Tuesday 25 November 2014

The lost element of climate- atmospheric pressure

This is a first. I'm not a scientist but writing an article on it. It's also a test to see if a total amateur (I passed at O level and not A level after taking a year, and that was pretty much it formally) can use other people's science plus logic to present something as genuine and accurate as if written by a scientist themselves. You know, like journalists do.

The standard meme offered by global warming believers is to compare Venus with Mercury, which is much hotter but further from the sun. Logic (not science as it is universal) says something besides the sun has to make it hotter. The scientists here (well, since global warming became an issue, I didn't check before and wouldn't be easy to find out as they may have covered their tracks) simply parrot it's the greenhouse effect. All very well, except that they learnt about atmospheric pressure in their first year and would unanimously be totally aware of its effects on temperature using simple (for them) equations explaining how the identical atmospheric composition can have different effects when more and more concentrated, like Venus basically.

As we don't have a control system offering two earths, one with 260ppm CO2 and another which is rising, it's not physically possible to prove or even know with much certainty how altering such a tiny amount of a massive atmosphere will make any difference. They have a single equation which adds around 1C per doubling until it can no longer catch any further heat where there will be no more effect. No one knows this point as it can't be modelled and can only wait and see for centuries or more, which is basically a proven unknown.

Therefore they hold up Venus, say it's got far more CO2 and methane, and that's why. Really? Using the same type of equation which assigns 1C per doubling of CO2, there's a similar relationship for doubling atmospheric pressure. Now luckily the very equation is O level/GCSE standard so means I'm actually still qualified to mention it directly. Atmospheric pressure effects
There is a mass of gas, and the more you compress it the hotter it gets. Of course there are other causes, but who has ever seen a reference to air pressure when measuring causes of temperature elsewhere? I haven't. It is a simple linear relationship so easy to graph, and at any point (in an open as well as closed system where they measure it in a lab, unlike the atmosphere) can measure the temperature with the same composition and amount with the rise in pressure (Charles' Law). I won't be applying this directly but the link shows the formula, and I will now present the atmosphere composition and temperature of Mercury, Venus, The Moon, earth and Mars and pressures and see how they compare:

Average temperature,  pressure kg/m, atmosphere composition
Mercury: 167C almost zero atmosphere (hydrogen, helium, oxygen) and pressure.
Venus: 65, 467C 96% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 0.003% water vapor
The Moon:  Pressure negligible -23C : argon-40, helium-4, oxygen, methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide (traces)
Earth:  pressure 1.2256 14C  78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon
Mars:  pressure 0.0155 -60C 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon
 NASA planet properties

Now looking at this table the interesting elements are the temperature can clearly be seen as related the most to the massive variations in atmospheric pressure. Mars and Venus are both nearly all CO2, but as Mars lost nearly all its atmosphere and only has the remnants, while as a control Venus has almost the same amount but a massive amount, (and remember at a totally unknown point adding CO2 can't add to the temperature at all) and by convention water vapour is not included in earth's official atmosphere but adds 95% of the official greenhouse effect (the difference between having it and not). Hold on, I hear you say, why have the world's top authority, NASA, included a trace of water vapour on Venus and not earth? You have their site, so you'll have to ask them, but technically it doesn't affect the figures here as I knew it was here as well so factored it in anyway. And our best control for the earth is the Moon, as its distance is similar from the sun, and as we learn the major effect of an atmosphere at all is to even out the temperature between day and night as it allows it to cool more slowly. But the daytime equator temperature on the moon exceeds the boiling point of water, so clearly an atmosphere has to slow daytime temperatures from rising as it absorbs the heat rather than letting it through to the surface. The next points are albedo (how much the body reflects heat away by how white the atmosphere is), and radiative reception in total watts per square metre. See the Lunar climate
here for more details to explain, and it appears to eliminate various causes and highlight others which again none of the mainstream system do but clearly genuine and accurate.

The next step for scientists or anyone able to is to apply Charles' law and various other formulas to the planets and see how they pan out in relation to air pressure v temperature (once distance from the sun is allowed for, which is a balancing equation they will surely know how to do as well). Then factor in the official greenhouse effect equations to subtract the ambient temperature (that assumed, as it is not certain) with no atmosphere at all, from the actual total per planet to calculate its greenhouse effect. I am then going to copy those results over here once some kind reader has done the work for me (as I really am not a scientist), and ideally double check it, and then we should get a fairly definitive measurement of atmosphere and pressure related to temperature once the distance from the sun has been evened out. But the clues as to the result look fairly massive before it's done here, while the scientists out there should probably know this already, but why isn't it in any of the material?

Therefore if you clothe each planet with the other's atmosphere the pressure will be totally different, as will the temperature.

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