The 'Venus' prediction - quackery or a valid climate science prediction?
There are climate doomsday proponents and alleged "experts" who fear that Earth is warming so fast that it will soon reach hothouse Venus-like temperatures, primarily due to humans continuing global emissions of CO2, a trace greenhouse gas.
To summarize this alarmist position, the feared extreme global warming and climate change would result in the demise of all humans and civilization. More recent claims of similar outcomes, include: the '6th great mass extinction' and the one referred to as the 'human extinction'.
Indeed, Venus is quite uninhabitable for humans with surface and lower atmospheric temperatures in excess of 800°F (+400°C). This planet is an extreme hothouse that had a runaway warming tipping point in its past.
But.....do the scientific facts and latest empirical evidence indicate that sort of "runaway tipping point" and extreme warming fate is even remotely possible for Earth in the future?
As a starting point, the above chart plots the gold-standard satellite warming measurement trends of Earth's lower troposphere, and plots the cumulative CO2 increase, since 1979. (These are the rolling per century temperature trends by month.)
None of the current trends, as of the end of September 2017, reveal a significantly high acceleration of lower atmospheric warming that would indicate a Venus tipping point of runaway global warming is imminent, despite the growing amount of CO2.
From the chart, it is clear there are very abrupt changes in acceleration and deceleration of temperatures, which strongly suggest powerful natural climate factors are in the driver's seat, not human CO2 emissions. The chart depicts short-term warming trend peaks that correlate well with recent and prior El Niño warming periods.
Focusing just on the above chart's 12-month (bright red curve) and 24-month (bright blue) and 36-month (bright green) trends, one can visualize the quick shifts in atmospheric temperature direction, from warming to cooling and then back to warming.
Again, these abrupt trend changes are associated with known short-term natural climate forces.
The long-term 20-year acceleration shown alone in this above chart confirms that the short-term changes in acceleration/deceleration are somewhat reflected in the longer trends but with a much reduced variation - i.e. - a smaller trend range.
Instead of a huge trend range of +80 degrees per century acceleration or a -80 degrees per century acceleration, the 20-year trend variation is much narrower, from +0.5 to +2.5 degrees per century.
And this satellite 20-year trend evidence confirms that the longer temperature trend has actually declined since a March 2004 peak, indicating that its relationship with the steady growth trend of atmospheric CO2 is rather weak, at best. One could surmise it's more of an inverse relationship during this time span.
Or, one could surmise that this reflects the proven and much investigated 'pause' in global warming.
Going back again to shorter term trends, this above graph represents the moving 12-month trends over the critical 31 months for the last 2 major El Niños: 1998 and 2016. The 16-month mark is the peak 12-month trend for each event. Plus, each temperature trend plot includes the 15 months prior to the peak, and after the peak.
Based on the gold-standard empirical evidence, it can safely be said that the increased atmospheric CO2 levels of 2016 had little acceleration impact, if any, since the earlier period - at a much lower level CO2 - exhibited greater atmospheric temperature acceleration.
Fact Check Conclusion: Large increases in atmospheric CO2 levels, be they from natural or human sources, are not turning Earth into the next Venus. The prediction of a Venus-like runaway warming future is quackery.
In the scheme of important global priorities and concerns, the accelerated warming of Earth due to CO2 emission should not even rank in a list of priorities, per the real empirical evidence.
(It truly does make one wonder why really smart people would be tempted to utter such anti-science 'Venus' nonsense. Or, why they choose to ignore the known empirical evidence and scientific research challenging the wrongheaded Gore orthodoxy.)
Okay, this one last chart to put the entire Venus vs. Earth comparison into proper context.
On an annual basis, Earth's lower troposphere (5km high) averages around -4.25°C. In contrast, the Venus lower troposphere (5km) temp is around +430°C. The above chart reveals the gigantic difference in these temperature levels.
Obviously, Earth's LT temps are not accelerating to match the outlandish Venus temps, even after 30 years of large scale industrial/consumer CO2 emissions.
One reason that we are not becoming the next Venus is that its atmosphere is 96% CO2. In comparison, our atmosphere is less than one-tenth of 1% composed of CO2. And even if our CO2 levels doubled, it would still be less than one-tenth of 1% of the atmosphere.
The actual known laboratory physics indicates Earth's temps will only increase between 1-2°C after a CO2 doubling - not some 400+ degrees.
In addition, Venus is a lot closer to the sun and its rotation is 243 Earth days, not 24 hours - it is basically baking in the solar furnace all the time.
And Venus has an atmospheric pressure that is some 90 times greater than Earth's, which is going to create incredible hot temperatures on its own.
Simply stated: Earth will not turn into Venus unless a major catastrophic event (asteroid, comet, an alien 'tractor' beam weapon, etc.) changes Earth's position in the solar system.
Note: Excel used to calculate averages, rolling month trends, the resultant per century trends, and to chart the dataset plots. Lower troposphere (LT) temperature satellite datasets - RSS and UAH - an equal weighting monthly average dataset used in chart's plot; NOAA's atmospheric CO2 dataset. For Earth vs. Venus comparison: a 30yr baseline was calculated from this UAH file of daily Kelvin temps and then monthly UAH LT anomalies applied to result in absolute temps for each month from 1979. Venus 5km LT absolute temps found on this web page.