Global Warming. Worst case, how hot could it get?

Question

In a worst case scenario, if we did nothing to stop global warming and went ahead and burned all the fossil fuels the planet has to offer, and all the permafrost melted (releasing all that methane) and anything else that could happen to add to the warming, did happen. Just how hot could it get? Could it get, say, as hot as inside a sauna (about 90 degrees celcius ) ? Could it get so hot that no place on the planet would be habitable ? Could a runaway greenhouse effect make it so hot that it would wipe out most life on the planet?

I'm just wondering because I'm thinking that at one time in the history of this planet all the carbon that we are digging and drilling up out of the ground right now (and burning and dumping into the atmosphere) came from the atmosphere to begin with . But the earth was still cool enough for life to begin on and evolve on...

Please, if you answer and have some scientific source could you please provide a link.

Thanks for your time and help.

Answer 1

maybe you ought to consider, where is all your food going to come from?

keeping in mind that if rain patterns change, the US might find a very large perminant dust bowl in it's middle.

also keeping in mind that something like 7% of all the humans that have ever lived on this earth are alive today, wanting food and water and clothing, and a place to live.  as of today, that's not working our real well for quite a number of people.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200704/da...

http://oldsite.globalsolutions.org/progr...

http://www.ethicalcorp.com/content.asp?C...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...

it's a common tactic to say it's been warmer before.

true. and colder.

never,  not one single time,  have 6 billion people survived those conditions.

and if the climate gets away from us, as it's apparently doing, they're not likely to do so this time either.

Answer 2

During the medieval optimum according to all verified sources it was about 6 degrees warmer than the 1934 average temperature which is a couple of degrees warmer than the current recent high of 1998. The Roman optimum at about the time of Christ was a couple of degrees warmer than that for maybe 8 or 9 degrees warmer than 1998 was. So considering that we still have a long way to go to reach those two previous highs I would not be very concerned about it at all.

And even if all the glaciers on earth today melted including Antarctica and Greenland which stayed frozen during other warm periods the most sea levels could possibly rise is about three or four inches and possibly at the worst case scenario six inches. The pacific islands that are being promoted as sinking under the seas because of AGW are not doing so and it has been scientifically proven they are not. In one case near Australia there is an island where there used to be a high tide marker showing a high tide some time in the late 1800s. The original marker has been proven to have been defaced and a new one placed near by several feet lower on the rocks.

The other major island they cite is suffering from subduction as happened to a portion of the island of Jamaica when a famous pirate port vanished a couple of hundred years ago and a portion of the Egyptian city of Alexandria that submerged a couple of thousand years ago. The problem most if not all of those believing in and promoting the AGW scam have is a serious lack of scientific and historical education. When you do not have a reasonable education on something it is very easy to get sucked into believing in something that is not at all true.

Answer 3

I have researched this a lot, taking into consideration the credibility of the sources (something to gain?, politicized?).

The best scientific evidence of the last 10 years says the temperature of the Earth is under the control of natural forces.

Once those are taken into account, the impact of man made CO2 is too small to be measured. I invite you to read my summary of this posted on www.CitizensEnergyForum.com

There is more evidence that we may be entering a period of cooling rather than warming, no matter how much CO2 is emitted by man. People don't know that warming stopped 10 years ago. Funny Gore never mentions that.

Answer 4

72 degrees.  CO2 in the Cambrian was 7000ppm for at least 1000 years and temperatures never got higher than that.

Answer 5

Quick And Simple.

Above Normal Temperatures.

Answer 6

well global warming is all about those smoke from veichles and factories and plastics too if you dont mind i suggest you and everybody to use recyclable plastics made of corn fibrs<if available>or make compost pit for your biodegradable materials such as kitchen leftovers and recycle your non biodegradable materials it could be useful try it and see what you find

Answer 7

Well all those green house gases take a lot of years to completely disappear.

So what would happen is all the beaches would dissapear

You know the movie the day after tomorrow what happened in New York that would happen to Manhattan.

Whole cities would be under water and a lot of people would have cancer.

(I got it somewhere but I don't know how to put a link).

A large part of India would be under water,Miami would be gone,San Fransisco.All the cities near beaches would be under water.

Answer 8

Worst case?  Maybe one degree, probably less.  All natural of course.  Man has no input re climate changes.

Answer 9

Extinction would be the result of such a scenario. But what your scenario didn't take into account would be the fact that our numbers would decrease to such a point that carbon dioxide output would level off and eventually return to normal, in such a case total extinction may not occur.

Thanks to our ability to analyze rock composition we are able to  know the chemical composition of the atmosphere during the last three extinctions. With this data, and much more data, we are able to see trends that arose before each extinction. According to my biology teacher we are seeing many of those trends starting to arise, especially the trends seen in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. If there is another extinction due to global warming, we would be the first species in the history of the Earth to be completely responsible for the extinction of all life on Earth (not including microbes and such).

In answer to your question yes, Earth does go through normal warming and cooling off periods and we are in the warming cycle right now. The important difference is the huge  increase in temperature from that norm that we are expecting to see in the near future. Although the Earth does have a normal cycle if a "run away greenhouse effect" took place we would deviate from that normal cycle by quite a bit, which is what scientists expect to happen if we don't fix this problem. Al Gores documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" pointed this following fact out. Historically there has been a direct correlation with the increase in carbon dioxide and the increase in temperature in the atmosphere. Thus, we do have evidence that shows that an increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will lead to an increase in temperature.  

In regards to your second question yes carbon is a conserved resource on Earth, so what we had billions of years ago is what we have now. But your missing a key bit of information in your statement and that is the carbon cycle. The Earth's atmosphere at no one point in time has contained all of Earths carbon source (obviously this is impossible but you get the point I'm trying to make... right). The carbon cycle is suppose to be a balance of carbon throughout the Earth's spheres (you get what I mean by sphere right, biosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, etc.). Over hundreds of years, carbon goes through a cycle from the atmosphere to geosphere (carbon is spread throughout these spheres at any given time); this cycle is essential to life and upsetting this cycle (by building up carbon at any one place) can create disastrous effects, such as global warming.

The point is this, global warming will have little effect on the survival of Earth, in the long run the Earth will do just fine, it is the survival of life as we know it that is at stake. In a worst case scenario the global temperature of Earth would increase so dramatically that life as we know it would not be able to withstand it.

From the way I understood it we now stand at a critical juncture because we still have the ability to level off the carbon dioxide pollutants in the atmosphere, but this window of opportunity will be lost in less than thirty years. In such a case the atmosphere would need a substantial amount of time to recover from the damage that we have caused it. The result would be that we could no longer maintain the huge populace that we currently have on Earth.

Answer 10

I'm finally beginning to see why deniers deny; they don't understand the problem at all!   No one with any credibility says its going to be too hot for humans to survive.   At the most the temp will rise 10-15 degrees in a couple hundred years.   That's an average for the planet, not everywhere.   Probably warm much more at the poles than anywhere near the equator.   Even then, winters will warm much more than summers.   That change will melt lots of ice which will NOT flood mountain ranges or continents, but ocean front homes and wetlands where fish and birds breed.  

Rainfall patterns will also change so we could have the next desert in the Midwest.   There go the hopes that warmer temperatures and more CO2 will help plants grow better.

GW will have many effects on the planet and its population, the least of the direct problems being warmer temperatures.

Answer 11

i dont have links or references, but i remember from high school chemistry that the earths atmosphere is something like 70 or 80% nitrogen. its maybe 5% carbon dioxide, and about 1% of that 5% is what humans are contributing. somehow, i dont think thats going to affect the entire state of the planet.

my theory on global warming? as many scientists (and even al gore) have stated, the earth goes through phases of hot and cold on a larger scale than just summer and winter. weve only been recording temperatures for one or two hundred years. if we only started recording temperatures at the bottom of an ice age, any natural increase in temperature would seem dramatic, but i doubt it will cause many problems.

it would be like moving to a dry lakebed in the dry season, then freaking out when the lake started filling back up once the rain came down. theres not much you can do for or against it