It will be 'hell': Earth might turn into Venus some day, greenhouse effect simulation shows

Researchers for the first time have simulated all stages of a runaway greenhouse effect and found that our green and blue planet will turn into an uninhabitable “hell” in the coming centuries.

A team of astronomers on Monday (Dec 18)said that it would take only a couple of degrees of rise in Earth’s temperature or a slight increase in the Sun’s luminosityto initiate an “irreversible” runaway warming, making it as inhospitable as Venus whose average surface temperature is around 464 degrees Celsius.

What was the research about?

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A team of astronomers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), with support from France’s CNRS laboratories in Paris and Bordeaux, said that they were the first ones to simulate all stages of a runaway greenhouse effect, the results of which were published in the Astronomy and Astrophysics review.

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The greenhouse effect is the process through which certain gases including water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere trap the Sun’s heat. While some of these gases occur naturally, others are generated by human activity like burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

The runaway greenhouse effect is when solar irradiation increases to a point that it sets off a dramatic, snowballing rise in a planet’s temperature.

The idea of a runaway of the greenhouse effect is not new and climate change is not the same as a runaway greenhouse process, but researchers warned that Earth was not far from the “apocalyptical scenario”.

The runaway greenhouse effect envisions a planet evolving from a temperate state like the one currently on Earth to one with surface temperatures of above 1,000 degrees Celsius.

For this study, scientists “demonstrated that from initial stages of the process, the atmospheric structure and cloud coverage undergo significant changes, leading to an almost-unstoppable and very complicated to reverse runaway greenhouse effect".

What would cause the Earth to turn into ‘hell’?

While the research, in part, was designed to provide a tool for studying the climate on other planets, particularly those outside our solar system or exoplanets in order to determine their potential for hosting life, it also provides an insight into what Earth may look like in the centuries to come.

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The researchers noted that a small amount of greenhouse effect is necessary to keep the Earth’s average temperature below the freezing point of water, without which it would turn into an ice-covered ball hostile to life.

However, too much of it increases the rate of evaporation of oceans which also raises the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere and traps heat like a rescue blanket.

“There is a critical threshold for this amount of water vapor, beyond which the planet cannot cool down anymore,” said Guillaume Chaverot, former postdoctoral scholar at UNIGE and main author of the study, in a statement.

“From there, everything gets carried away until the oceans end up getting fully evaporated and the temperature reaches several hundred degrees,” Chaverot added.

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One of the most important and rather surprising aspects of the study was the observation of an odd cloud pattern.“From the start of the transition, we can observe some very dense clouds developing in the high atmosphere,” said Chaverot.

This dense cloud pattern appearing in the high atmosphere increases the runaway effect and makes the process irreversible.

The study comes as countries across the world are attempting to cap Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

(With inputs from agencies)