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:
“You’ll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labour, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The earth is not earth but a stone,
Not the mother that held men as they fell
But stone, but like a stone, no: not
The mother, but an oppressor, but like
An oppressor that grudges them their death,
As it grudges the living that they live.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Truth and kindness in sweet embrace,
Righteousness and peace are God’s grace;
For truth out of the earth does spring,
And righteousness from heaven ring.”
—Faye T. Bresler (b. 1959)