Author: Ted Holden
I claim that empirical evidence involving Venus is being
doctored and falsified at every turn because it does not fit with
scientists' pre-conceived ideas involving the age of our solar
system, and because it does not match any of the logical
requirements of Carl Sagan's "super-greenhouse" theory.
Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky are the only two authors of
theories which attempt to explain the intense surface heat of Venus.
Velikovsky claims that Venus is simply a new planet, which has not had
time to cool; a wealth of historical evidence supports him. Sagan
claims that the < 2% of solar energy which somehow finds its way through
the thick CO2 clouds of Venus to the surface is forever trapped there
and cannot re-radiate as infra-red flux and thus escape. This he claims
causes the intense heat; he even manages to keep a straight face.
"Super-Greenhouse" REQUIRES that Venus be in thermal equilibrium. Is it?
Robert Anton Wilson's "The New Inquisition", page 73 quotes
T.B. Pawlicki to the effect that Jupiter, like Venus, gives off
more heat than it absorbs from the sun, and cites Funk and
Wagnall's encyclopedia as a source.
The Nov. 13 1980 issue of New Scientist contained an article
entitled "The mystery of Venus' internal heat", which read as
"Two years surveillance by the Pioneer Venus orbiter seems to
show that Venus is radiating away more energy than it receives
from the sun. If this surprising result is confirmed, it
means that the planet itself is producing far more heat than
the earth does.
F.W. Taylor of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford presented
these measurements at a Royal Society meeting last week.
Venus surface temperature is higher than any other in the
solar system, at 480 C. The generally accepted theory is that
sunlight is absorbed at Venus' surface, and re-radiated as
infrared. The later is absorbed in the atmosphere, which thus
acts as a blanket, keeping the planet hot. It is similar to
the way a greenhouse keeps warm.
Pioneer has shown that there is enough carbon dioxide and the
tiny proportion of water vapor needed to make the greenhouse
effect work -- just. If this is the whole story, the total
amount of radiation emitted back into space, after its journey
up through the atmospheric blanket must be exactly equal to
that absorbed from sunlight (otherwise the surface temperature
would be continuously changing).
But Taylor found that Venus radiates 15 percent more energy
than it receives. To keep the surface temperature constant,
Venus must be producing this extra heat from within.
All the inner planets, including earth, produce internal heat
from radioactive elements within their rocks. But Taylor's
observations of Venus would mean that the planet is producing
almost 10,000 times more heat than the earth, and it is
inconceivable according to present theories of planetary
formation, that Venus should have thousands of times more of
the radioactive elements than Earth does. At last weeks
meeting, Taylor's suggestion met with skepticism - not to say
sheer disbelief - from other planetary scientists.
Taylor himself has no explanation for his result. He simply
points out that the discrepancy seemed at first to be simply
experimental error - but with more precise measurements, it
refused to go away. More measurements are needed before
astronomers accept the result, and most planetary scientists
are obviously expecting - and hoping - that the embarrassing
extra heat will disappear on further investigation.
Astronomers now claim that Venus is "within error bounds of thermal
equilibrium" and cite the noted astronomer Tomasko as a source. I will
explain how this works momemtarily.
Consider then what happens as probes descend deep into the
atmosphere of Venus towards the surface.
I am looking at two articles from Icarus magazine dated 1982
and 1985, the first by H.E. Revercomb, L.A. Sromovsky, and V.E.
Suomi of the Space Science and Engineering Center, Univ. of
Wisconsin at Madison, the second by the same three gentlemen along
with R.W. Boese of NASA-Ames (Icarus 52, 279-300 and Icarus 61,
521-538). Both of these articles involve the infra-red flux
sensors on the Venus probes which landed in Dec. 1978, so that even
by the time the first article was written (82), these people had
quite awhile to think about what the probes had told them. Three
small probes carried net flux radiometers carried externally, and
a larger probe carried an infrared radiometer internally, which
viewed the atmosphere through a window. All of these instruments
measured the infrared flux of the Venereal atmosphere.
In the upper atmosphere, all of these instruments showed
infrared fluxes which the scientists could at least think about
living with; as they descended, however, all began to show very
large net fluxes UPWARDS, which is what you might expect if
(HORRORS) Velikovsky's view of Venus were the correct one:
"Below the Venus cloud deck both LIR and SNFR flux
measurements appear to affected by serious errors..."
"...Although the LIR [large probe enclosed instrument]
measurements might be correctable, using the multispectral
information of the data to deduce the magnitude of the
asymmetry, no reliable corrections have yet been obtained [by
1982 three years after the fact]... Thus we cannot at this
time make use of the LIR results..."
However, if the scientists lacked imagination in forcing the
large probe data into a suitable uniformitarian, Saganesque mold,
no such lack occurred with the data from the probes carried on the
three small probes:
"The magnitudes of the corrections for both instruments are
determined by forcing agreement with a range of calculated net
fluxes at one altitude deep in the atmosphere, where the net
flux must be small because of the large density of CO2.
"Must be small" based on the known facts of uniformitarianism and
"Super-Greenhouse". The idea that four separate instruments of two
different sorts, three carried externally and one internally all
telling the same story MIGHT possibly just be correct does not even
occur to the scientists. Religious belief overrides evidence; the
round evidence must be pounded into the square hole.
But then, we know that Venus is "within error bounds of" thermal
equilibrium in its upper atmosphere (as a number of the t.o regular crew
members delight in noting), and so these lower atmosphere figures cannot
possibly be right, no? No indeed!
The astronomers and others are citing Tomasko's article on pages
611 - 612 of THE BOOK (VENUS, Hunten, Colin, Donahue, Moroz, Univ. of
Arizona Press, 1983). This monstrosity is a size-equivalent to
War & Peace, GWTW, and the Bible, and costs $80 in North America. They
aren't making it on volume... One notes also that they clearly intend
that ordinary hoodlums (such as myself) should not have access to the
book; it turns out, this could cause some embarassment to the
It turns out, that there are two articles on thermal equilibrium, the
Tomasko article on pages 611 - 612, AND the article by F.W. Taylor
on page 658. It turns out that only by adopting the most myopic view which
it is possible to take can you get thermal equilibrium from this story, and
that is precisely what Tomasko does.
For thermal equilibrium to pertain, two numbers must match up; the
first is an emissions number which all parties involved agree reads
right at .76. The second number is a planetary albedo. Tomasko claims
(pp 611-612) "For the whole planet to be in equilibrium with absorbed
sunlight, the bolometric albedo would have to be .76..." Nobody
anywhere appears to disagree with that statement.
Now, the Pioneer Venus readings on albedo (Taylor's article, page 658)
was .80 plus/minus .02, and the calculations from Venera data (also
page 658) are .79, plus .02, minus .01. The closest you could get and
stay within error bounds is .78.
Now, you might ask, what's a lousy .02 amongst friends; doesn't sound
like much... This is one of those cases in which a little bit appears
to go a long way. Consider what Taylor claims would be required to
be believed if the .80 figure for albedo were to hold good (also page
"Clearly, the Pioneer measurements of emission and reflection are not
consistent with eachother if radiative balance applies. A source
inside Venus equal in magnitude to 20% of the solar input (i.e.
accounting for the difference between A = 0.76 and 0.80 is very
unlikely since Venus is thought to have an Earth-like makeup which
would imply heat sources several orders of magnitude less than this.
Also, even if such sources were postulated, it is difficult to
construct a model in which these fairly large amounts of heat can be
transported from the core to the atmosphere via a rocky crust without
the later becoming sufficiently plastic to collapse the observed
surface relief. This could only be avoided if the transport were very
localized, i.e., via a relatively small number of giant volcanoes.
Although large, fresh-looking volcanoes do appear to exist on Venus
(see chapter 6), and the content of the atmosphere is consistent with
vigorous output from these, a simple comparison with terrestrial
volcanism shows that the volcanic activity on Venus would have to be on
an awesome scale to account for the missing 10^15 W or so of power."
That, of course (the little thing about "awesome" volcanic activity), is
more or less what Magellan tells us. Taylor, naturally enough, does not
particularly care to believe what the data is telling him. Nonetheless,
the data IS telling him that there is no way that Venus is even within
error bounds of thermal equilibrium. How then does Tomasko make such a
Tomasko cites one 1968 calculation of albedo of .77 +- .07 without
bothering to tell you that that estimate was later revised upwards to
.80 +- .07 in 1975 (Taylor tells us that on page 657), and notes that
Taylor indicates that the .02 error bounds for the Pioneer reading (the
most recent, and done with the best instruments from the best distance)
may be "too small".
Taylor indeed notes (page 758):
"A more acceptable alternative is that the preliminary estimate of 0.80
+- .02 for the albedo from the PV measurements is too high, since the
uncertainty limit is now known from further work to be too conservative
(J. V. Martinchik, personal communication). A fuller analysis of PV
albedo data - still the best in terms of wave length, spatial and phase
coverage, and radiometric precision, which is likely to be obtained for
the forseeable future, is likely to resolve this puzzle. In conclusion
then, the best thermal measurements of Venus, with the assumption of
global energy balance, yeild a value of the albedo of 0.76 +- .01;
this is the most probable value."
Tomasko is basing his entire case on one entirely outdated calculation,
and upon a "personal communication from Martinchik". That's hear-say...
Tomasko is thus seen as nothing more than a source of misinformation on
the entire topic of thermal equalibrium on Venus. It gets funnier; the
last time I posted any of this to talk.origins, one of the regular t.o
crew, and apparently one with serious astronomical credentials, replied
that I needed to read something else of Tomasko's. The question then
becomes: "How much misinformation is required before one begins to
truly this business?"
Taylor is saying that the best measurements available tell us that
thermal balance is not to be had on Venus, and that Sagan and his super
greenhouse theory are FUBAR, but that that can't really be, that he and
others are probably, hopefully looking at something the wrong way, but
he doesn't know what that something is.
That's a long, long way from claiming that Venus is "within error
bounds" of equilibrium.
The only thing in the world which should cause a non-prejudiced reader
NOT to question the integrity of these two, particularly Tomasko, is the
fact that, in all likelihood, both are blithly unaware that there is a
competing theory for origins of Venus, which positively predicts and
calls for such a lack of thermal equilibrium. They are both trying to
bring the numbers into conformance with the only cosmological base
system they know.