THE INTERMINABLE ADVANCEMENT OF THE VENUS SYNDROME

If you're new to this blog site, you might not know about The Venus Syndrome:

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

Chapter 6 of my SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth provides all the details.

If you did not click on any of the above:

     The Venus Syndrome is this catastrophic cascade converting the atmosphere of Planet Earth into Planet Venus-like conditions, where the temperature is at 863 F.

The doomsday gas is methane (right), and there are at least two cataclysmic periods in the history of this planet where this condition almost made life extinct.  Will the third time be the charm, or real end?  

Carbon dioxide (left) is of course the most dangerous of current greenhouse gases, but the following compares this molecule with methane:

Note that methane is increasing a lot faster than carbon dioxide.  Worse, when released into the atmosphere, it is 70 times worse for climate warming per molecule than carbon dioxide.  Over a 100-year cycle, the factor is still a very high 20, but recently the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) warned that this multiplier is 34, and 86 over a 20-year time frame.  The priority given to methane is minimal today because the amount of methane in the atmosphere is only one half of one percent that of carbon dioxide.  Yet, the effect is becoming serious (methane is CH4):

While Arctic sources are beginning to worry scientists, my biggest concern has to do with marine methane hydrates at the bottom of the ocean throughout the world.  Worse, there is twice the abundance of energy in this deposit as the rest of the fossil fuel reserves combine.  As the oceans slowly warm, there will come a time when these resources will come to surface, for what happens to gas in ice?  The hydrates will float if not stuck to the bottom.  The Ring of Fire in the Pacific is a particular worry because a good portion of these methane clathrates are positioned close to this natural anomaly, and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions can jiggle the methane loose.  Here are locations where methane hydrates are located:

Note that the sites mirror the Ring of Fire.

Now comes fracking, where the underground is hydraulically fractured to release methane, which will only exacerbate the escape of this gas into the atmosphere.  Here is a methane escape map in the Boston area:

Global warming with carbon dioxide will "merely" warm our climate and slowly raise the level of our oceans.  A sudden release of methane into the atmosphere could swiftly convert Planet Earth to Planet Venus, which is at 863 F.

What can we do to prevent The Venus Syndrome?  Not much, except fracking can only accelerate the potential.  My next publication could be a novel entitled:  THE VENUS SYNDROME.  Quoting James Hansen:

The Venus syndrome is the greatest threat to the planet, to humanity's continuing existence... In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn all the tar sands and tar shale (aka oil shale), I think it is a dead certainty.

Hmmm....I wonder who came up with "The Venus Syndrome" first?

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THE VENUS SYNDROME

I met James Hanson 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.

Hanson 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 Hanson 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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THE VENUS SYNDROME: Part X

You now and then see these headlines:
   

     Global Geoengineering Fueling Venus Syndrome

But if you read this article, featuring Dale Wiggington of Geoengineering Watch, it is merely a diatribe against the current geoengineering perpetrated by governments and industry.  Solution?  Public awareness. 

This one, by Michael Byrne is worried about water vapor:

     Investigating Global Warming's Absolute Worst-Case Scenario, Venus Syndrome

Yes, water vapor is certainly significant:

Fully 95% of the greenhouse effect is caused by water vapor.  But all this water vapor has been there for many millions, in fact, billions, of years.  Nothing we can do about it, so consider this "dangerous" gas as a given and unchangeable.  What is increasing is carbon dioxide, caused by us and nature:

But when you add the true effect of human caused warming, methane jumps into the scene:

Why?  One molecule of methane is 30 times worse for capturing heat than one molecule of carbon dioxide. But this number is debatable, for others show factors up to 72.  Then, in 20 years, the methane gets oxidized into...carbon dioxide, and continues to contribute.  Planet Venus has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.  Methane, incidentally, is almost all of natural gas.  Fracking?  Something to definitely watch.

Anyway, here is the real problem  about METHANE.  Through the lifetime of Planet Earth, ocean life has died, dropped to the bottom of the ocean and decomposed into methane and other compounds.  Much of this methane, because of pressure and temperature (low) conditions, are trapped by ice and become a methane hydrate.  That is methane ice burning:  It is said that there are many times more energy in these deposits than all the known coal, natural gas and oil on land.  Unfortunately, most of these methane hydrates are located in the vicinity of the Ring of Fire, where undersea volcanic eruptions and most of the severe earthquakes occur:

Combined with all the methane being released in the Arctic Zone, my fear is that a series of undersea earthquakes could jar these methane hydrates loose and trigger the Venus Syndrome.  Read my three Huffington Post articles written a few years ago:

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

Let me close with an enhancee quote from Part Two:

All this heat finally resulted in portions of the ocean going hyper-critical with respect to temperature, and the danger point for runaway water vapor was finally exceeded on this October day in 2012. Water vapor (that steam you see emanating from your coffee cup is water vapor), as prevalent as it is, has not in the past been considered as a danger, mostly because there is so much of it and there is nothing we can do about it anyway. Suddenly, this is a major issue. But that in itself was not the trigger, for it should have taken many millennia to get to anything like the Venus Syndrome.

The problem was that this critical condition occurred over portions of the warmer Pacific, which sat over huge deposits of marine methane hydrates (MMH). It was purely coincidental, but in the Ring of Fire, at a spot off Peru, a major subsea earthquake rated at 8.9, triggered a massive underwater volcanic eruption, which served as a fuse to destabilize the hydrates, beginning the release of copious amounts of methane into the atmosphere. A major tsunami is expected to hit the Pacific Rim, but that has now become a minor irritant. A sizable MMH deposit off Guatemala, possibly catalyzed by a related earthquake, also went metastable. Unexpectedly, there was a huge reservoir of methane gas below the clathrates that just came to the surface.

Thus, in a matter of 24 hours, Planet Earth had its hottest day in modern history, a sudden influx of methane from the ocean, and an atmosphere where methane superseded carbon dioxide as the primary agent for global warming. We're not quite sure how this excess water vapor was affecting the process, but it can only be bad. The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt stopping was particularly ominous, for the ocean surrounding these MMH beds would further warm.

I will continue tomorrow with a few disturbing conditions now occurring.  The simple solution?

This is too depressing, so let me end with a song from Japan called VENUS SYNDROME.  You will need to click on that attractive girl.

No, not this girl, but the one in the link to VENUS SYNDROME.

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By the way, Hurricane Linda at 135 MPH  suddenly appeared in the eastern Pacific

Looks like a definite weakening and path towards Hawaii.

I continue to be intrigued about Typhoon (former Hurricane) Kilo, now at 75 MPH, which began south of Hawaii and now is getting close to Japan:

That's Japan to the left.  All signs show weakening and a move north, parallel, but sufficiently distanced, from land.

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IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE VENUS SYNDROME?

Private donors have pledged $41 million to the Woodwell Climate Research Center to monitor thawing of permafrost in the Arctic.   Buried beneath the Arctic Ocean are 60 billion tons of methane and 560 billion tons of organic carbon.  This carbon is more than humans have released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.  The problem is that global warming is causing the permafrost to thaw, and 140 million tons of carbon dioxide and 5.3 million tons of methane are already escaping into the atmosphere.

The danger is really methane, as molecule for molecule, this gas is from 20 to 100 times more dangerous for global warming than carbon dioxide.  Thus, those 60 billion tons of methane are the equivalent of at least 1200 billion tons of carbon, compared to the current estimate of 560 billion tons of carbon.

Further, there is a lot more methane stored as methane hydrates in the ocean than on land.  There is more potential fuel contained in these methane deposits than all the coal, oil and natural gas reserves on land.  Today, it's a big guess how much methane is in the sea, but current estimates range from 100 to 530,000 billion tons, with a more reliable range of 1000 billion tons to 5000 billion tons.

Most of these methane reserves are concentrated  near the coastline.

The danger I fear is that the Ring of Fire in the Pacific is also located in the same region:

This Ring of Fire:

• Contains 850 to 1000 active volcanoes.
• The four largest volcanic eruptions on Earth in the last 11,700 years have occurred here.  
• Eruptions from 1900 to 2013:

In short, this is The Venus Syndrome.  A cataclysmic eruption of several volcanoes in close proximity to these methane hydrate deposits, disturbing the meta-stable condition, releasing the methane into the atmosphere, called the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis.  This sudden release has resulted in a variety of extinction events in our geological history.

The next one could result in the Venus Syndrome.  Read three of my publications in the Huffington Post.

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

Why do I call this end of all life event The Venus Syndrome?  At least a billion years ago Venus suffered a runaway greenhouse effect.  Today the atmosphere at the surface is at around 900 F, with a pressure equivalent to an ocean depth of 0.6 miles.  You would be crushed.

Such doomsday talk deserves a lighter ending. Venus Syndrome by Minami Nitta, an anime character.  Perhaps a more appropriate song representing this end of life catastrophe is provided by a progressive metal band called Venus Syndrome, here with Sun Inside Me.

Typhoon Malaka formed On April 7, attained hurricane strength on the 11th, and is now at 132 MPH, with gusts up to 161 MPH.  The eye is moving along at 13 MPH in the North Northeast direction, the track is currently away from the Philippines towards Japan.  All models, however, show Malaka easing well east away from the country.

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