The Venus Syndrome

I’ve got this dream. It’s a nightmare, really. It involves the effects of runaway global warming. It can’t be stopped and the temperature soars, boiling the oceans and scorching the land. Life is extinguished. The tectonic process stops. It’s called the Venus Syndrome. And it scares the shit out of me.

Now I am an optimist, people tell me. But I do like to know what the odds are, in everything I consider. Like, what’s the best that could happen and what’s the worst. Global warming. What a fluffy phrase that has become. Almost comforting. Warm is good. Maybe what we should be calling the phenomenon is ‘uncontrolled potentially catastrophic global heating’.

The worst case scenario goes a bit like this, I think. Rising ocean temperatures suddenly cause trillions of tonnes of subsea methane to be belched into the atmosphere rapidly raising global heating by several degrees. This in turn leads to a massive increase in the methane and CO2 released from the tundra, raising temperatures still further.

The Amazon and the Taiga burn. Everything burns. All the ice melts, very quickly. There are mass extinctions. The oceans begin to evaporate and the water vapour strengthens the greenhouse effect. As the temperature climbs all life is snuffed out. The surface temperature of our sister planet Venus is 450 degrees Celsius. Gas mark 12.

Oh, and it’s too late to do anything about it. The process is now unstoppable. Like yeast farting in a sealed belling jar, we're doomed by our own emmissions. It’s now a case of when not if. Oh, shit.

Anyways, that’s my nightmare. It’s worth considering, surely, if only to focus the mind on the need for real action now, not the ‘wait and see’ approach our leaders follow. Maybe it will take a major disaster, a mega disaster before real action is taken. I just hope it won’t be too late. And I really hope it’s just a dream.