The famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has raised some eyebrows in the scientific community with a claim to the BBC that American President Donald trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord will cause the Earth to become a like Venus. That is to say, Earth would become a planet with an average of 250 degrees (according to Hawking) and raining sulfuric acid. According to the Daily Caller, as a number of climate scientists and environmental accidents are wondering why Hawking would say such a thing.
What is Venus like?
To understand what Hawking thinks we have in store for us, one has to look at what Venus is like now.
It has an atmosphere that is 96.5 percent carbon dioxide with 92 times the atmospheric pressure on its surface than that of Earth. The surface temperature of Venus is about 863 degrees Fahrenheit or 261 degrees Celsius. Scientists believe that billions of years ago Venus had an atmosphere much like Earth with surface water. However, over hundreds of billions of years, the surface water evaporated, generating greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, making Venus the hell planet that it is today. In other words, the process took place over an incredibly long time.
Why did someone as smart as Hawking say that about Trump?
Hawking apparently misspoke on a number of points, including understating what the temperature is on Venus and not mentioning that the second planet from the sun became the way it was over hundreds of millions of years.
Even the most strident climate change alarmist posit ocean level rises that will submerge coastal regions and a gradual rise in temperatures that will make the equatorial regions extremely uncomfortable but will likely benefit areas closer to the Arctic and Antarctic
It could be that Hawking was just popping off. Even one of the smartest people in the world may not be immune to Trump derangement syndrome.
On the other hand, he might have overstated the effects of climate change as a means to incite action against Trump and motivate Americans to adhere more closely to the Paris mandates.
The late Carl Sagan once admitted to exaggerating the effects of a phenomenon called nuclear winter, caused by debris kicked up into the atmosphere in a general thermonuclear exchange, as a way to persuade people toward nuclear disarmament in the 1980s.
Some environmentalists may be doing the same thing regarding climate change.
The problem, from the point of view of climate change alarmists, is that this kind of Chicken Little behavior is going to impact their credibility. If human-caused climate change is real and is a bad thing, but less bad than Venus, Hawking has done his cause no favors.
