My Venus/Earth Comparison Should Not Even Have Been Needed

I received a comment (from one Chris Carter) yesterday (on this post), agreeing with, and emphasizing, my continual refrain with respect to my November 2010 Venus/Earth temperature vs. pressure comparison, that the close (or rather, precise) agreement between the Standard Atmosphere for Earth's atmosphere, and the actual profile of Venus's atmosphere over the same range of tropospheric pressures, cannot legitimately or even competently be laid to "coincidence" (as all of the critics of that comparison essentially do).

I don't want to debate with such critics; I say I am only here to inform, and I only maintain my original analysis is correct, as originally written, and definitive against the consensus "climate science" theories, of radiational forcing of global warming within the atmosphere, due to a "carbon dioxide greenhouse effect". The comparison of Earth and Venus shows there is no such effect in the real atmospheres (and Venus has 2400 times the concentration of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere as does Earth), and the simple physics of the Standard Atmosphere explains why -- because, for atmospheric pressures above approximately 200 mb (as can be observed in all the planetary atmospheres), the atmosphere overall, and thus globally, obeys the hydrostatic condition, and thus behaves like an unmoving ("static"), incompressible medium (to wit, water, hence the "hydro"). That condition enforces an increasing pressure with depth in the atmosphere, and the ideal gas laws in turn mean the temperature must also increase with depth in the troposphere (which, again, exists above 200 mb in all the planetary atmospheres). This explains the simple vertical temperature "lapse rate" structure, defined in the Standard Atmosphere (and based upon many years of temperature measurements throughout the real atmosphere), of -6.5 degrees Celsius per km of altitude above sea level. (The condition is quantified by simple calorimetry, in the equation mcΔT = -mgΔh, or ΔT/Δh = -g/c, where g is the gravitational acceleration and c is the effective specific heat of the air, determined empirically.)

I am only mentioning this yet again, because the very EXISTENCE of the lapse rate structure -- obviously a global constraint upon the temperature in the atmosphere, as any excess heat will only escape "down" that temperature gradient, without affecting the temperature at any point along the way, to outer space -- should have rung a bell in the minds of competent physicists, that there can be no radiative global-warming "greenhouse effect" in the real atmosphere (despite what radiation transfer theorists and laboratory physicists observe in an enclosed tank in a laboratory, for example).

This in fact is why I did the Venus/Earth comparison in the first place, because the subject of the lapse rate structure was brought up in the internet blogs earlier in 2010 (and not by me), and I quickly understood just how powerful a contradiction of the consensus it was, and I couldn't understand why others, of even the most pronounced "skeptical" positions in the climate science debates, weren't treating it as such. I felt a quick comparison of Venus, with its almost pure carbon dioxide atmosphere, with Earth should reveal, clearly and decisively, the truth of the matter. And of course, I found the utterly precise (!) agreement that I, and I thought any competent physicist should have, expected.

So my Venus/Earth comparison wasn't really even needed. Competent scientists should have agreed that, if in fact the Standard Atmosphere model correctly represented the temperature structure of Earth's troposphere (and of course it was developed, between approximately 1850 and 1920 -- the latter date, when the American Standard Atmosphere was first officially adopted -- to do just that), it should also, and just as accurately, represent Venus's atmosphere over the same range of pressures -- modified only by Venus's closer distance from the Sun.

And it did, and always will, due SOLELY to the fundamental nature of the hydrostatic condition. It should always be remembered that my comparison was between the Standard Atmosphere, known for decades, even a century, with the Venus profile on a much later, and single day, October 5, 1991 -- showing there can not have been any global warming in Earth's atmosphere since the development of the Standard Atmosphere model, a century and more ago. This negates all the research of all the alarmist "climate scientists" of the last two generations and more (since they turned away from the Standard Atmosphere in order to chase a chimera of unstable atmospheric temperatures) -- lifetimes, and generations, of work, wasted by miseducation and incompetent physics (and the resulting degeneration of modern science itself, as the many "skeptics" of the consensus have by now well shown).

So thanks for reminding me to emphasize this critical point once again, Chris.