An Inconvenient Planet
An Inconvenient Planet
Why has NASA not rushed to colonise this Earth-like place?
One reason could be Venus’s irritating nullification of the prevailing greenhouse gas theory.
To compare apples with apples, we should compare the temperatures of two planets at places where they have the same atmospheric pressure.
You don’t meaningfully compare the temperature of, say, a city at sea level with that of the peak of a nearby mountain, unless you are going to take into account the adiabatic lapse rate.
Like our city versus mountaintop example, comparisons between Earth and Venus should focus on altitudes with the same pressure.
On Venus, the altitude where the pressure is the same as Earth’s at sea level is 50 kilometres above the surface mean.
The average temperature of Venus at this altitude is 66°C.
This turns out to be exactly the temperature you would expect it to be, when taking into account Venus’s closer orbit around the sun. (Note: Earth’s temperature in the stratosphere increases with height as ultra-violet light is intercepted by ozone and oxygen, warming the wispy air from above — at other altitudes, temperatures track each other nicely.)
Venus gets 1.91 times the incident solar energy that Earth does, and its temperature in Kelvins should be, and is, Earth’s multiplied by 1.91 square-rooted twice (1.176).
The following chart illustrates this relationship:
https://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html
The problem for the greenhouse theory is that Venus has 2000 times Earth’s concentration of CO₂.
Its composition is 96.5% CO₂, versus Earth’s at 0.04% CO₂.
So despite an overabundance of this ‘warming’ gas, there is no warming.
The temperature of the Venusian atmosphere at Earth’s sea-level pressure proves the greenhouse gas theory false.
The goddess Venus doesn’t give the theory any love, because her CO₂ does not warm Venus by so much as one measly degree.
Back on Earth, the greenhouse theory’s ‘climate sensitivity’ is the measure of the expected temperature increase due to a doubling of the amount of the trace gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The latest IPCC estimate of this phenomenon is several degrees, varying wildly over time and between climate modellers.
In essence, Venusian atmospheric temperatures at one bar prove that this climate sensitivity is zero.
No explanation for this phenomenon has come forth from any warmist quarter.
To fit the greenhouse narrative, the explanation would have to conjure up a climate mechanism that counter-cools the Venusian atmosphere, and precisely cancels out the greenhouse effect.
This is a bridge too far even for data-torturing warmists.
The only blogosphere suggestion I’ve read is that the temperature matching is a ‘coincidence’.
Well, it’s a pretty big coincidence considering Venus is Earth’s nearest atmosphere-bearing neighbour and is exactly the place where proof should be sought.
Warmists, perversely, hold Venus up as proof for the greenhouse gas theory, because they refer only to the high temperature on the Venusian surface.
Adiabatic cooling dictates, whether on Earth or Venus, that temperatures will fall as one goes up in an atmosphere, and they will increase as one descends, due to adiabatic warming.
Although it varies with Earth’s humidity, the adiabatic lapse rate on the two planets is practically the same.
The lapse rate measures the temperature that a parcel of air loses as it goes up and gains gravitational potential energy.
On Earth, when you descend down below sea level to places such as Death Valley or the Dead Sea, things get hotter.
The same phenomenon applies to mineshafts, for which geologists have well-established calculations that take into account the compression warming.
Returning to the Venusian atmosphere, as we descend from the 50km altitude where humans can lounge outside in shorts, the temperature gets much hotter.
Descend right through to the surface, and one finds extreme temperatures around 460℃, and a corresponding pressure of 90 atmospheres.
It’s another Death Valley all right, with a desiccated and crushed dead guy in shorts sitting on a deck chair beside a dried-out and even deader Dead Sea.
But the simple extrapolation of the adiabatic lapse rate, as felt on Earth, fully explains Venus’s surface temperature.
Science populizer Carl Sagan initiated this error, calling it a ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect.
It is, absurdly, what alarmists warn is the threat facing Earth from microscopic increases in CO₂.
It could be pointed out that, if one includes water — the other alleged greenhouse gas — then the concentration of greenhouse gases on Venus is merely 20 times that of Earth, there being about 2% moisture in Earth’s atmosphere and only 20 parts per million in Venus’s.
This does not help the warmists’ theoretical cause at all.
A twenty-fold difference is still a huge factor to be explained away, given the absence of any temperature difference beyond that which is accounted for by Venus’s closer orbit around the sun.
The data also imply that water is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂, the opposite of warmist mantra.
The Earth would not be threatened by such a benign greenhouse gas if CO₂ were not given extra magic heating properties that somehow return heat received from the surface back to the surface, with interest.
The Venusian data points are not the only ones that show zero greenhouse effect from any atmospheric component.
Nikolov and Zeller’s brilliant analysis of NASA-supplied data demonstrates that atmosphere-bearing planets and moons, including Earth, have surface temperatures independent of their atmospheres’ contents.
In 2017, Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller published a paper on their work to identify an empirical model for planetary temperatures (“New Insights on the Physical Nature of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Deduced from an Empirical Planetary Temperature Model”)
The thermodynamic explanation for the absence of any greenhouse effect is best illustrated by the Sky Dragon Slayers.
As the Slayers point out, colder upper atmospheric layers cannot ‘heat’ warmer lower ones.
Nowhere in applied physics does cold matter heat warm matter without the input of work, as with a plugged-in heat pump.
No laboratory nor field experiment has ever demonstrated this, nor will one ever do so.
Hamstrung Studies
The late Sagan’s runaway-greenhouse gas theory has, hitherto, put terraformation ideas out of reach.
Prominent terraform theorists Martyn Fogg, of Britain, and NASA scientist Geoffrey Landis, have both embraced the greenhouse gas theory, and terraformation ideas have been dismissed as impossible.
Among those ideas is this one, by Landis, of the Glenn Research Centre:
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2011-7215
NASA seems reluctant to even spend resources on going to the most Earth-like place in the solar system — the most likely place to be colonised perhaps because drawing attention to the planet would also highlight the greenhouse theory-refuting data ever-present there.
On NASA’s planetary factsheets, the gas giants’ one-bar conditions are presented, but these data are notably absent from Venus’s factsheet.
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/jupiterfact.html
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/venusfact.html
Until someone develops a theory on why the temperatures at Venus’s cloud heights are exactly what they should be if CO₂ had a nil impact on temperatures, simply discussing the place may be taboo.
But this could be to our advantage.
People presented with proof of there being no greenhouse effect can go either of two ways.
They can think, ‘This is great. People don’t have to worry about climate change anymore.’
Or, if they have an emotional or financial interest in the belief in the greenhouse effect, they can think, ‘This is terrible. People don’t have to worry about climate change anymore.’
The Venusian project should desire to be separate from state bodies which embrace bad science for political and power gains.
The greenhouse refutation inherent in the Venusian data will ensure that state bodies stay out of it from the outset, and for a long time.
Note that these are facts – concrete data points – and do not allude to anything as subjective as the truth, Al Gore-style.