Good News: Life On Earth Will Not Boil Away As Soon As Previously Thought
Coronal Mass Ejection NASA Look around you. See the plants, the animals; most importantly, feel the earth beneath your toes. One day, the sun will brighten, and everything on the planet will burn. The oceans will vaporize. Complex life--eventually, even microbes--will no longer survive. But wait: new research offers hope. Ha ha. Juuuuust kidding. We are screwed. We just have a little longer than we thought. Maybe. A previous climate model suggested that the sun, which is getting brighter at a rate of about 1 percent every 100 million years, would destroy the planet's water in 600 or so million years. But that model--showing how slowly evaporating water and heat would be trapped in the earth's atmosphere, quickly baking everything inside--wasn't complicated enough, according to two recently published studies. Adding in factors like cloud coverage and regional differences, other models now estimate that the inevitable...