Venus & Mars

In the 1960s and 1970s, observations of Mars and Venus showed that planets that seemed much like the Earth could have frightfully different atmospheres. The greenhouse effect had made Venus a furnace, while lack of atmosphere had locked Mars in a deep freeze. This was visible evidence that climate can be delicately balanced, so that a planet's atmosphere could flip from a livable state to a deadly one.

A planet is not a lump in the laboratory that scientists can subject to different pressures and radiations, comparing how it reacts to this or that. We have only one Earth, and that makes climate science difficult. To be sure, we can learn a lot by studying how past climates were different from the present one. And observing how the climate changes in reaction to humanity's "large scale geophysical experiment" of emitting greenhouse gases may teach us a great deal. But these are limited comparisons  different breeds of cat, but still cats. Fortunately our solar system contains wholly other species, planets with radically different atmospheres. - LINKS - Full discussion in

<= Climate cycles

<= Simple models

Until the 1950s, science fiction writers gave about as accurate a picture of the nearest planets as scientists themselves held. The writers, after all, read up on the science. Mars seemed much like the Earth, although its atmosphere was certainly far colder and dryer. Strange life might crawl over the Red Planet's sands under an indigo sky brushed with wispy clouds. Perhaps it had once been a bit warmer and wetter, but everyone assumed that planetary atmospheres (including our Earth’s) were naturally stable, their composition held fixed within rough limits by simple geochemical processes. As for Venus, visitors might expect something even more Earth-like, a steam bath under perpetual clouds. Some scientists suspected that the atmosphere was largely carbon dioxide gas (CO 2 ), but even so abundant life was not ruled out.

Could study of these strange atmospheres provide, by comparison, insights into the Earth's weather and climate? With this ambitious hope Harry Wexler, head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, instigated a "Project on Planetary Atmospheres" in 1948. Several leading scientists joined the interdisciplinary effort. But the other planets were so unlike the Earth, and information about their atmospheres was so minimal, that the scientists could reach no general conclusions about climate. The project was mostly canceled in 1952.(1)

Telescopic observations continued, benefitting from improved photographic techniques. By the mid 1950s, scientists, if not science fiction writers, knew that the atmosphere of Mars was unbreathable  mainly CO 2 , very tenuous and very cold, occasionally stirred up with yellowish dust storms. If Mars had features resembling "canals" they were not full of water, for water could not exist as a liquid on the planet's surface.(2) The Mariner 4 spacecraft of 1965, sending back blurry pictures that showed a surface scarred with craters like the Moon, confirmed that the planet was an unlikely abode of life. As for Venus, radio observations published in 1958 showed an amazingly hot temperature, upwards of 600°K, around the melting point of lead. "It was very disappointing to many people," one of the discoverers recalled, "who were reluctant to give up the idea of a sister planet and perhaps even the possibility of life." Some astronomers worked up arguments that the radio measurements were misleading, representing something in the upper atmosphere, so that life might still exist on Venus. The matter was settled in 1962 when the spacecraft Mariner II flew past and showed unequivocally that the heat radiation came from the hot surface.(3)



= Milestone

Already back in 1940, Rupert Wildt had made a rough calculation of the greenhouse effect from the large amount of CO 2 that others had found in telescope studies of Venus; he predicted the effect could raise the surface temperature above the boiling point of water. But raising it as high as 600°K seemed impossible.(4*) Nobody mounted a serious attack on the problem (after all, very few people were doing any kind of planetary astronomy in those decades). Finally in 1960 a young doctoral student, Carl Sagan, took up the problem and got a solution that made his name known among astronomers. Using what he later recalled as "embarrassingly crude" methods, taking data from tables designed for steam boiler engineering, he confirmed that Venus could indeed be a greenhouse effect furnace.(5) The atmosphere would have to be almost totally opaque, and this "very efficient greenhouse effect" couldn't all be due to CO 2 . He pointed to absorption of radiation by water vapor as the likely culprit.

Sagan, a science fiction fan from his early years, was among those who had dreamed of a living sister planet of swamp and ocean, but now he had to admit that "Venus is a hot, dry, sandy... and probably lifeless planet." Most significantly, the situation was self-perpetuating. The surface was so hot that whatever water the planet possessed remained in the atmosphere as vapor, helping maintain the extreme greenhouse effect condition. It was later found that Sagan was mistaken, for Venus's atmosphere has little water. In 1967 the Soviet Union's spacecraft Venera 4 penetrated Venus's atmosphere and found it was mostly CO 2 ; in 1978 the American Pioneer spacecraft proved it was almost almost entirely CO 2 . If the greenhouse effect there is strong anyway, that is because Venus has a much denser CO 2 atmosphere than astronomers of the time thought. But mistakes in science can be as useful as valid results, when they stimulate further work and point in the right direction.(6)

The discovery that Venus's atmosphere had a composition, and probably a history, very different from Earth's prompted scientists to abandon their old assumption that planetary atmospheres were fixed forever by simple chemistry. A few researchers tried putting a feedback between temperature and water vapor into a simple system of equations; the results were strange. In 1969, Andrew Ingersoll reported "singularities," mathematical points where the numbers went out of bounds. That signaled "a profound change in the physical system which the model represents."(7) Ingersoll pointed at CO 2 as the key ingredient. Sagan had estimated that Venus had started out with roughly the same amount of CO 2 as the Earth. On our planet, most of the carbon has always been locked up in minerals and buried in sediments. The surface of Venus, by contrast, was so hot and dry that carbon-bearing compounds evaporated rather than remaining in the rocks. Thus its atmosphere was filled with a huge quantity of the greenhouse gas. <=> Simple models Link from below

Perhaps Venus had once enjoyed a climate of the sort hospitable to life, but as water had gradually evaporated into the warming atmosphere, followed by CO 2 eroded from the rocks, the planet had fallen into its present hellish state? In a 1971 paper, James Pollack argued that Venus might once have had oceans like Earth's It seemed that such a "runaway greenhouse" could have turned the Earth too into a furnace, if the starting conditions had been only a little different. (Into the 21st century the question of whether Venus was in fact once a watery planet remained unresolved.) (8*) => CO2 greenhouse

In the late 1970s Michael Hart pursued the idea with a more complex computer model, and concluded that the balance was exceedingly delicate. Hardly any planets in the universe, he said, orbited in the narrow "habitable zone" around a star where life could flourish. For our solar system, the orbits in which a planet would be too close to the Sun  so that at some point the planet would suffer a runaway greenhouse effect from which it could never recover  were separated by only a 5% gap from orbits in which the planet would be so far away that runaway glaciation would freeze any ocean solid. The Earth was a lucky place, then. Hart's calculations were riddled with untested assumptions, and many scientists denied that our situation was so extremely precarious. (Later calculations showed they were right — a Venus-type runaway on our planet is scarcely possible, even if we burn all available fossil fuels.) Hart defended his ideas energetically among his colleagues, and also in public, including an appearance on television in "Walter Cronkite's Universe."(9*)





=> Public opinion

The atmosphere of Venus was filled not only with CO 2 but also with an opaque haze. Its nature was unknown, and in the 1960s scientists could only say that the haze was probably caused by some kind of tiny particles.(10) "The clouds on Venus had long been a mystery," as one expert recalled, "in which stratospheric aerosols now appeared to play a key role. The unraveling of the precise role of aerosols in the Venus atmosphere would certainly benefit studies of chemical contamination of Earth's atmosphere." (11*) In the early 1970s, ground-based telescope observations produced extraordinarily precise data on the optical properties of these aerosols, and at last they were identified. The haze was from sulfur compounds.(12*)

The greenhouse effect of the sulfates could be calculated, and by the late 1970s, NASA climate modeler James Hansen stated confidently that the sulfates together with CO 2 "are responsible for the basic climatic state on Venus." Hansen had originally become interested in the greenhouse effect when, in response to Sagan's primitive calculations, he tried to derive a better explanation of why the planet's atmosphere was so hot. Now Hansen's findings about sulfate aerosols strengthened his belief that these particles could make a serious difference for the Earth's climate as well. Sulfates were emitted by volcanoes and, increasingly, by human industry, so Venus had things to tell us about climate change at home.(13*) (CO 2 was by far the largest factor in warming Venus, and the effect of sulfates would be debated for decades. It turned out that the greenhouse effect of sulfate clouds reflecting heat back to the surface of Venus was outweighed by cooling due to their reflection of incoming sunlight.)

=> Aerosols

And then there was Mars. That planet too inspired important new thinking about the Earth's atmosphere, even before spacecraft paid a visit. In the 1960s, NASA asked some scientists to think about ways to detect life on Mars. A few of them noticed that life on Earth makes its presence blatantly evident by driving the atmosphere far from chemical equilibrium. In particular, the abundant oxygen in the air would swiftly drain away, by combining with surface minerals, except the oxygen is renewed by a daily emission from plants. Telescopic studies found practically no oxygen in the Red Planet's atmosphere. Overall the Martian atmosphere showed no signs of any chemical disequilibrium. Biochemist James Lovelock dismayed his peers by arguing that this showed any search for life there would be fruitless. The sterile atmosphere of Mars, so strikingly different from the Earth's, helped Lovelock, and eventually others, to recognize that life plays a central role in determining the nature of our own planet's atmosphere. (14*)

<=> Biosphere

In 1971 the spacecraft Mariner 9, a marvelous jewel of engineering, settled into orbit around Mars and saw... nothing. A great dust storm was shrouding the entire planet. Such storms are rare for Mars, and this one was no misfortune for the observers, but great good luck. They immediately saw that the dust had profoundly altered the Martian climate, warming the planet by tens of degrees. The dust settled after a few months, but its lesson was clear. Haze could warm an atmosphere. More generally, anyone studying the climate of any planet would have to take dust very seriously. In particular, it seemed that on Mars the temporary warming had reinforced a pattern of winds that had kept the dust stirred up. It was a striking demonstration that feedbacks in a planet's atmospheric system could flip weather patterns into a drastically different state. That was no longer speculation but an actual event in full view of scientists  as of 1975 it was "the only global climatic change whose cause is known that man has ever scientifically observed."(15)



= Milestone

=> Wintry doom

Crude speculations about just such radical instabilities in the Earth’s own climate had been published independently by two scientists a few years before, about the same time as Ingersoll’s calculation of the Venus greenhouse runaway.(16) (See above) Pursuing such thoughts before Mariner arrived at Mars, Carl Sagan had made a bold prediction. He suggested that the Red Planet's atmosphere could settle in either of two stable climate states. Besides the current "ice age" there was another possible state, more clement, which might even support life. The prediction seemed to be validated by crisp images of the surface that Mariner beamed home after the dust cleared. The canals some astronomers had imagined were nowhere to be seen, but geologists did see strong signs that vast water floods had ripped the planet in the far past. It was a deadly blow to the old, comforting belief that planets had naturally stable climates, reinforcing the “runaway greenhouse” speculations about Venus that were emerging around the same time.

<= Simple models

Scarred Mars

Calculations by Sagan and his collaborators now suggested that the planet's climate system was balanced so that it could have been flipped from a state with oceans to the present frigid desert, or even back and forth between the two states, by relatively minor changes — changes in its orbit, or in the strength of the Sun's radiation, or in the reflection of sunlight off the polar icecap. These were also, as the authors remarked, "fashionable variables in theories of climatic change on Earth." (Not until 2004 did direct observations on the surface of Mars prove that the planet had indeed once carried standing water, although only much farther in the past than Sagan guessed.)

The speculations recently published about the Earth's climate had suggested possibilities as spectacular as anything proposed for Mars. A small change could start a warming in which the Earth's polar ice caps would shrink, lowering the planet's reflectivity and pushing the warming further into a self-sustaining climate shift. Much the same thing could perhaps happen on Mars, releasing the CO 2 frozen at its poles, starting a greenhouse effect process that would melt the water ice buried in the soil. In fact some kind of drastic climate shift had happened on Mars, if the evidence of ancient floods and lakes was correct. Perhaps storms that deposited dust on the polar caps and darkened them had pushed the planet into its warm phase. Or perhaps (according to an idea published much later) clouds of CO 2 ice had exerted a different kind of greenhouse effect. In any case even this supposedly "dead" planet gave evidence of climate instability.(17)



=> Aerosols

=> Simple models

Studies of Mars stimulated interest in a puzzle concerning a third planet, like yet unlike our own world, that gave an additional reason to believe that CO 2 plays a crucial role in temperature regulation. That planet was the Earth itself as it was several billion years ago. Sagan and a colleague pointed out in 1972 what became known as the "faint early Sun paradox." Astrophysical calculations show that the Sun changes as it burns its hydrogen fuel, gradually getting brighter. Three billion years ago, if the atmosphere was like the present, the seas should have been permanently frozen. But geological evidence shows there was liquid water. Sagan suggested this was thanks to the greenhouse effect of ammonia gas, but further geological studies showed that such an atmosphere was unlikely. In 1979 another group produced a model whereby a very high concentration of CO 2 provided the necessary warmth. (More recent measurements don't support such a high early CO 2 level, however, so discussion of the paradox continues; besides CO 2 , extra methane and/or changes in clouds seem needed, and perhaps other factors, for example N 2 O.)(17a)