Some good news about global warming.

This is about warming caused by our sun as it ages (eventually becoming a red giant).

First the bad news, we only have 150 million years left...

In one recent study, planetary scientist Ravi Kopparapu of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, and colleagues used computers to model how Earth would respond to increasing solar radiation. Just 6% more sunlight was enough to send the greenhouse effect into overdrive and vaporize Earth’s water, the researchers found. At the current rate of solar brightening—just over 1% every 100 million years—Earth would suffer this “runaway greenhouse” in 600 million to 700 million years. Earth will suffer some preliminary effects leading up to that, too. After just 150 million years, the researchers found, the stratosphere will warm enough to let some water vapor reach high in the sky, where solar radiation will break it down into molecules that can escape to space. In this "moist greenhouse," the planet would be too hot for complex surface life, but a few hardy marine organisms and microbes could soldier on.

And now the good news. The above computer model may be faulty, and we might actually have 1.5 billion years left (above computer model may of been off by a factor of 10)...

But not so fast, says Eric Wolf, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Kopparapu’s model is pretty rudimentary, Wolf says: It analyzes what happens in one dimension—altitude. As a result, the model excludes clouds and wrongly assumes that climate factors like humidity are the same everywhere on Earth. Wolf and his Boulder colleague, Owen Brian Toon, simulated Earth’s future using a more realistic 3D climate model from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Their model included clouds, and a host of other details such as regional differences in moisture, Wolf says. It also assumed that atmospheric CO2 levels would start at 500 parts per million—25% higher than today—and stay there indefinitely.

Then Wolf and Toon cranked up the sun. After they made our star 15.5% brighter than it is today, the simulated Earth had warmed from its current average of 15°C to 40°C. That’s hot, but not too hot for liquid water to survive. The oceans didn’t boil off. The stratosphere also didn't heat up, so no moist greenhouse occurred either. The upshot: Earth has at least 1.5 billion years left to support life, the researchers report this month in Geophysical Research Letters. If humans last that long, Earth would be generally uncomfortable for them, but livable in some areas just below the polar regions, Wolf suggests. Earth warms slower than in Kopparapu’s model, Wolf explains, because clouds and dry regions such as deserts, both of which the 1D study lacked, send a lot of heat back into space.

http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/01/earth-wont-die-soon-thought

Whew, hope you all feel better about this! I just thought I'd share some good global warming news. lol

Fecal matter, 1.5 billion years will pass before you know it. We need to ban fossil fuels now.

Algore didn't just invent the tubes of the interwebs, he invented Global Warming too...

http://pumabydesign001.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/al-gore-global-warming.jpg?w=223&h=300

:rofllol Otis. Yep and his mansions show how much he worries about global warming.

GreatGran wrote: :rofllol Otis. Yep and his mansions show how much he worries about global warming.

But he does purchase carbon credits which are used to mitigate toxic unicorn farts.

:rofllol Oh, well, alrighty then, that makes it ok.

Rick wrote:

GreatGran wrote: :rofllol Otis. Yep and his mansions show how much he worries about global warming.

But he does purchase carbon credits which are used to mitigate toxic unicorn farts.

More bad news...

I read the comments in the original article I posted and see that the Earth faces another life threatening event in just 1.3 million years or so.

There is an orange dwarf star out there, Gliese 710, which is currently about 63 light years away. But in 1.3 million years it's projected to get within 1.3 light years of our sun. That would pass through the sun's Oort Cloud which contains some 2.4 million icy objects such as comets, and Gliese's gravity could hurl many of them towards the solar system and to Earth.

Then again, assuming humans survive global warming and all the other threats out there, you'd think we might have a comet/asteroid defense in 1.3 million years.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/88198587.html