Hawking, Venus, Trump and Modern Physics

Media reports the shocking news that

• STEPHEN HAWKING SAYS EARTH WILL BECOME AS HOT AS VENUS BECAUSE OF DONALD TRUMP'S PARIS ACCORD DECISION

Hawking is supposed to be one of the greatest now living physicists (the greatest?) with deep insights into the construction of the Universe comparable (or beyond?) to those of Einstein (and Newton of course).

But Hawking's statement shows an even more deep ignorance/illiteracy of basic elementary facts of physics: The surface of Venus is so much hotter (about 450 C) than that of the Earth (about 15 C) because the atmosphere is 100 times thicker and the atmospheric pressure 100 times higher, which by elementary thermodynamics comes with high temperature (since the atmosphere is also opaque). 

Hawking's statement shows that he does not understand basic physics and thermodynamics. It is then difficult to not ask the question if Hawking really better understands less basic facts of physics, such as physics of black holes as his specialty? 

How is it possible that a (the?) leading now living representative of modern physics shows a deep ignorance about basic physics? 

What does that say about the status of modern physics? What does that say about the progress of modern physics concerning the main current topics of multiversa, black holes, string theory...?

What do you say?

Or is Hawking deliberately misleading the general public because of some hidden political agenda?

Stephen Hawking on Global Warming and Colonisation of Other Worlds

BBC reports that Stephen Hawking sends the following message to humanity on Earth:

• Humanity is at risk from a series of dangers of our own making e g global warming.
• Assuming humanity eventually establishes colonies on other worlds, it will be able to survive.
• Disaster to planet Earth becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years.
• By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race. 
• However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period.

Evidently Hawking believes in man-made disastrous global warming and sees a necessity to escape to other worlds around other stars than our Sun. 

We cite from SkyandTelescope:

• The Sun’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is actually a triple-star system —three stars bound together by gravity. 
• Alpha Centauri A and B are two bright, closely orbiting stars with a distant, dim companion, Proxima Centauri. 
• The binary appears to the unaided eye as a single star, the third brightest in the night sky, but it lies 4.37 light years from the Sun — Proxima Centauri claims the honor of being our true nearest neighbor at only 4.24 light years away.
• It’s difficult to conceptualize such vast distances, but a popular analogy sets the Sun at the size of a grapefruit. If you wanted to get from your grapefruit-sized Sun to a grapefruit-sized Alpha Centauri system, you would have to travel about 2,500 miles, which is about the distance from coast to coast on the continental United States. And that’s just to the Sun’s closest neighbor!

So to escape global warming our only chance is to reach Alpha Centauri or beyond, at least 4 light years away, with a lot of material, food and people to build a colony.  Of course clever scientists can make this come true...