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The runaway greenhouse effect on Venus

What the science says...

Select a level... Basic Advanced

Venus very likely underwent a runaway or ‘moist’ greenhouse phase earlier in its history, and today is kept hot by a dense CO2 atmosphere.

Climate Myth...

Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect

"I bought off on the “runaway greenhouse” idea on Venus for several decades (without smoking pot) and only very recently have come to understand that the theory is beyond absurd." (Steve Goddard, WUWT)

At a glance

Earth: we take its existence for granted. But when one looks at its early evolution, from around 4.56 billion years ago, the fact that we are here at all starts to look miraculous.

Over billions of years, stars are born and then die. Our modern telescopes can observe such processes across the cosmos. So we have a reasonable idea of what happened when our own Solar System was young. It started out as a vast spinning disc of dust with the young Sun at its centre. What happened next?

Readers who look up a lot at night will be familiar with shooting stars. These are small remnants of the early Solar System, drawn towards Earth's surface by our planet's gravitational pull. Billions of years ago, the same thing happened but on an absolutely massive scale. Fledgeling protoplanets attracted more and more matter to themselves. Lots of them collided. Eventually out of all this violent chaos, a few winners emerged, making up the Solar System as we now know it.

The early Solar system was also extremely hot. Even more heat was generated during the near-constant collisions and through the super-abundance of fiercely radioactive isotopes. Protoplanets became so hot that they went through a completely molten stage, during which heavy elements such as iron sank down through gravity, towards the centre. That's how their cores formed. At the same time, the displaced lighter material rose, to form their silicate mantles. This dramatic process, that affected all juvenile rocky planets, is known as planetary differentiation.

Earth and Venus are the two largest rocky planets. But at some point after differentiation and solidification of their magma-oceans, their paths diverged. Earth ended up becoming habitable to life, but Venus turned into a hellscape. What happened?

There's a lot we don't know about Venus. But what we do know is that the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, at 477 °C (890 °F). Atmospheric pressure is akin to that found on Earth - but over a kilometre down in the oceans. The orbit of Venus may be closer to the Sun but a lot of the sunlight bathing the planet is reflected by the thick and permanent cloud cover. Several attempts to land probes on the surface have seen the craft expire during descent or only a short while (~2 hours max.) after landing.

Nevertheless, radar has been used to map the features of the planetary surface and analyses have been made of the Venusian atmosphere. The latter is almost all carbon dioxide, with a bit of nitrogen. Sulphuric acid droplets make up the clouds. Many hypotheses have been put forward for the evidently different evolution of Venus, but the critical bit - testing them - requires fieldwork under the most difficult conditions in the inner Solar System.

One leading hypothesis is that early on, Venus experienced a runaway water vapour-based greenhouse effect. Water vapour built up in the atmosphere and temperatures rose and rose until a point was reached where the oceans had evaporated. In the upper atmosphere, the water (H2O) molecules were split by exposure to high-energy ultraviolet light and the light hydrogen component escaped to space.

With that progressive loss of water, most processes that consume CO2 would eventually grind to a halt, unlike on Earth. Carbon dioxide released by volcanic activity would then simply accumulate in the Venusian atmosphere over billions of years, creating the stable but unfriendly conditions we see there today.

Earth instead managed to hang onto its water, to become the benign, life-supporting place where we live. We should be grateful!

Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "At a glance" section. Read a more technical version below or dig deeper via the tabs above!


Further details

Venus may have experienced a runaway greenhouse effect in the geological past. To use the term 'runaway' is to refer to a highly specific process when discussed by planetary scientists. Simply having a very hot, high-CO2 atmosphere is not it. So let's start with a tutorial on Venus at the present day.

Venus’ orbit is much closer to the sun, which means it receives almost twice the solar radiation at the top of its atmosphere than Earth. Venus also has a very high albedo which ends up over-compensating for the closer distance to the sun. The result is that less than 10% of that incident solar radiation reaches the surface. High albedo can be attributed to sulphur-bearing compounds, along with minor water vapour (around 20 ppm). These substances form globally encircling sulphuric acid-dominated cloud decks (fig. 1). Venus’ atmosphere also has a surface pressure of around 92 bars (or if you like, 92,000 millibars), equivalent to what you’d feel on Earth beneath more than a kilometre of ocean.

Venus in its shroud of clouds.

Fig. 1: Venus in its shroud of clouds - a false colour composite created by combining images taken using orange and ultraviolet spectral filters on the Mariner 10 spacecraft's imaging camera.The images used to create this view were acquired in 1974; the RH one has been enhanced to bring out texture and colour. Image: NASA.

Observations of the water vapour content in the Venusian atmosphere show a high heavy to light hydrogen isotopic ratio (D/H). This is best interpreted as the product of a preferential light hydrogen escape to space: deuterium escapes less easily. Venus is considered to have had at least 100 times its current water content in the past (e.g. Selsis et al. 2007 and references therein).

The greenhouse effect on Venus today is primarily caused by CO2, although water vapour and SO2 are important as well. Since most of the radiation that makes its way out to space comes from only the very topmost parts of the atmosphere, it can look as cold as Mars in infra-red (IR) imagery. In reality, the surface of Venus (Fig. 2) is even hotter than the dayside of Mercury, at a deadly 477 °C (890 °F).

Like Earth, the Venusian clouds also generate a greenhouse effect. However, they are poor IR absorbers and emitters compared to water clouds. The sulfuric acid droplets forming the clouds can also scatter IR radiation back to the surface, producing another form of the greenhouse effect in that way. In the dense Venusian CO2-rich atmosphere, there are IR-handling processes at work that are unimportant on modern Earth.

The Soviet Union's Venera 14 probe.

Fig. 2: The Soviet Union's Venera 14 probe captured two colour panoramas of Venus's surface in 1982. This panorama came from the rear camera. Image: Russian Academy of Sciences. More images can be seen at: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-surface-ever

How to get a Runaway?

To get a true runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, you need a combination of solar radiation and the presence of a greenhouse gas. That gas has two key requirements. It must be condensable and it needs to be in equilibrium with its surface reservoir. In addition, its concentration must increase with temperature, as explained by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. For Venus to enter a runaway greenhouse state, the greenhouse gas of interest is water vapour, plus its liquid reservoir, the water making up the oceans.

The greenhouse effect on any planet involves impeding the flux of outwards longwave radiation to space. Water vapour is very good at this so can potentially lead to a positive feedback runaway scenario. That works as follows: higher temperatures cause ever more water to evaporate and then drive temperatures even higher and on and on it goes - while there is an available liquid water reservoir.

Through water vapour's effectiveness at blocking IR, the outward longwave radiation flux eventually flatlines. If the incoming Solar flux is constantly greater than that outgoing flatline value, the planet is tipped out of radiative equilibrium and we have that runaway. If you like, it has a fever. The reservoir for water vapour - the oceans - is vast. That means the system may only be able to return to radiative equilibrium once the runaway process has stopped. In the extreme runaway greenhouse effect, that cessation may only happen at the point when the whole ocean has evaporated.

On present-day Earth, there is a strong temperature inversion, called the tropopause. It is situated between the troposphere and stratosphere. You can see it on thundery days when the tops of storm-clouds spread out beneath it to form the familiar anvil-shapes. The tropopause thus forms an effective barrier to moisture getting into the stratosphere. At the height of the tropopause on Earth, in any case, it's already too cold for water to remain in the vapour phase. The wispy clouds making up thunderstorm anvils consist of ice crystals. This impediment to water vapour's ascent is often referred to as a 'cold trap'.

In a runaway scenario, such as that proposed for Venus, no such impediment exists. This means the upper atmosphere would have become moist too. On Venus, the troposphere extends to a much greater height than on Earth. There is no stratosphere - we're talking about a very different situation here. That is critical because water vapour, upon reaching such great heights, has energetic Solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation to contend with. The UV is effective at splitting the H2O molecule into its constituent elements. Once that has happened, the hydrogen in particular is easily lost to space. One can envisage that once a runaway greenhouse effect got going, Venus' water content got steadily depleted in this manner through time. If Venus ever had oceans, they must have evaporated into oblivion. Because of the 'cold trap', this form of water-depletion is of very little significance on Earth - thankfully.

Once that water was lost, the chemical processes that lock up carbon in rocks on Earth could not operate. All of them involve water somewhere. Thereafter, every addition of carbon to the atmosphere, large or small, stayed up there. Most CO2 was probably of volcanic origin. The result was the 96.5% CO2 atmosphere and hellish surface temperature of Venus today.

Earth and the Runaway: Past and Future

Currently, Earth is well under the absorbed solar radiation threshold for a runaway greenhouse effect to occur. Its water condenses and is recycled back to the surface as rain, rather than accumulating indefinitely throughout the atmosphere. The opposite is true for CO2, which builds up and up through our emissions, only checked by natural removal processes. Note here that the runaway greenhouse threshold is largely independent of CO2 since the IR opacity is swamped by the water vapour effect. This makes it difficult to justify concerns over a CO2-induced runaway on Earth.

However, this immunity to a runaway greenhouse effect will not last forever. The most realistic scenario for Earth entering a runaway occurs a few billion years in the future, when the sun's brightness has substantially increased. Earth will then receive more sunlight than the outgoing longwave radiation escaping to space. A true runaway greenhouse effect is then able to kick in. Caveats apply, though. For example, greater cloud cover could increase planetary albedo and delay this process.

Interestingly, some (e.g. Zahnle et al. 2007) have argued that Earth may have been in a transient runaway greenhouse phase within the first few million years of its existence. Geothermal heat and the heat flow from the moon-forming impact would have made up for the difference between the net solar insolation and the runaway greenhouse threshold. But if this happened it could only have lasted for a relatively short period of time - since we still have plenty of water on Earth.

For further reading, a recent review paper (Gillmann et al. 2022) explores the various hypotheses concerning the evolution of the Venusian atmosphere over geological time. There's also an excellent book chapter (Arney & Kane. 2020, currently available as a PDF at arXiv). As might be expected, difficulties in fieldwork are plural on Venus and designing a probe that survives touchdown and can go on to do the required data-collecting is still some time away. The key piece of evidence we need to confirm the existence of a runaway greenhouse effect in deep time would be for free water having once been present. But it is apparent that large parts of the surface were covered with lava flows from monster volcanoes at some point. Is that evidence nowhere to be seen, or is it just hiding? Time will tell.

Last updated on 21 January 2024 by John Mason. View Archives

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Comments 51 to 74 out of 74:

  1. Rosco - how do you find out who is right? You measure it. See which number matches reality. Do you accept that this is the way science questions are settled?
  2. Tom Curtis @ 48 says "You have not raised any interesting questions about the moon. You have merely cited a vaguely remembered maximum temperature. Apparently you base all your reasoning on the assumption that the maximum temperature is the only relevant temperature, but I am disinclined to follow you in that absurdity." But this is precisely what the Stefan-Boltzman formula relates - the temperature for a given radiative flux - well actually it is the reverse if we're being strictly correct - it gives the radiative flux for a given temperature.
  3. scaddenp @51 Certainly - you cannot argue with accurately measured observations. If the energy input is 342 W/sq m which results in ~5.5 C check out the temperature on the moon which has no atmosphere. NASA provides all the facts - here is a link -http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/kids/moon_temperature. "During the day the temperature on the Moon can reach 253 Fahrenheit (123 Celsius), while at night it can drop to -387 Fahrenheit (-233 Celsius). The Earth, which has an atmosphere, has a much more comfortable range of temperatures." As I said - We have an anomaly that I find very interesting.
  4. Well sorry about the link in the previous post. It worked in June. http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_kids/AskKids/moontemp.shtml - works. Google it and you'll find it is a little bit more than ~5.5 C. Draw your own conclusions. As I said - We have an anomaly that I find very interesting.
  5. Rosco, You're comparing the average temperature of earth that has a day/night cycle of 1 day, to the max and min temperature (not even average max or min temp) of the moon where the day/night cycle is 29 days. And it is a surprise that they differ?
  6. You miss the point - once equilibrium is reached the only way to increase the temperature is to increase the energy input - simply pumping in the same amount simply maintains the temperature. So if the moon is irradiated by 342 W/sq m as is claimed for Earth its temperature is ~5.5 C - Simple indisputable physics.
  7. 56, Rosco, No, it's temperature is 5.5C or less due to the moon's albedo. Of course, the moon has no atmosphere, so there is no opportunity for a greenhouse effect. The mean daytime temperature is 380K. The mean nighttime temperature is 120K. The overall mean temperature is 250K. This corresponds to an energy input of 221 W/m2, which is not surprising. It suggests an albedo of 221/342 or 0.65, which certainly fits with how bright the moon appears at night. Simple, properly applied physics. What does this have to do with Venus, by the way?
  8. All of this has everything to do with Venus. How does the mean daytime temperature get to 380 K on the moon with no atmosphere but the earth, irradiated by the same irradiation, is minus 18 ? What does the mean temperature on the moon have to do with anything ? It is either illuminated (`1368 W/sq m) and hot or dark (~0 W/sq m) and cold.
  9. Sorry should have said 255 K or minus 18 C.
  10. Properly applied physics says that the temperature is proportional to the radiative flux - Stefan-Boltzman. It is a simple equation with only 2 variables ! 342 W/sq m = ~278.68 K or ~5.5 C Maximum. 1368 W/sq m = ~394.12 K or ~ 121 C Maximum.
  11. 50, Rosco, Your statement is nonsensical. The time over which the energy is distributed is irrelevant. Your inability to understand the factor of four is astounding. If you wish, lets use a day's worth of energy. As you stated, a Watt is measured in Joules per second, or an amount of energy delivered per second. As already stated, the total energy received by the earth in one second is 1.748310 x 1017 W. There are 86,400 seconds in an earth day, so if we multiply the two we get the total amount of energy (in Joules) received by the earth in 24 hours. 86,400 seconds times 1.748310 x 1017 W... or rather, 86,400 seconds times 1.748310 x 1017 J/sec gives 1.51053984 x 1022 Joules. If we divide that by the total area of the earth (again, from before, 5.1120196 x 1014 m2) we will get the average energy per square meter delivered to the earth in one earth day. So 1.51053984 x 1022 Joules / 5.1120196 x 1014 m2 gives us 2.9548788 x 107 Joules/m2. That is the amount of energy in Joules per square meter delivered to the earth in one earth day. But we'd like to get that number in J/sec/m2 (which is W/m2), so we'll divide by the number of seconds in one earth day, or 86,400 seconds. 2.9548788 x 107 J/m2 divided by 86,400 seconds is... you guessed it, 341.999862 J/sec/m2, or rather 341.999862 W/m2. Happy?
  12. 60, Rosco, No, you are discounting albedo. The energy which is reflected is not absorbed. Note that the maximum temperature on the moon is 120C... that is, the spot on the moon that actually receives 1368 W/m2, for the brief period it does so, can achieve a temperature of 120C (if it hits something black). Really, Rosco, you're tying yourself in knots trying to prove what you misunderstand, when you should be stepping back and saying "whoa, everyone here says something else, and all of science says something else, maybe I better reconsider my position, open my mind, and read and learn instead of posting nonsense."
  13. No - if the earth rotates once in 24 hours and every point on the earths surface is luuminated then the whole area of the arths is illuminated and not the area of the disk which has the same diameter so the factor of 4 used to reduce the solar "constant" of 1368 W/sq m TOA to 342 W/sq m TOA is invalid. I see we will never agree however the Stefan-Boltzman equation is either right or wrong. Climate scientists use it all the time and the way they apply the geometrical manipulations cannot explain the temperature on the moon. We can argue all day about planets where the atmosphere plays a significant role but the simple indisputable fact is if you apply the geometrical reduction to the moon you cannot explain the maximum temperature there. If it fails for the moon why is it valid for Venus, Earth or anywhere else ?
  14. Rosco, The geometric reduction is meant to explain the average temperature over the entire earth/moon, and of course it doesn't explain the maximum "daily" temperature. You are confusing the two concepts. The whole point of the simple radiative model is to provide an understanding of how greenhouse effect increase the average temperature of the planet. If you insist that it should reproduce the maximum temperature in a day/night cycle you are missing the point.
  15. Rosco#63: "cannot explain the temperature on the moon" Your minimalist approach, picking the highest and lowest lunar temperatures and computing an 'average' for use in the SB equation, neglects a few important facts. Are you aware that the moon has negligible axial tilt, so that areas in shadow near the poles (where these ultra cold temperatures were measured) are hardly ever in sunlight? They never warm up, so they do not reach equilibrium with the illuminated portion of the planet. See the images here. The areal extent of these ultracold regions is quite small. What you have done with the lunar temperature range is equivalent to looking at a dataset consisting of {10,10,10,10,10,10,10,0} and concluding the 'average' is 5. Your conclusions about climate science based on that error are thus utterly incorrect. In short, if it doesn't 'fail for the moon,' it is valid for the Earth.
  16. 63, Rosco,
    I see we will never agree however the Stefan-Boltzman equation is either right or wrong.
    This statement is utter nonsense. No one is disputing Stefan-Boltzman, and nothing that is being explained to you is in conflict with it. Stop simply making things up!!!!!!!. The argument is about how to distribute the energy that arrives at the earth on only one side over the entire surface of the earth, a fairly basic bit of geometry that you appear incapable of grasping. You instead would like to pretend that this energy is simply divided among the two hemispheres of the earth, as if it were a flat disk... Oh!!! Now I get it... you're one of those flat-earthers I've heard about. But the earth isn't flat. The energy has to be distributed over the surface of a spherical earth, not a flat earth. Really, I can't believe I'm trying to explain things to someone who can't get past the first page of any introductory climate science text. Please, Rosco, please go do some reading. By the way, throwing the word Venus into your posts doesn't cut it. There is no connection whatsoever to your discussion and the GHE on Venus. It is long past time for this to stop.
  17. Rosco @54, seriously, "Ask an Astronomer for Kids" is your source of astronomical information? Really? You could have at least tried the moon fact sheet from NASA, where we learn that the blackbody temperature of the moon is 270.7 degrees K. Let me see, 1366/4 * 0.89 (1-lunar albedo) = 303.9 K, or 33.2 K greater than the black body temperature of the moon. The reason for the discrepancy is well known - the divide by 4 approximation is only perfectly accurate for bodies with no temperature variation. Because radiated output varies with the fourth power of temperature, if there is temperature variability, the energy is radiated from the surface more efficiently, resulting in a lower temperature, as can be seen on the moon. That means the Earth's atmosphere and ocean, by redistributing heat do in fact warm the Earth, but they cannot warm the Earth to more than the 255 degrees K indicated by the usual black body approximation. Indeed, as they do not eliminate temperature variation from the surface (as they do on Venus), they warm it to less than that temperature and the total greenhouse effect is more than the normally stated 33 degrees K difference between 255 K 'expected' black body temperature and 288 K average surface temperature. As it happens, the actual black body temperature of the Earth is 254.3 degrees K, only 0.7 degrees K below the expected using the standard approximation, so it is a very good approximation. (I believe Chris Colose discussed this in more detail on this site recently, but cannot remember where.) The question may arise as to whether NASA know lunar temperatures well enough to determine the black body temperature of the moon. Afterall, determining that temperature requires measuring the Outgoing Long wave Radiation integrated across the entire moons surface and over the entire 28 day rotation period. Welcome to the Diviner mission: Lunar Temperatures by latitude and Lunar Hour: (Note, one lunar hour equals 29.53 Earth hours.) Lunar Day Time Temperatures: Lunar Night Time Temperatures:
  18. Muoncounter @65, a minor point - the regions that never see sunlight have temperatures below 35 degrees K. The 120 degrees K is the average night time temperature of the moon, with the poles maintaining a more even temperature during day and night of around 220 K, except at the bottom of craters where the temperatures are much lower. This is probably the best image to see that.
  19. TC#68: Rosco's moon has a low temperature of -233C and a high of 123C, both consistent with the color schemes in the LRO images (purple ~ 40K). It is his average lunar temperature that makes no sense. But consider this: If the lunar temperature is appropriate for its effective (non-black body) radiation balance, as you explain in #67, that means solar input really is driving planetary temperature. But that is in contradiction with Doug Cotton's temperature of the earth's surface is based on the core temperature fantasy. Since we can't have both, which one should we discard? Tom, you've disproved Rosco and Cotton in one shot - all in all, a nice day's work.
  20. Tom Curtis @67 you think NASA would lie to Kids ? If as you say solar insolation is 240 W/ sq m over earth then the Stefan-Boltzman temperature tells you that Earth can never increase in temperature above 255 K. Again - The Stefan-Boltzman equation has 2 variables - radiative flux and temperature. When a surface is irradiated it reaches the temperature determined by that radiative flux. When a surface is not irradiated it will tend towards the temperature of its surroundings. For the moon with no atmosphere to distribute temperature around the sphere it is either irradiated by solar radiation and reaches an equilibrium temperature commensurate with that level of radiation (which has been measured as ~120 C or 393 K) - OR - it is not irradiated and begins cooling to reach thermal equilibrium with the erergy flux of free space which does not have solar radiation incident on it and that is a very low flux commensurate with the temperature of free space which is postulated to be as low as a few K. The extra energy postulated to come from Greenhouse gases to warm the surface of the Earth came from where originally ?
  21. muoncounter @69 (-Snip-)
    Response:

    [DB] Off-topic snipped.  Continuing to perpetuate your intransigence in actually taking the time and bother to actually learn something about climate science has become intolerable.

    Please note that posting comments here at SkS is a privilege, not a right.  This privilege can and will be rescinded if the posting individual continues to treat adherence to the Comments Policy as optional, rather than the mandatory condition of participating in this online forum.

    Moderating this site is a tiresome chore, particularly when commentators repeatedly submit off-topic posts. We really appreciate people's cooperation in abiding by the Comments Policy, which is largely responsible for the quality of this site.

    Please take the time to review the policy and ensure future comments are in full compliance with it.  Thanks for your understanding and compliance in this matter.

  22. I give in. I seem to be breaching the commentary policy by arguing that the basis for determining the energy input to a planetary atmosphere is important in determining the topic discussed here. I guess you will always oppose my point of view adn I will continue to oppose the factor of 4 reduction of insolation. But remember - energy cannot be created or destroyed merely transformed. Think about it.
    Response:

    [DB] The point that you are not grasping is that this thread is about Venus doesn't have a runaway greenhouse effect.

    You have given no indication of talking about that topic, despite able advice from others.  Other threads (nearly 5,000 in number) exist here at SkS on every subject imaginable that pertain to climate science.  Using the seach function in the upper left corner of every page here at SkS, search for that topic you want to hang your hat on and place a comment there (for example Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?).

    Dozens of regular participants here are ready to help you gain a better understanding of climate science.  So the choice stands before you:

    1. Continue in your present path of not listening to others and continuing to be off-topic, with the expected result of forcing the moderators to intervene
    2. Or follow the path outlined above

    Think about it.

  23. The last post. I don't understand why everyone seems to insist I calculate some sort of average - I don't. I think the only relevant thing is the maximum at any time as we all know things will lose energy and cool. I am simply trying to explain why it is possible that Venus when irradiated by the ~2640 W/sq m in the vicinity it occupies in space can have a blackbody temperature of ~464K - much lower than observed but also much higher than usually calculated. I have used the examples of the Earth and the moon to demonstrate because we have some reliable data for these. the graph of the moon above shows varying temperature over various latitudes and agrees with what I posted before the insolation varying as the cosine of the latitude. It also shows a maximum temperature of ~ 380 - 390 K as would be expected using the solar constant. I cannot see any flaw in this logic so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. The use of the sine and cosine to break a vector down into its normal and tangential component is well established scientific method.
    Response:

    [DB] "I cannot see any flaw in this logic so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree."

    The flaws in your logic, physics and math have already been pointed out to you.  That you refuse to accept that is telling.

  24. Despite the angst that seems to have developed I have enjoyed the intellectual stimulation. I think people should discuss and argue their beliefs and everyone should have a right to voice theirs. Definately the last post - hopefully not the military version. PS - I don't believe in the flat disk model so I'm definitely not a flat earther.
    Response:

    [DB] "Despite the angst that seems to have developed"

    Your conduct here is the intellectual version of poking a bee's nest with a stick.  That that activity generates a response you characterize as "angst" should be of no surprise.

    "I think people should discuss and argue their beliefs and everyone should have a right to voice theirs"

    This is a science website.  The conversations and dialogue center on climate science using logic and evidenciary chains.  Not fuzzy terms & beliefs & opinions.  Evidence-based discussions of climate science using peer-reviewed published studies from reputable sources.

    Given your persistence in avoiding using any of the latter some "angst" should be expected.

  25. 73, Rosco,
    I think the only relevant thing is the maximum at any time...
    You are wrong about this. Also, please notice how often you use the words "I think" and "I believe." These are fuzzy broadcasts of the fact that you don't know, but refuse to learn.
    I think people should discuss and argue their beliefs...
    If you want to do so, visit a site about religion. This site is about science, and as such it is about facts, not beliefs. You are entitled to your own beliefs, but not your own facts.
    ...and everyone should have a right to voice theirs.
    No. You do not have a right to broadcast misinformation here, any more than I have a right to walk into a classroom and teach children that mathematics is evil and the language of the Satan.
    PS - I don't believe in the flat disk model so I'm definitely not a flat earther.
    Yes, you do, and if you understood the math you'd recognize this. My suggestion... leave this site, stop posting, and surf the Internet under the assumption that there is something you really, really do not understand. Try to figure it out so that you can come back, apologize for your recalcitrance, and discuss things on the level of understanding that is appropriate to this site.

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