The Tale of Two Different Worlds
In their Climate Change (Venus and Earth)
5 years ago, 12 December 2015 to be precise, the Paris Agreement was adopted in the 21st Conference of Parties (COP) United Nation Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC). It became a monumental moment for Climate Change regulation, aiming to strengthen the global response to the climate change threat (in the context of sustainability and poverty eradication).
The Paris Agreement gives responsibilities towards participant nations to arrange the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), which is the responsibilities of participant nations to arranging and setting specific and quantifiable emission reduction plans with clear time frames nationally.
The realization of earth climate change has come a long way, began with the discoveries of increasing global temperature and CO2 level in the atmosphere since the revolutionary industry.
As far back as 1896, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius calculated that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would melt the arctic ice. In 1930, the American physicist EO Hulburt at the Naval Research Laboratory confirmed that result. So far, it was just theoretical, but then the English engineer Guy Callendar assemble the evidence to show both CO2 and the average global temperature were actually increased. In 1960, Carl Sagan’s Ph.D. thesis included the first calculation of the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus (this is a part of his career-long interest in the planet’s atmosphere, including our own).
Recently, Climate scientists want more data, more models. Some climate information types go back millennia, like the details trapped in sediment columns that scientists can pull from the ocean floor, but climate data is skewed heavily toward modern years. So doubling the number of planets they’re looking at — even with limited data — makes a difference. Venus doesn’t just offer new information — it also offers a new way of talking about climate.
“Venus is a laboratory for understanding climate physics and climate change on an Earth-like planet” said David Grinspoon, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist at the Planetary Science Institute, at Space.com.
In Venus, the ocean was long gone, the surface is hotter than a burning oven and hot enough to melt lead.
You might think it because Venus is 30% closer to the sun than the Earth is. But maybe it’s not the main reason. Venus is completely covered by clouds of sulfuric acid that blocks almost all sunlight from reaching its surface, so it supposed to make Venus cooler than Earth. Even scientists discovered that when our galaxy was young, Venus was like earth nowadays. It had a liquid-water Ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to 2 billion years of its early history, according to computer modeling of the planet’s ancient climate by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. Venus’ ocean was gone billion years ago after large-scale resurfacing from volcanic eruptions released enough CO2 to dry up the surface water, Venus now clocks in at a staggering 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius).
So why Venus can be so hot? How can Venus turn into hell?
Scientists aren’t positive precisely how events played out, but the runaway greenhouse effect that resulted is beyond debate. The atmosphere began trapping a little too much heat, the little amount of sunlight that through the cloud and reaches the surfaces can’t get back out again, the flow of energy is blocked by the dense atmosphere that carbon dioxide gas. CO2 gas act like a blanket that keeps the heat in.
No one is burning coal or driving wasteful fuel car, in Venus nature can destroy the environment.
Scientists have long theorized that Venus formed out of ingredients similar to Earth’s. Venus and Earth start have the same amount of CO2, but these two worlds separate into two different long paths, and carbon is the deciding element in both stories. In Venus, it almost in the form of gas, CO2 in the atmosphere. On the other side, most of the carbon on Earth has been stored for thousands of years in solid and carbonate rock (for example, White Cliff Dover in English). Ocean was absorbing CO2 in the atmosphere, which was supplied by volcanic activity, then one cell algae turned CO2 into accumulated limestone, as a result only small amount left as gas in earth atmosphere not even 0,03%. And yet it makes the critical difference, with no CO2 at all the Earth will be frozen and with twice as many, things will get uncomfortably hot and causes some serious problem for us. But not even as hot as Venus, not even close. Venus lost its ocean billion years ago. Without an ocean, it has no way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as a mineral. CO2 from erupting volcanoes just continues to build up. Today Venus’ atmosphere is 90 times heavier than ours. Almost all of it is trap heat CO2, that why Venus is such a burner and uninhabitable.
Otherwise, the Earth is so live and breath that a single breath takes a single whole year. Forest contains the most Earth life, most forest is in the northern hemisphere. When spring comes to the north, forests inhale CO2 from the air and grow to turn the land green, so CO2 in the atmosphere goes down. When fall comes, plant drops their leaves then decay, exhale CO2 back into the atmosphere. The same thing happens in the southern hemisphere at the opposite time of the year. But the southern hemisphere mostly ocean, so forest in the north that control the changes of global CO2. The Earth has been breathing like this for ten million years, that just realized in 1958, firstly discovered by oceanographer Charles David Keeling in 1958 who tried to calculate the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Apart from discovering the beautiful earth-breathing, he also discovered an increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The striking increase in the CO2 level has occurred since the revolution industry and continues to increase rapidly. For now, it is more than 40% higher since then (see also the Climate Record ).
The Earth has a mechanism that lets the sunlight shine on to Earth’s surface, but they trap the heat that reflects up into the atmosphere, known as the greenhouse effect, which CO2 be one material. It keeps the earth’s climate comfortable and inhabitable. So little greenhouse effect is a good thing, but the big one will trap more heat, make Earth hotter, destabilize the climate and wreck our way of life.
By burning coal, oil, and gas, our civilization exhaling CO2 much faster than the Earth can absorb it. So CO2 is building up in the atmosphere, and Planet is heating up. Every year our civilization pumping up 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. This amount is extremely larger than CO2 erupted by all the volcanoes on this planet, which is not even more than 2% of that amount. Volcanic CO2 has the distinction signature, it’s slightly heavier than the produced by burning fossil fuel, and it’s clear that the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is not from volcanoes.
The increase of CO2, which more trapping heat from the Sun, then impacts climate change right now. All of those energies trapped by CO2 warm the air, and most end up in the ocean, all of the world the ocean is getting warmer. It most obvious in the arctic ocean, the land surrounding it, and also melting ice both in the north pole and the south pole. Melting the ice can make more worst (besides the increasing sea level). Ice is the brightest natural surface on the Earth, and open ocean water is the darkest. Ice reflects the income sunlight to space. Water absorbs sunlight and gets warmer, which melts even more ice will decrase the reflector, then exposes still more ocean surface to absorb even more sunlight, so ocean even more warmer and again will melt even more ice. This is called a positive feedback loop. It’s one of many natural mechanisms that magnifies any warming caused by CO2 alone.
Based on scientific projection, if we just keep doing business as usual, our kids will experience heat waves, severe dryness, rising sea levels, and mass extinction of species. The climate has varied in the past indeed, there was a medieval warm period and little ice age caused by natural forces. But based on the equation developed by Professor Will Steffen (in a paper that was published in the Anthropocene Review Journal ), our civilization nowadays is causing the climate to change 170 times faster than natural forces. Luckily we quickly realized the problem that we faced. The Paris Agreement is a huge step in the right direction to act climate change worldwide. We need to catch up on reducing emissions and slowing down climate change at its natural rate, which is harmonized with nature.
[1] https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement
[3] https://www.space.com/42570-venus-model-for-climate-change.html
[4] https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/08/14/mesmerizing-gifs-of-breathing-earth/
[8] https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/188/graphic-the-greenhouse-effect/
And inspired by the mesmerizing 12th episode in the cosmos series: spacetime odyssey.
