problem with a runaway greenhouse effect and the exponential warming problem is that there is a point where it can't be stopped or reversed. After that the oceans start to evaporate so quickly that the earth will become enshrouded in a hazy fog that traps the heat in. Water vapor acts similar to a greenhouse gas. With no polar ice caps to reflect heat out or cool down water vapor, this smog earth starts to reach temperature levels most people consider unthinkable.
As the oceans boil away; the atmosphere thick with water vapor traps in heat causing the oceans to boil away even faster. In the upper atmosphere the water molecules are broken apart by ultraviolet rays from the sun into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen the lightest element in the universe escapes into outer space, while the Oxygen reacts with the minerals in rocks to create even more Co2, once again accelerating the process and creating a heavier denser hotter atmosphere. This process continues until the oceans and all water on earth have evaporated. Until nearly all the hydrogen has drifted off into space. Without hydrogen there will never be water on Earth again. The heavy dense Co2 continues to trap heat over this dark barren lifeless world until the average surface temperature exceeds 800 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature tin and lead run molten. In this state, water, cold and life will never return to the earth. Once upon a time Venus had oceans of water, but they boiled away and its hydrogen was lost to the solar system in the process described above.
By the time the sun turns red and the earth receives less energy from the sun so that it's the same temperature it is now, the earth will no longer be rotating on its axis thanks to the slowing effect of the moons gravity. Instead one side will always be facing the sun, and one side will always be facing space. Like the moon, one side of the earth will always be incredibly hot, and the other side will always be amazingly cold.
Life and water will never return to the earth if a runaway greenhouse effect is allowed to occur. That is the gravity of the situation of global warming, and thatâs a big part of the problem. Itâs so intense that itâs hard to believe. Itâs so horrible that we dismiss it because we donât want to think about it. Advertisers and psychologists can tell you that moderate messages motivate people better, because when things are too intense we dismiss them. The inherit problem this presents is that if we think of global warming in a moderate sense, it may lead to the false notion that if things get really hot we can make changes then and things will be ok. The problem is that because thereâs a point of no return with the exponential increasing rate of global warming, by the time things seem dire itâs too late.
No one knows for sure where that point of no return is, and that alone should be enough to motivate us to take this issue very seriously since all that is at stake is all life on earth forever. (Seriously- Forever.) When preeminent theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking analyzed the problem his promising suggested course of action for the survival of the human race was: âWe need to colonize Mars right away.â
Itâs hard to imagine, itâs hard to believe we could collectively completely destroy the possibility of life on this planet. With Nuclear weapons we can only wipe it out for hundreds of thousands of years. The complete loss of the ozone layer might have wiped out all surface life for just a measly 100 years or more. Giant asteroids striking the earth in various intervals in it history caused mass extinctions and ice ages. The earths magnetic field has ceased repelling deadly cosmic rays for short periods as the magnetic poles of the earth switch. But no other likely threat facing life on earth has ever had the potential to wipe out all life on earth forever. Thatâs the part that worries me.
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}