Hyperventilating on Venus

By Steve Goddard

The classic cure for hyperventilation is to put a paper bag over your head, which increases your CO2 levels and reduces the amount of Oxygen in your bloodstream. Global warmers have been hyperventilating over CO2 on Venus, ever since Carl Sagan made popular the idea of a runaway greenhouse effect. That was when he wasn’t warning about nuclear winter.

Sagan said that marijuana helped him write some of his books.

I bought off on the “runaway greenhouse” idea on Venus for several decades (without smoking pot) and only very recently have come to understand that the theory is beyond absurd.  I explain below.

The first problem is that the surface of Venus receives no direct sunshine. The Venusian atmosphere is full of dense, high clouds “30–40 km thick with bases at 30–35 km altitude.”  The way a greenhouse effect works is by shortwave radiation warming the ground, and greenhouse gases impeding the return of long wave radiation to space. Since there is very little sunshine reaching below 30km on Venus, it does not warm the surface much.  This is further evidenced by the fact that there is almost no difference in temperature on Venus between day and night.  It is just as hot during their very long (1400 hours) nights, so the 485C  temperatures can not be due to solar heating and a resultant greenhouse effect.  The days on Venus are dim and the nights are pitch black.

The next problem is that the albedo of Venus is very high, due to the 100% cloud cover.  At least 65% of the sunshine received by Venus is immediately reflected back into space.  Even the upper atmosphere doesn’t receive a lot of sunshine. The top of Venus’ atmosphere receives 1.9 times as much solar radiation as earth, but the albedo is more than double earth’s – so the net effect is that Venus’ upper atmosphere receives a lower TSI than earth.

The third problem is that Venus has almost no water vapor in the atmosphere.  The concentration of water vapor is about one thousand times greater on earth.

Composition of Venus Atmosphere

0.965 CO2

0.035 N2

0.00015 SO2

0.00007 AR

0.00002 H2O

Water vapor is a much more important greenhouse gas than CO2, because it absorbs a wider spectrum of infrared light – as can be seen in the image below.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/7/7c/Atmospheric_Transmission.png

The effects of increasing CO2 decay logarithmically.  Each doubling of CO2 increases temperatures by 2-3C.  So if earth went  from .04% CO2 to 100% CO2, it would raise temperatures by less than 25-36C.

Even worse, if earth’s atmosphere had almost no water (like Venus) temperatures would be much colder – like the Arctic.  The excess CO2 does not begin to compensate for the lack of H2O. Water vapour accounts for 70-95% of the greenhouse effect on earth. The whole basis of the CAGW argument is that H2O feedback will overwhelm the system, yet Venus has essentially no H2O to feed back. CAGW proponents are talking out of both sides of their mouth.

So why is Venus hot?  Because it has an extremely high atmospheric pressure.  The atmospheric pressure on Venus is 92X greater than earth.  Temperatures in Earth’s atmosphere warm over 80C going from 20 kPa (altitude 15km) to 100 kPa (sea level.)  That is why mountains are much colder than the deserts which lie at their base.

The atmospheric pressure on Venus is greater than 9,000 kPa.  At those pressures, we would expect Venus to be very hot. Much, much hotter than Death Valley.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Emagram.GIF

Wikipedia typifies the illogical “runaway greenhouse” argument with this statement.

Without the greenhouse effect caused by the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the temperature at the surface of Venus would be quite similar to that on Earth.

No it wouldn’t. 9000 kPa atmospheric pressure would occur on earth at an altitude many miles below sea level.  No such place exists, but if it did – it would be extremely hot, like Venus. A back of the envelope estimate – temperatures on earth increase by about 80C going from 20 to 100 kPa, so at 9,000 kPa we would expect temperatures to be in the ballpark  of :

20C + ln(9000/(100-20)) *80C = 400C

This is very close to what we see on Venus.  The high temperatures there can be almost completely explained by atmospheric pressure – not composition. If 90% of the CO2 in Venus atmosphere was replaced by Nitrogen, it would change temperatures there by only a few tens of degrees.

How did such bad science become “common knowledge?” The greenhouse effect can not be the cause of the high temperatures on Venus. “Group Think” at it’s worst, and I am embarrassed to admit that I blindly accepted it for decades.

Blame CO2 first – ask questions later.

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UPDATE: Lubos Motl has written an essay and analysis that broadly agrees with this post. See it here