From: news@fedfil.UUCP (news)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Sagan's <Super Greenhouse>/  Three Strikes
Date: 12 Jan 93 05:24:25 GMT
Organization: HTE




We've all seen the Magellan pictures by now.  They show a planet (Venus)
the entire surface of which appears to consist of recent lava flows,
i.e. a new planet.  This is the way in which the earliest stages of
earth's development are usually described.  The conclusion is obvious to
anybody with eyes and a mind, but the astronomical establishment
persists with the multi-billion year bullshit.

It is bad enough that they should thus delude themselves;  they are also
deluding everybody else, and the ramifications go far beyond astronomy.
There is no way in which a new planet could have been added right next
to us in the recent past and earth not have felt it or noticed it.  And,
since all of the dating schemes which are commonly used to date fossils,
sediment layers and the like on earth are founded upon the axiomatic
system of uniformitarianism, all such schemes essentially go out the
window when you admit of even one catastrophe such as Velikovsky
describes in WORLDS IN COLLISION, essentially the reconstructed account
(from historical documents) of the event/series of events which the
Magellan probe tells us MUST have happened recently.

Carl Sagan's <super greenhouse theory>, the official establishment
explaination for the 900 F surface temperature of Venus would require
Venus to be in thermal equilibrium.  Evidence from the upper, the
middle, and the lower atmosphere of Venus all indicates that this is not
so, and in all three cases, this evidence is being doctored to force it
to fit the mold.


1.  The upper atmosphere:

     The Nov. 13 1980 issue of New Scientist contained an article
entitled "The mystery of Venus' internal heat", which read as
follows:

     "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.

     
     It would be naive to assume the astronomical community would
sit around waiting for the extra heat to go away of its own
volition.  Later explanations (from the astronomical community)
would have us believe that an error had been made in our estimate
of the albedo of Venus, and that the subsequent corrections have
put the notion of thermal equilibrium at least within the error-
bounds of what is actually observed.  Do you believe it?

.............................................................

2.  The middle atmosphere:

..............................................................

From a journal article of Charles Ginenthal:

   A 1973 article in New Scientist noted the work of four
scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory demonstrating
that Venus shows "regular changes in the spectrum of its
atmosphere," with marked variations in the carbon dioxide lines on
a four-day cycle:

Ginenthal here cites the actual New Scientist article (vol 58,
1973, page 72):


     Over 20 years ago, Gerard Kuiper noted day-to-day fluctuations
     in the infrared spectrum of Venus, but no one has yet got to
     the bottom of these changes.  In order to study the
     oscillations A.T., L.G., and J.W. Young and J.T. Gerstrahl
     obtained spectra nightly during the autumn of last year
     [1972].  Their data on the carbon dioxide line show an
     unmistakable oscillation.


     The observed variation is not periodic, but more akin to a
     relaxation oscillation in which the amplitude builds up on
     successive cycles and then suddenly collapses.  In order to
     produce the observed changes the cloud deck of Venus must be
     moving up and down as much as one kilometer, simultaneously
     over the entire surface of the planet.  Such a large
     atmosphere oscillation requires a high input of mechanical
     energy.  This condition is difficult to account for in the
     case of a slowly rotating planet heated uniformly by the suns
     rays [greenhouse effect].

     Therefore, the cycle variations point to some unexplained,
     deep-seated property of the atmospheric dynamics.

Ginenthal offers his own explanation:


     What is very apparent is that the surface heat is building up
     so strongly that it cannot be convected away as rapidly as it
     builds up.  The super-hot air therefore expands and rises,
     pushing the layers above it which also expand and rise.  The
     process goes on until the upper air layers have risen
     sufficiently high to permit heat to dissipate more rapidly in
     the freezing altitudes of space, following which the entire
     atmosphere contracts to repeat the process.   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.

..............................................................

3.  The lower atmosphere:


     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.

..............................................................

     Several posters on t.o noted that such large flux
differentials (as high as 600 w/m**2) would necessarily translate
into equally large outflows at the top of the atmosphere which
CAN'T be, because our industrious astronomers have already adjusted
the figures for the top of the atmosphere right?

Note that the 600 w/m^2 is local.  There appear to be local hot spots on
the surface of Venus, just one more thing you'd not expect given the
Sagan/establishment astronomy version of it.


Thus we see that, judging from undoctored evidence, expectations based
on SGH hold true nowhere in the Venereal atmosphere.  Instead, both at
the bottom, and in the middle layers, and at the top we actually observe
large scale net outward transfer of energy.


That's three strikes.  The next time somebody tells you they want to talk
about SGH, tell them (in the immortal words of Al Capone) that you want
to talk about baseball.










-- 
Ted Holden
HTE

Newsgroups: talk.origins