Future Planetary Separated At Birth?

The incredibly over-rated scientist, Stephen Hawking, has suggested in a speech in Beijing that the Earth “might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid.”

Uh, no it won’t. Venus is indeed an extreme example of the greenhouse effect. It has a mean surface temperature of over 450 C – hotter than the surface of Mercury – despite being further from the sun than the Mercury. The primary difference is that Venus’ atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide while the Earth’s is 0.053%.

How much would we have to drive our H2s to get to 96.5%? Let’s do the calculation:

The mean mass of the Earth’s atmosphere is 5.148 x 10¹⁸ kg, to get to 96.5%, we would need to add 4.965 x 10¹⁸ kg of CO_{2 (assuming we are replacing the same amount of other gasses).}

So how much gasoline would we have to burn to produce that much CO₂? The rule of thumb is that one gallon of gasoline produces about 9.1 kgs of CO₂, so to reach a Venus-like concentration of greenhouse gasses we must burn 5.5 x10¹⁷ gallons.

To burn this much gas, every man, woman and child in the world would have to make more than 1700 round trips to the moon and back in an H2 – assuming that you could build that many H2s, that there were a road to the moon, and that all of the CO₂ would go into the Earth’s atmosphere. (other assumptions in the calculation: 10 mpg for an H2, 6.7 billion people on Earth, 238,758 miles between the Earth and Moon)

Unfortunately there is not nearly enough oil on the Earth for this much driving; the largest estimate I can find is 1.19 x 10¹² barrels, or roughly 5 x 10¹³ gallons of gasoline. Thus, we would need to come up with 10,000 times more oil than we have to produce a Venus-like atmosphere. Maybe we can make up the difference with ethanol.

Of course, the previous calculation is largely bullshit, but then so is most of the work by the global warming “experts”. I will leave you with a quote from my favorite physicist, Richard Feynman:

“Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."