Is an escalating greenhouse effect possible on Earth?

If, lets say, an asteroid or comet strikes any of the Earth's oceans, creating an explosion. The explosion would turn huge quantities of water into vapor, which rises into the atmosphere. Since water vapor is a good greenhouse gas, the temperature will rise, and more water will be vaporized, creating an unstoppable positive spiral.

At some point the atmosphere will be so hot that it allows the vapor to rise above the ozone layer, and thus it cannot be protected against ultra violet radiation. The radation will cause the oxygen and hydrogen to separate, with the possible outcome that the hydrogen will leave Earth due to its light mass.

Is this a realistic scenario? I'm very, very greatful for answers.

 

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The problem I see with that scenerio is that even after a large quantity of water is vaporized after impact, it will almost immediately drop back down in the form of rain. The atmosphere is a very large open system and a large, sharp increase in water vapor content in a given area will only last for so long before it's redistributed throughout the Earth system and returned back to the surface as rain.

The only way I can see your kind of scenerio working is if a 200km wide asteroid impact's Earth and vaporizes half the entire liquid water content on the planet and completely disrupt global atmospheric patterns. Anything in the realistic range of 1km wide asteroids may not be enough to start a postive feedback mechanism as you're suggesting.

At least that's what I think.

 

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Depends on how much the water condenses, in which Singularity's argument makes sense.

If you have a point where a 1km wide asteroid strikes, the water vapor that spreads will soon condense because there isn't enough energy to keep it as a diffuse gas, the latter of which is the case of the 200km asteroid.

So then you have a bunch of white puffy clouds all over the planet, the whole planet becomes bright grey, the albedo skyrockets, and we have an ice age.

 

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Hasn't happened yet - and there have been some pretty big meteorite impacts over the past 4,000,000,000 years.....

 

More likely, human global warming will rearrange the atmosphere, increase radiation levels and leave this place looking like Mars...

Ever see the show "Greatest American Hero"?

 

Thanks alot for your answers.

Lets assume that the object is large enough to vaporize enough water to make the atmosphere unstable. In this case, will the clouds raise the Earth's temperature, or will it cool it down? And in the later case, would not a cooling effect turn the clouds into rain, thus stopping the cooling of the planet rather quickly?

As I understand, Venus is covered with sulfuric acid clouds. The planets albedo is extremely high, but the greenhouse effect due to the high concentration of carbon dioxide in Venus' atmosphere it stays hot. Do Venus' clouds cool the planet down, and does this mean that there is constant 'battle' between clouds and greenhouse effect on Venus?

Neoclassical, sorry, I've not seen that movie. How will the human global warming rearrange our atmosphere? Please explain further if you have the time!

Singulary, Facial, Essan, thanks again! I'll be checking in later!

 

Orange, it was a TV show which posited that aliens were intervening on earth to save us from their fate at the hands of technology. It was very unabomber.

Global warming is a spiral. Once started, it's very hard to stop, and even if we shut off all CO2 producing sources in industry, its effects will be felt for some time.

This will disrupt the temperatures of the upper atmosphere, causing some gasses to thin out and be lost to space.

It does no favors to the ozone layer, for example.

 

I take that back; I don't think it's possible with any meteorite impact.

 

It's hard to imagine this kind of thing since it never happened during prehistoric history. I've read somewhere that it would take an approximately 450km wide asteroid to produce enough energy to vaporize every single drop of water of the planet. Now since water vapor is indeed a very strong greenhouse gas ... maybe the enomous increase of water vapor in the atmosphere, even if it's for a brief amount of time, may be enough to send atmospheric temperatures into a state of shock. It would be like a being struck by a lightning bolt ... its an enormous amount of energy in a very brief amount of time.

I don't exactly know how this would play out but I may be wrong in this regard since it's inconcievable to imagine a scenerio like that ever happening. But then again, if a 450km asteroid were to hit, then we wouldn't need to worry amount the planet's increase in greenhouse gases. Something that catastrophic would not only vaporize every drop of water but it would completely ionize the entire atmosphere.

I don't think anything can destabalize the atmosphere just by increasing water vapor content in any circumstance. Water vapor doesn't have a direct effect on the mechanism of atmospheric circulation. In the case for clouds, if the clouds are low-level clouds, then they will cool the planet but if they are high level clouds, then they will increase surface temperatures.

As for Venus, the clouds surrounding the planet are the result of intense concentrations of CO2, just like our clouds are the result of localized high concentrations are water vapor at certain time intervals. So the clouds are keeping surface temperatures high on Venus.

 

Singularity, thanks for your reply.

 

Nope. None whatsoever. The evidence is mounting that the heat of Venus has nothing to do with greenhouse gas effect. Continious investigation of the geology of the planet reveals that it must have been a lot more warmer in the past, say 500 million years ago. There is even a new hypothesis that explains not only the heat of the planet, but also the emerging of the dense carbon diocxide atmosphere, the lack of water and the lack of magnetism, the short but extreme heavy volcanic era in the most ancient times and the slow retrograde spinning.

It's all in one and the answer is definitely not greenhouse gas.

 

Tell me more, Andre.

I'm curious as to how you would dispose of the greenhouse effect as a contributing factor so easily.

 

Well I'm about to finish the book on that. Venus has stopped spinning by an internal mechanism that was feeded by chaotic resonance in its orbit. Consequently the planet heated up tremendously melting it completely. This happened one to two billion years ago. We still see the residual heat of that process and this has nothing to do with greenhouse gas effect.

There are many details supporting that hypothesis, like the shaping and geologic frequencies of the plains indicating melting, the exponential declining of volcanic activity indicates strong cooling etc. The new paradigm rthat is currently emerging is "radiogenic heat" and a lot of it. But what is the source. The most likely element -potassium40- (40K) is also much more rare on Venus?

It was the big brake.

 

Actually,
We might be in process of that escalating greenhouse effect.
And the culprit is not human produced polution.
Rather, it is human induced deforestation.
If the nitwit "scientists" would put it into the models, the picture would come out really scary.

e

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s

 

Forget about it. That's chicken little talk. The CO2 level has been estimated to be about 5 times that of today 60 million years ago and perhaps about 30 times that of today some 200 million years ago. There is no runaway greenhouse gas effect.

 

Sure, they where declining for millions of years due to vegetation.
But we are killing vegetation, so they are rising.

ES

 

The point is that extreme high CO2 levels of the past never have caused runaway greenhouse effect. So, why would a tiny fraction of that level increase do so now, all of a sudden?

 

They probably had some greenhouse effect

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Maybe we should not be too sensitive: what having a few grades warmer winter can to to a man?

The problem is, that in the past there was a mechanism that had produced new equilibrium, so that when there was more CO2, there was more vegetation to consume it. Since now the mechanism is broken by us destroying veretation, the CO2 level can go straight up unchecked by the forests.

es

 

But of course. We're not disputing the greenhouse gas effect. With the law of Arrhenius and the law of Stefan-Boltzmann it's possible to calculate that the average global temperature would increase about 1 degree F or 0,7 degree K for every doubling of CO2 level, assuming no feedback factors. And since 1850 when the CO2 level was 280 parts per millions, we have thus far increased CO2 levels with 1/3 to 370 ppm.

Well let's get a lot more forests then to increase the biomass. But don't worry most of the CO2 is absorbed in the oceans where it starts a new food chain as well, eventually restoring biologic life in the sea, after man has fished it empty.

 

Not without tricks.
The calculation that I made, and it took time, shows that with current CO2 yearly increase of 0.0038, 0,38%, the temperature increases yearly by 0.2 degree, because of greenhouse effect.

Doubling CO2... you might be smoking something

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The only cure is vegetation!

es