Aerosols cool Earth and heat Venus.
Hot Venus: Hansen was not always a greenhouse cultivator. In 1965, he was casting about for a dissertation for his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Iowa. His mentor, James Van Allen (discoverer of the radiation belts that girdle Earth), suggested that Hansen tackle the question of why the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead. The catch was that the explanation had to be wholly original. The best theory for Venus’s heat–that it was the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect-had already been claimed by some young Harvard professor named Carl Sagan, Hansen wasn’t deterred. “I decided to say that Venus was so hot because a dusty atmosphere was trapping internal heat,” he recalls. That was good enough for the doctoral committee (even though it turns out that Sagan was right about Venus).
A three ring circus of scientific and media buffoons. You might as well get your scientific information from the Weekly World News.
