In 2013, NASA’s former chief climate scientist James Hansen published a short whitepaper that warned if humans burned all the planet’s available fossil fuels, it “could result in the planet being not only ice-free but human-free.” He went on to describe “Venus Syndrome”—a situation that could unfold far in the future, in which so much carbon dioxide is loaded into the atmosphere that Earth is rendered a replica of the scorching second planet from the sun. First, though, all of the oceans would evaporate.

It won’t happen anytime soon, and it was a fairly radical proposition. Hansen concluded that though it would take millions of years, “Earth can ‘achieve’ Venus-like conditions, in the sense of ~90 bar surface pressure, only after first getting rid of its ocean via escape of hydrogen to space.” We would, in other words, have to heat the Earth up enough to boil away the oceans—a feat that another scientist, Max Popp, of Princeton and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, has confirmed is entirely within the realm of possibility. A distant, eventual possibility, but a possibility nonetheless.

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