Data Wars: Climate
I recently got to argue with a bunch of old friends and former colleagues about climate. It seems that they had formed a little group of climate warriors who would meet for breakfast and the bashing of the conventional climate wisdom. One point of physics they were confused on was the surface temperature of Venus. the guru of their group, a retired meteorologist and meteorological researcher, was convince that the thickness of the atmosphere and the gas law alone could explain the temperature at the surface. Of course they also didn't know that Venus, despite being only 2/3 of our distance from the Sun, absorbed less solar radiation than Earth. Heat is transported in the atmosphere through three mechanisms: conduction, convection, and radiation. Most of the heat energy we get from the sun is absorbed at the surface, and since we know that the planet has been at roughly the same temperature for billions of years, essentially all of that absorbed energy is returned to space. ...