Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Bummer: Grist suggests that CO2 might turn Earth into "an uninhabitable, 900-degree wasteland swathed in clouds of sulfuric acid"

No Venus envy here: Earth’s evil twin shows us the climate change endgame | Grist
Venus and Earth have a lot in common: They’re practically the same size, they’re made up of basically the same stuff, and early in the life of our solar system they were nearly identical, right down to oceans and moderate atmospheres. But then climate change arrived on Venus — the same processes that are playing out on our planet today with rising carbon dioxide and an increasing greenhouse effect — and transformed the planet into an uninhabitable, 900-degree wasteland swathed in clouds of sulfuric acid.

“It’s almost as if you had a twin study — you take these identical twins and give them different experiences in life and see how they grow up,” says David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the NASA-sponsored astrobiology chair at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center.

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