A team of researchers have conducted a simulation to explore the potential consequences of greenhouse gases causing a significant increase in Earth’s temperature.
The results of the runaway greenhouse effect would be devastating and difficult to undo. It would rapidly transform Earth into a hostile environment similar to Venus, with temperatures soaring by hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit within a few centuries.
If the greenhouse effect were to rise too much, the amount of water vapor from evaporating earth oceans could be lethal. There is a critical threshold for this amount of water vapor, beyond which the planet cannot cool down anymore.
From there, everything gets carried away until the oceans end up getting fully evaporated and the temperature reaches several hundred degrees. The researchers took the concept of a runaway greenhouse effect to its natural — and hellish — conclusion.
This is the first time a team has used a 3D global climate model to study the transition and observe how the climate and atmosphere change during this process. The atmosphere’s structure is significantly changed, resulting in the formation of thick clouds in the upper atmosphere.
The situation looks dire if 33 feet of the ocean’s surface would evaporate, the researchers calculate that the atmospheric pressure would increase by 1 bar at ground level. Later, we would even reach 273 bars of surface pressure and over [2732 degrees Fahrenheit], when all of the oceans would end up totally evaporated.
Reference- Journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Geneva (UNIGE), French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Futurism