Venus Heat from Global Warming?

[Lloyd]

Venus' Heat Source?
What is the source of Venus' heat? In 1956 or so, when it was first found that the surface temperature of Venus was 462 degrees C, scientists were greatly surprised, because it was assumed that Venus would be cold, because its thick atmosphere should shield it from solar radiation. Is the high temperature on Venus due to greenhouse gas CO2 induced global warming? Or how did Venus get so hot?

Velikovsky found that ancient myths described Venus as a great comet, so he concluded that Venus is a young planet ejected from Jupiter a few thousand years ago. The Thunderbolts team found that Jupiter was likely not connected with Venus, but Saturn was. They conclude that Venus was either ejected from Saturn as a new planet, and thus hot, or that it had long been a moon of Saturn. If it was not ejected from Saturn, what was the source of Venus' heat? They conclude that Venus was close to Saturn, which was a brown dwarf star. Could Saturn have been close enough to heat up Venus? Or could electrical interactions between the two planets have heated it up?

The following article gives evidence that Venus was not heated by global warming.

THE VENUS COMET (2) By Wallace Thornhill
http://saturniancosmology.org/files/.cd ... th1-05.htm
- For those who prefer to believe that the early description of Venus as a comet can be explained away as a case of mistaken identity, I present some of the physical evidence which must also be explained away.
- ELECTRICAL PHENOMENA
The Venera spacecraft found continuous lightning activity from 32km down to about 2km altitude, with discharges as frequent as an amazing 25 per second. The highest recorded rate on Earth is 1.4/sec during a severe blizzard.
... A 'mysterious glow' was detected coming from the surface at a height of 16km by 2 Pioneer probes as they descended on the night hemisphere. The glow increased on descent and may have been caused by a form of St. Elmo's fire and/or chemical reactions in the atmosphere, close to the surface.
... the highest mountains of Venus are all surprisingly shiny. At altitudes above about thirteen thousand feet, the reflectivity jumps up and the ground abruptly gets very bright.
... (The temperature there is lower, 438, instead of 462, degrees C.)
... [T]he diffuse electric discharges of St. Elmo's fire, occurring preferentially at the highest altitudes of mountain peaks, forms a highly conductive plasma which is a superb reflector of radar signals.
... The Venusian ionosphere is directly coupled to the solar wind. ... If the extremely rapid lightning detected by the Venera spacecraft is verified, there may be two modes of discharge on Venus: firstly, a continuous glow of St. Elmo's fire at high points on the surface with rapid, low energy lightning, rather like that on Earth, and secondly, high energy superbolts which fire from the upper atmosphere - as detected by the Galileo spacecraft.
... [C]ometary tails ... are under enhanced electrical stress.... THE COMET-LIKE PLASMA TAIL OF VENUS WOULD SUGGEST THAT THE PLANET HAS NOT YET ACHIEVED ELECTRICAL EQUILIBRIUM AFTER A RECENT COMETARY HISTORY.
... [T]he Venusian atmosphere ... CO2 lines swing through a four day cycle.... This indicates that the cloud deck moves up and down through 1 km over the entire planet. [This means the atmosphere expands by 1 km slowly for 4 days, then contracts suddenly back to the original planetary radius, but losing some atmosphere to space.] ... This strange phenomenon is analogous to the lid on a kettle of boiling water and indicates planet-wide heat input. It is one of the strongest arguments for Venus' heat being sourced internally and is consistent with
the the four Pioneer probes discovery of twice the radiation coming from the surface as was incident from sunlight. The surface radiation also varied by a factor of two which is difficult to explain by any greenhouse theory.
... IN SUMMARY:
The comet-like magnetosphere, extreme heat, strong electrical interactions with the solar wind and intense lightning, ionospheric and atmospheric activity suggest that Venus has not yet achieved electrical or thermal equilibrium with its environment in the solar plasma. This, in turn, lends physical support to the interpretation of early reports of the planet as COMET VENUS and of its interaction with other planetary bodies. Then there is the evidence of the surface scars......
- Wal Thornhill

[Electro]

Why are you starting a new thread on this subject? Wouldn't it be easier to continue in the other thread?

[Lloyd]

The other thread asks for arguments for and against AGW, but I thought I should focus more on what is Venus' heat source, regardless of whether AGW is true for Earth at present.

[LunarSabbathTruth]

Why are you starting a new thread on this subject? Wouldn't it be easier to continue in the other thread?

I am not Lloyd, but I would say it is because there is a much more fundamental question than "what is the cause of climate change?" That question is: Is the Earth and Solar System in a steady-state condition?

The answer to that question determines everything.

The approach promoted my mainstream media is that the Earth has been in a steady state condition for hundreds of thousands of years, the mountains are millions of years old, blah, blah, but now mankind (especially the white man) has come along and ruined everything.

The alternative is that the Earth and Solar System have experienced radical changes over the last few thousand year, and these are not due to the hand of man.

Moving the question over to Venus focuses the attention and narrows the list of possible answers. And it exposes the inadequacy of mainstream science in providing sensible answers.

- joe

[Electro]

First of all, I have never heard of comets the size of Venus. I believe a comet that size coming so close to Earth would have caused much more damage. Second, if Saturn is spitting out planets, no one, including Wal Thornill, has ever demonstrated the physical, chemical, and electrical mechanisms leading to planet formation within a gas giant (or brown dwarf), nor how or why it is ejected. The only theory explaining planet formation through electrical processes (and phase transitions) is Jeffrey's General Theory of Stellar Metamorphosis, which I agree with. Furthermore, having no intrinsic magnetic field, I would tend to see Venus as a very old planet, just like Mars. In the other thread, I have already given a hypothesis on the origin of CO2 in Venus' atmosphere, as well as for the scars on its surface.

As for Velikovsky, I have my doubts. Carvings on stone, that simply look like the Sun (the biggest most obvious object in the sky) not Venus or Saturn, and myths from a bunch of scared people, passages taken from holy books, are hardly evidence for his outrageous claims. Velikovsky was accused of using material for proof in a very selective manner, a lot of claims showed inaccuracies, and he was debunked a long time ago.

[GaryN]

With a sunlight model then Venus should be cold and dark at the surface, but with a solar radiation model, not sunlight, the process of heating is dependent on the composition, depth and density of the atmosphere. CO2 is heated by IR, the IR being generated from solar radiation induced fluorescence emissions of sulphuric acid in the upper atmosphere. IMO.

A couple of relevant links.
Carbon Dioxide -- How Can One Little Molecule Be Such a Big Troublemaker?
http://news.thomasnet.com/imt/2012/03/0 ... oublemaker

Infrared Radiative Heating and Cooling in the Venusian Mesosphere.I: Global Mean Radiative Equilibrium
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10. ... 3E2.0.CO;2

[Lloyd]

Electro, Jeffrey's theory is good, esp. in combination with Charles Chandler's, which latter goes into great detail. But Thornhill has also written quite a bit on his holoscience.com site, which you may not have read. Have you read that? As I've said, CC's explanation of electric forces in the universe seems much the best, but the EU team's explanation of catastrophism is better on that subject IMO. I'll present some of that below, which may also serve as a reply to Gary.

The Youthful Atmosphere of Venus
Charles Ginenthal
From: Aeon I:6 (1988)
http://www.catastrophism.com/intro/sear ... oom_query=

... In this paper I will show that a great deal of "surprising" data indicates that Venus' atmosphere is that of a very young planet....

ABUNDANCE OF SULPHURIC ACID
... One [question] that has yet to be answered satisfactorily is this: can sulphuric acid remain stable in the atmosphere of Venus over the time required by the usual models of the planet's history? Peter R. Ballinger, a researcher in organic chemistry, raised this question in 1965, when he wrote: It is likely that sulphuric acid would be gradually decomposed by solar radiation of ultraviolet and shorter wavelength, particularly in the presence of iron compounds ... to give hydrogen and oxygen. This process would also be expected to result in the preferential retention of deuterium, as discussed in another context... Because of this and other chemical reactions, sulphuric acid might well have a relatively short lifetime, consistent with a recent installation of the planet in its present orbit. (3) There is indeed iron in the Venusian atmosphere, as reported in Science in 1979. (4)
... Hence, the very presence of sulphuric acid is telling evidence of a recently- constituted atmosphere.

NOT ENOUGH CARBON MONOXIDE
... Ballinger noted in passing that there were "other chemical reactions" indicating the same result, and these too are of significance. It is known that ultraviolet rays break down carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen molecules, O2. Once these molecules of carbon monoxide and O2 form, they do not recombine again easily. Since Venus' atmosphere is about 97 percent carbon dioxide, one would expect to find a great deal of carbon monoxide and oxygen in the upper and middle atmospheric layers of Venus.
... The central problem of the photochemistry of Venus' middle atmosphere is to account for the exceedingly low abundance of CO [carbon monoxide] and O2 [molecular oxygen] observed at the bottom of the middle atmosphere. In fact, O2 has not been detected even at 1 ppm [part per million] level. Due to low abundance Of O2 and O3 [ozone which absorbs ultraviolet radiation] solar ultraviolet of sufficient energy to photolyse CO2 penetrates down to 65 km [or 39 miles] above the surface of Venus.
The 3-body recombination reaction with a rate constant K b [based on temperature is, however, spin-forbidden. Consequently, at typical temperatures of the Venus middle atmosphere (200K) this [recombination reaction has a very small rate...[But at this temperature oxygen is converted to molecular oxygen...with a rate constant K c which is 5 orders of magnitude higher than K b. Neglecting for a moment the effect of trace gases in Venus' atmosphere, CO2, CO and O2 are nonreactive with each other and
... we therefore expect a fairly rapid transition (on geologic time scales) of the CO2 atmosphere to one dominated by CO and O2; CO2 would disappear from the upper atmosphere within a few weeks and from the entire middle atmosphere in a few thousand years.
... In order for the abundance of carbon dioxide to persist in the middle atmosphere of Venus, the planet must be only a "few thousand years" old.

ABSENCE OF WATER
... Velikovsky pointed out long ago that Venus contains practically no water in its atmosphere. Andrew and Louise Young reported in 1975 that studies at radio wave lengths "have established once again that there is no more than .1 or .2 percent water vapour in the lower atmosphere, and the true value is probably close to .01 [l/l00] of a percent. The cloud tops are drier still." (6)
... Of the water Venus has today, very little reaches the upper atmosphere and therefore it is not dissociated; at the present rate Venus would not have lost a significant amount [of water] in the history of the solar system." (7) Venus has either lost water inexplicably, or it has simply not yet had time to generate the abundance of atmospheric and surface water the conventional models would predict (over the assumed billions of years).
... Beatty wonders, "Where has all of Venus' water gone? Theorists have asked this question for years. It doesn't make sense to them that a planet so like the earth in size and distance from the sun should have 10,000 to 100,000 times less water. After all, the pair have comparable amounts of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, so the water was probably there at the outset but has somehow disappeared." (9) What ever water Venus possessed was apparently burned off when Venus was a stupendously hot, brilliant comet.
... If, as Velikovsky claimed, Venus is a new planet, then it has not had time to outgas sufficient water vapour into the atmosphere and therefore it should have very little, or practically none. In fact, if the amount of Venusian water is one- one hundredth of one percent of Earth's (the "more likely" estimate of Young and Young), then Venus could be no older than 10,000 to 20,000 years.

MISSING OXYGEN
... Eric Burgess in his book, Venus an Errant Twin, informs us that the missing oxygen is vital to the question of what happened to the water: "If water molecules were broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, the disappearance of the oxygen has to be explained, since very little of this gas is present in the atmosphere today. No completely satisfactory explanation is yet available for what happened to the oxygen."(10) This particular dilemma is aggravated by the problem of photodissociation of carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen discussed earlier, and also by the photodissociation of sulphuric acid into hydrogen and oxygen. If Venus' atmosphere is ancient, photodissociation of water (into oxygen and hydrogen) in conjunction with photodissociation of carbon dioxide (into carbon monoxide and oxygen) and sulphuric acid (into water and hydrogen) should have given Venus an abundant supply of oxygen. However, if Venus is extremely young the absence of oxygen from its atmosphere is fully explained.

HYDROCHLORIC AND HYDROFLUORIC ACID
... these acids [hydrofluoric and hydrochloric acid], when they react with rocks, are quickly neutralised. Thus these gasses, interacting with new (volcanic) surface rock, should have been completely neutralised over its four to six billion year history.
... Young and Young report that -- Among the more exotic materials proposed for the clouds only one has been detected spectroscopically. It is hydrogen chloride, and it was found along with hydrogen fluoride by William S. Benedict of the University of Maryland in the spectra reported by the Connesses. Both gases are highly corrosive;
... Their abundance is too low for them to be the clouds, but that they should be present in the atmosphere at all is a surprise. (13) The chart supplied by Young and Young shows hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid moving to and from the surface of Venus. It is clear, therefore, that these acids interact with the surface rock. The authors go on to say, "Such strong acids could not survive for long in the Earth's atmosphere; they would react with rocks and other materials and soon be neutralized." (14)
... there is no accounting for the existence of these gases in Venus' atmosphere -- apart from the possibility that a very youthful Venus has not had sufficient time to neutralise them.
... Dr. Michael McElroy, a scientist involved with Pioneer spacecraft exploration of Venus, is quoted in the Washington Post as stating, "The atmosphere of Venus contains as much argon-36 as you would expect from a planet's original atmosphere." (17)

FRESHLY STREWN ROCK
... "Although winds on Venus near the surface do not blow at high velocity they represent the movement of extremely dense air by terrestrial standards, sufficiently dense to move particles up to several millimetres diameter across the surface of Venus."(18) Needless to say, these winds, operating over great spans of time, should have drastically eroded surface rock materials and blown the resulting debris into basins, forming vast sand dunes. To the contrary, however, Burgess tells us that "the radar data are...inconsistent with Venus being covered by vast areas of windblown debris."(19)
... in a 1975 Science News article titled "Grand Unveiling of the Rocks of Venus" ... the author described Venera 9 photographs of the surface: The initial photo, apparently taken with the camera looking almost straight down (suggesting that mission officials wanted to ensure at least one picture before moving anything), contains a remarkably clear view of some sharp-edged angular rocks. According to Boris Nepoklonov, one of the mission scientists quoted by the Soviet news agency Tass, 'This seems to knock the bottom out of the existing hypothesis by which the surface was expected to look like a desert covered with sand dunes because of constant wind and temperature erosion.' In fact, he says, 'even the moon does not have such rocks. We thought there couldn't be rocks on Venus - they would all be annihilated by erosion -- but here they are, with edges absolutely not blunted. This picture makes us reconsider all our concepts of Venus. (21)

THE ENERGY PROBLEM
... Nor is there a clear explanation for the tremendous energy that is moving the dense atmosphere. According to Billy P. Glass, **"The pressure at the surface [of Venus] is approximately 90 bars, which is equivalent to the pressure in the ocean on earth at a depth of nearly 1 km [3,000 feet] below sea level."(22)
... Theoretical attempts to explain the generation of the winds have produced several possible mechanisms,
... None of them, however, have been shown to be capable of explaining velocities greater than a few metres per second.(23) Velikovsky's youthful Venus, however, fits this bizarre atmospheric behaviour remarkably well. Since Venus was a comet- like body, its tail gases and coma atmospheric gases would still have great inertia after Venus entered its orbit, the momentum of its massive tail being transformed into a dense planetary atmosphere. Thus the high velocity still persists in the Venusian upper (lighter) atmosphere, while at the surface, where the atmosphere is most dense, the gases move more slowly.

TEMPERATURE
... Air on earth begins to convect whenever the temperature begins to drop with altitude more quickly than about 6 degrees C per kilometre [of altitude].
... The reason it is warmer inside than outside a greenhouse is mainly that the [glass] roof keeps the warmed-up air inside from floating away [but there] is no lid on Venus and the dense carbon dioxide is free to convect.(24) The super hot air of Venus, therefore, must rise and carry away the surface heat of the planet to the upper atmosphere where there is no covering. There the heat will radiate into space. This upward motion or convection of gas by heat will allow it to pass right through the clouds. Hence, the reality is that Venus would convect and radiate its surface heat into space long before its surface reached anything like 750 degrees K. Achieving a relatively high surface temperature for Venus would require a cover encapsulating the entire planet to keep the hot air at the surface from mixing with the cold air of the upper atmosphere. No such mechanism is available, and this simple fact poses an immense problem for the greenhouse theory. The problem becomes fatal when it is discovered that Venus' atmosphere actually rises and expands over the entire surface and then falls and contracts periodically like a pulsating star.
... The amount of energy required to accomplish such a feat is far greater than could be produced by any "greenhouse" that lacks a cover!. It is thus impossible to reconcile the observed condition with a thermally balanced atmosphere: an ancient planet would have achieved a thermal equilibrium long ago. Hence, the fact that the Venusian atmosphere is not in equilibrium makes the "greenhouse" effect a charade and points to the same conclusion as the other considerations reviewed above. In sum, the evidence we have presented regarding Venus' atmosphere disputes the uniformitarian view that Venus is an ancient member of the solar system; in every instance, however, this evidence is completely en rapport with Velikovsky's view that Venus is a newcomer to the planetary system.

[GaryN]

The first thing to consider with Venus I think is how the surface temperature was measured. Not with a thermometer I think, Radio wavelength observations, though difficult, show that Venus can not be considered a blackbody. VIRTIS?
Haven't studied it yet.
Exploring the surface of Venus with VIRTIS on Venus Express.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/vexag/meetings/ ... elbert.pdf

[Webbman]

there is also the possibility that the sun spit venus out.

[Electro]

there is also the possibility that the sun spit venus out.

I believe the Sun is still too young (younger than Venus) and hot to have developed a core. The material is still very ionized and phase transitions have probably not begun yet. Cores probably start developing from red dwarf stage.

[GaryN]

The Venera 7 probe was the first one designed to survive Venus surface conditions and to make a soft landing. Massively overbuilt to ensure survival, it had few experiments on board, and scientific output from the mission was further limited due to an internal switchboard failure which stuck in the "transmit temperature" position. Still, the control scientists succeeded in extrapolating the pressure (90 atm) from the temperature data (465 °C (869 °F)), which resulted from the first direct surface measurements.

So they did measure temperature, but if that was surface temperature or at some distance above ground is not mentioned. Surface temperature can be much hotter than the air just above the surface on Earth, but on Venus they give 100 Watts/M^2 as the solar contribution, vs 1000 for Earth. The pressure was extrapolated from temperature data, so a lot resting on temp being correct.
I found this while searching though:
Venus Flagship Mission Study
http://vfm.jpl.nasa.gov/files/Venus+Fla ... ressed.pdf
$3.2 Billion, but should be able to answer a lot of questions, if and when they get funding. Maybe we could give NASA a helping hand with a Kickstarter campaign?

[Lloyd]

Have you all read John Ackerman's site at http://www.firmament-chaos.com? He has a number of papers there and a couple blogs. One paper is on Venus at http://www.firmament-chaos.com/planets_venus.html. He also has his own interpretations of ancient myths, esp. the Egyptians, at http://www.firmament-chaos.com/papers/E ... icleV2.pdf. He says the Egyptians were describing what was happening with Mars and Venus every 30 years, I think, and that cyclic encounters with Mars especially resulted in periodic flooding, and that pyramids, tells etc were built to help people survive such floods. Ackerman is a satellite scientist, so he likely knows quite a bit about spacecraft data. He says, "Proof that the temperature is driven by interior heat comes from the striking uniformity of this temperature - only one or two degrees deviation from pole to pole and on the day and night sides." He also says the high pressure of Venus atmosphere is due to sulfur gas from volcanoes, i.e. S8, rather than CO2, which he says the satellite sensors could not detect directly. The CO2 is all above 30 km or so. He agrees with Velikovsky's views quite a bit, saying that Venus was ejected from Jupiter and that the encounters lasted till 2700 years ago. He says the Great Red Spot on Jupiter is where another object hit Jupiter and Venus rebounded out of the crater that formed there. Gary Gilligan agrees with John too, I think. John says, "The high surface temperature of Venus implies that the entire interior is molten rock, on which is floating a tenuous crust less than a kilometer thick." That statement is hard to believe, because I read yesterday and recently that there are a number of mountains on Venus which are up to 7 miles above the average altitude. A thin crust would not be able to sustain such high mountains. Does anyone have any comments on Ackerman's site?

[Electro]

Electro, Jeffrey's theory is good, esp. in combination with Charles Chandler's, which latter goes into great detail. But Thornhill has also written quite a bit on his holoscience.com site, which you may not have read. Have you read that?

I've been on holoscience.com, but still, I found no answers to my questions.

[Grey Cloud]

Lloyd,
Ackerman is yet another conman jumping on a bandwagon. Assertion after assertion, mostly stolen from others such as Velikovsky and Sitchin, and all without references.

One only has to read the first paragraph of his section on Greek Myth to see this.
http://www.firmament-chaos.com/mythology_greek.html

First sentence: This assertion is totally unsustainable.

Second sentence: This is pure fantasy. 'corrected radiocarbon date' - what corrected radiocarbon date? Where does he get the dates 4000-687 from?

Third sentence: No idea what he is trying to say here.

Fourth sentence: There is no 'Dialogue of Critias', the (unfinished) book is called 'Critias' and runs to less than 50 pages. The book does not tell how Solon 'went to the Egyptian priests to try and recapture this knowledge'. Solon went to Egypt to learn and to get away from Athens. As far as I am aware, no ancient source mentions catastrophe as the purpose of his visit.

Fifth sentence: The Egyptian priest likened the Greeks to children because they had no knowledge of their history, not because they had no knowledge of catastrophes.

Sixth sentence: The priest does not mention a 'reorienting of the Earth relative to the stars'.

Seventh sentence: The East/West comment is made in reference to the antiquity of Egyptian records not catastrophes. It concerns precession not catastrophe/Earth tilting.

Eighth sentence: As knowledgable as were the Egyptian priests, I doubt that their knowledge extended to forseeing the future. There is no way that they or Plato could have mentioned the Roman Ovid.

The rest of the Greek Myth section goes downhill from here and from what I read of some of the other myth sections - ditto.

Source discrimination.

[Lloyd]

Thanks, Grey Cloud. I wasn't paying close attention to his references. Did you read his Venus paper? I thought that was interesting and it's conceivable that, as a space scientist, he may understand the spacecraft data collection methods and may have good reason to believe there is mostly S8 in the lower atmosphere and very little CO2 there. I don't see a problem with accepting other people's theories. I don't think he denies that he got ideas from Velikovsky and Sitchin. I didn't read much of his paper on Egyptian myths, but the few paragraphs I skimmed through seemed similar to the EU team's findings on Mars and Venus, so I suspected he was referencing the same passages that they do.

Other comments on Ackerman are welcome too. I don't have a lot of time for reading right now myself.