THE VENUS SYNDROME

I met James Hansen several decades ago, and remember him all the back to 1988 when he first testified in Congress.  This was six years after I had left the U. S. Senate, a time period when global warming was an issue of importance only to a very few scientists.  I am on his mailing list, and this morning received his views on The Venus Syndrome and Runaway Climate.

Paper starts with:

Mars, Venus and Earth are the Goldilocks planets – too cold, too hot, and just right. These planets reveal how a planet’s surface temperature depends on atmospheric gases as well as the planet’s distance from the Sun. The physics is energy balance: a planet sends back to space, as (infrared) heat radiation, the energy in sunlight that it absorbs. Absorbed solar energy depends simply on the Sun’s irradiance,ⁱ the planet’s distance from the Sun, and the fraction of incident sunlight that the planet absorbs (the remainder being reflected). The surface temperature is then given by the Stefan-Boltzmann law¹ (physical principle), if the planet has no atmosphere.

If the planet has an atmosphere that partly blocks heat emission, the surface must be warmer than given by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation for emission to space to match absorbed solar energy.² This “greenhouse” warming depends on how opaque the atmosphere is in the infrared. Mars’ atmosphere has small infrared opacity, so its surface is only a few degrees warmer than it would be with no atmosphere. Venus has a thick atmosphere of (96% CO₂) with sulfuric acid clouds and water vapor that absorb at wavelengths where CO₂ absorption is weak; resulting greenhouse warming on Venus is about 500°C. Earth has intermediate greenhouse warming, about 33°C, enough to change Earth from an ice ball at –19°C (–2°F) to a hospitable +14°C (57°F).

How did these planets get to this situation? Can Earth end up like Venus, a lifeless hothouse? Yes, it can, but the runaway greenhouse story described in Storms of My Grandchildren needs correction. To explain the change, we should first discuss what happened on Venus.

Hansen explains that Venus became that way because at some point in its history, it lost its oceans.  Earth has a lot of ocean and is not anywhere close to losing it.  So we have no Venus Syndrome potential, right?  Wrong!!!

Read my posting of 24February2014:  THE INTERMINABLE ADVANCEMENT OF THE VENUS SYNDROME.

• I started with a series of my articles published in the Huffington Post:

• 
  The Venus Syndrome (Part One)
• The Venus Syndrome (Part Two)
• The Venus Syndrome Revisited
• The Venus Syndrome Revisited Again

• 
  Read those summaries to find out why Planet Earth could enter into a Venus Syndrome.  Interesting that the reason of our demise is our ocean and how marine methane hydrates can become the source from which we relatively suddenly go from okay to The Venus Syndrome.

• 
  Part One of the above four articles reported on one of my efforts to find an Albert Einstein, who in 1939 with Leo Szilard wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt about Hitler and his possible Atomic Bomb.  In our case, the concern was about global warming, and we thought that James Hansen did not have enough clout to convince President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney to do something about this coming doom.  So I instead wrote a book as a scare tactic.

Well, pure logic was not working, so I tried something even more offbeat--FEAR! I wrote a book (SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth), with Chapter 5 on The Venus Syndrome. What are some strategies?

• If all the ice melts, the oceans will rise by 250 feet.  Unfortunately, this would take a thousand years and longer, and society will instead build walls around coastal cities instead of cutting out fossil fuels.  Something known as the Iron Lung Syndrome, that is, treat the symptom, but avoid the root of the problem.

• 
  Most only think that carbon dioxide is a problem.  I've long worried about methane, for each molecule this gas is 20-60 times more serious that a molecule of carbon dioxide.  I checked Google AI Overview today, and it says 28-126 times worse.
• But there isn't enough methane in fossil fuel combustion to make any real difference.  However:

• 
  There is more mass in just in ocean bacteria, viruses and archaea than all forms of life on land.  This microscopic marine mass die, drop to bottom, and with other forms of chemical conversion, they all become methane trapped in ice as marine methane hydrates.
• How much mass is this?  TWICE AS MUCH ENERGY IN METHANE IN METASTABLE EQUILIBRIUM AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN THAN ALL THE KNOWN COAL, OIL AND NATURAL GAS DEPOSITS, WHICH ARE RATHER SAFELY RESTING DEEP UNDERGROUND.
• Over our geologic history, every few tens of million years, our planet naturally heats up. This is accompanied by heightened carbon dioxide and methane levels, or more probably, these gases caused the temperature rise...just like today. Some scientists have speculated that the primary cause might well have been a rather sudden release of marine methane hydrates into the atmosphere.

Part II of The Venus Syndrome then says the following:

• Much of these marine methane hydrates are located around the Pacific Rim of Fire.

• 
  To make a longer story short (read this Part 2 to get the details), what if:
• Global warming begins to destabilize these methane hydrates and stops the thermohaline ocean circulation.
• Then, many of those volcanoes around this Rim of Fire erupt.

• 
  There will be a sudden influx of methane from the ocean into the atmosphere.  Quoting one paragraph:

It had to take the Global Warming equivalent of a Perfect Storm to catalyze an expedited Venus Syndrome: portions of the ocean surface at critical positive feedback temperature; cessation of the cooling currents thus warming the marine methane hydrate (MMH) deposits; a major subsea earthquake combined with a cataclysmic undersea volcanic eruption; resultant tsunami which slightly lowered the sea level over the MMH deposits near the coastlines; and, most importantly, crossing over of the dynamic equilibrium pressure-temperature condition allowing marine methane to explode to the surface. Yes, and that troublesome water vapor influx.

• 
  This is hypothetical, but:

Scientists at the International Marine Methane Hydrates Research Institute at the University of Hawaii calculated that one teraton, a million times a million, of methane will be released into the atmosphere over the next year or two. The early Eocene, 55 million years ago, experienced a similar event, resulting in a temperature rise of about 16 degrees Fahrenheit across the now populated regions of the world.

The chairman of the IPCC reported that we had reached and tripped over the tipping point. THE VENUS SYNDROME had begun, and, now, could probably not be stopped. Humanity at large, and most of life, would cease to exist within a century, providing a short period to develop solutions for survival, the only rational one being to leave Planet Earth, although emergency efforts are being planned to release air pollution particulates and sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere. Fortunately enough, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (see Simple Solutions for Humanity in box on the right) project, headed by a non government organization, had recently detected signals from an apparently advanced civilization in the Orion constellation. The data is being interpreted and....

• I end with:

A long time ago, according to Greek mythology, there was a very beautiful princess of Troy by the name of Cassandra. Her younger brother Paris was the character who kidnapped Helen, the wife of the King of Sparta, and brought her to Troy. Apollo, son of Zeus, fell in love with Cassandra and gave her the power to know the future if only she were to marry him. She was given that power, but refused to marry him, so Apollo put a curse on her predictive capabilities, and doomed her to despair, for while her powers remained, no one would believe her.

From the New York Times this morning:

There isn’t a universally agreed-upon song of the summer. So, to take the pulse of the season, the “Popcast” hosts Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli asked 10 cultural figures for their picks.

Jeff Goldblum chose “Lover Girl” by Laufey, which he said reminded him of “those ’60s bossa nova things that I was enchanted with.” Questlove picked “Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly and the Family Stone. And Zohran Mamdani made the case for “Funds” by the Nigerian artists Davido, Odumodublvck and Chike. Check out the other picks here.

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