Climate experts and other stoners like Carl Sagan claimed that the high temperatures on Venus are due to the greenhouse effect. This is idiotic because the surface of Venus receives very little sunlight, and in fact goes for months at a time without receiving any sunlight during the long Venusian night. The whole point of the greenhouse effect is that the sun warms the surface and greenhouse gases impede the return of the heat back to space. This obviously can’t happen if there is no sunlight.
The high temperatures on Venus are the result of the very thick troposphere, which creates high atmospheric pressure at the surface – compressing the gases and generating heat like a bicycle pump does.
Every time I bring this up, climate morons make blog posts claiming that I can’t be correct because the bicycle pump cools down after the person pumping stops doing work to compress the air. Apparently they haven’t heard of the Sun, which is continuously doing work to the atmosphere and keeping it inflated. If the Sun turned off, the atmosphere would quickly collapse and freeze, and the atmospheric pressure would drop to near zero.
The adiabatic lapse rate is the temperature gradient through a stable atmosphere. It is nearly the same on Venus as it is on Earth – despite dramatically different atmospheric compositions, temperatures and radiative characteristics of the atmosphere. Gas temperature increases as pressure goes up, as seen at the Grand Canyon. The bottom of the Grand Canyon is hot, and the top is cold.
If Earth’s atmosphere had the same mass as Venus, the temperature at Earth’s surface would be approximately the same as Venus. It has almost nothing to do with the greenhouse effect.
But it is worse than it seems. The world’s greatest climate scientist (James Hansen) wrote his doctoral dissertation claiming that aerosols created the heat on Venus. This same genius now claims that Chinese aerosols are the cause of the global warming pause. You really can’t make this stuff up.