Earth
See also: Runaway climate changeEarth's climate has swung repeatedly between warm periods and ice ages during its history. In the current climate the gain of the positive feedback effect from increased atmospheric water vapor is well below that which is required to boil away the oceans. Climate scientist John Houghton has written that " is no possibility of runaway greenhouse conditions occurring on the Earth". However, climatologist James Hansen disagrees. In his Storms of My Grandchildren he says that burning coal and mining shale oil will result in runaway greenhouse on Earth.
Benton and Twitchett's have a different definition of a runaway greenhouse; events meeting this definition have been suggested as a cause for the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and the great dying.
Read more about this topic: Runaway Greenhouse Effect
Famous quotes containing the word earth:
“A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“All earth was but one thought—and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour’d,”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“I sat in silent musing—
The soft wind waved my hair;
It told me heaven was glorious
And sleeping earth was fair.”
—Emily Brontë (1818–1848)