Monday, 24 February 2020

Something is wrong

I sense something is wrong because it has been raining incessantly for 3 months now and some districts in the center of Britain has flooded. That is not how winter works here on this island. What normally happens is we get lots of frost in the night and it stays dry and it snows a bit. Even the trees are confused, some of them have opened their spring blossom flowers in February. 

If this is all down to global warming from the greenhouse effect then I would think about Venus because that is a super greenhouse. 

Venus is only about 40 million killometers closer to the sun then Earth but the temperature is 450 °c. To give you a sense of scale, Mars is 220 Millon killometers from the sun, twice as far as Venus. If Venus was in Mars' orbit it would still be over 220 °c on the surface, more than twice the boiling point of water. Even if Venus was placed in the orbit of Jupiter it would still be too hot.

Venus would still be slightly hotter than Earth at the surface if it was as far from the sun as  the planet Saturn. The atmosphere of Venus is very thick so it traps more heat and is even hotter than Mercury which is twice as close to the sun. 

It makes me wonder really perhaps a slow burning star like a red dwarf that is dim could have planets with liquid water on them without being tidally locked if the atmosphere was better at trapping heat. Perhaps such a planet would be fine recieving 5% of the sun's energy if it trapped more heat and it could be at Venus' orbit.  Who knows?

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