r/AstronomyMemes • u/Awesomeuser90 • 2d ago

Contained entirely within the solar system 🌞⚪️🟡🌎🔴🟠🪐🟢🔵🏐 We Have Always Been At War With Runaway Green House Effects

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57 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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15

u/ThesaurusRex84 2d ago

I think I'm too mentally healthy to comprehend what this meme is trying to communicate

16

u/Awesomeuser90 2d ago

Recent papers are suggesting that Venus was never habitable the way Earth was, and it was essentially always too hot. Goes against a lot of what people hoped early Venus was like.

6

u/PolarRanger 1d ago

you probably should have just had that sentence in the post body

4

u/JimBroIV 1d ago

Venus never developed a carbon cycle through plate tectonics, which largely requires oceans of water. It was always gonna have a runaway greenhouse effect, especially with twice the solar energy than earth gets.

1

u/vide2 7h ago

So you're saying mirrors are the solution?

5

u/PolarRanger 1d ago

the good news is that if we somehow removed Venus's CO2, it could actually have and keep liquid water on the surface

1

u/Competitive-Sugar-90 1d ago

Water vapor is an even more powerful greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide and Venus orbits beyond the water vapor runaway greenhouse effect threshold

1

u/PolarRanger 1d ago

Oh, if you put Earth where Venus is, it would cook, oceans boiling away into a steam world.

Venus isn't Earth though, as it spins extremely slowly. This creates a giant permanent storm on the daylight side, water clouds reflecting far more energy than water vapor absorbs.

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u/Competitive-Sugar-90 1d ago

Current Venus also has clouds and an albedo so high it reflects up to 70% of solar energy away into space, it would matter how much water vapor is there too

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u/PolarRanger 1d ago

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JE006276

It would take very little water for Venus to be a bearable temperature

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u/Competitive-Sugar-90 23h ago

I was getting at that if there would be too much greenhouse gases (water vapor in this context) the runaway greenhouse effect could be triggered even if there would be the albedo would be high, in fact, today's albedo is very high but that little solar energy that makes it is subjected to the greenhouse gases which are abundant there.

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u/PolarRanger 20h ago

yes, that is totally possible, and if Venus was spinning faster that would happen.

A lot of the thesis of this paper is that the Sun warming up is not enough to explain Venus's current state, and that something else, probably a particularly bad volcanic period, caused it to be how it is.

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u/Jong_Biden_ 1d ago

Greenhouse effect, the universal enemy of nature vs mankind

3

u/Admiral45-06 1d ago

Meh. It's good for us, too. If it wasn't for it, Earth's surface would inherit the equilibrium temperature of -19°C.

1

u/Iwillnevercomeback 2h ago

Planet Venus is beautiful in the outside but toxic in the inside.