Reply To: Questions regarding DPF.

[Brian H]

KeithPickering wrote:

Talk about Occam’s razor!

Nope. Reading error. The sun has no effect on the surface temp of Venus, day or night. All its radiation is rejected by the cloud cover etc.!

If that were true, Venus would have an albedo of 1.0, while its actual albedo is 0.6 — so what happens to that other 40% of incoming sunlight?
Still trying to “balance the radiation”, are we? There is no conservation of radiation! Only of total energy. I’d guess much of the 40% goes to driving the 200+ mph high-altitude winds, etc., but in any case, the rock-steady surface temps absolutely rule out solar energy participation there. Even if there were high winds on the surface (which there are not! — they’re well under 10 mph average) they would have to be driven by major heat-source and -sink regions and pressure gradients, etc., which also do not exist.

And give it up with the “Mercury” stuff. Mercury has no atmospheric phenomena, nor internal convection or other processes. What is going on inside Venus is still a deep, dark, intensely interesting and significant mystery. It is certainly the source of its heat and atmosphere. As for the nighttime volcanoes, no idea, other than perhaps gravity tides in the crust, or even magnetically modulated magma movements as Venus interacts with the solar fields. But it will be fascinating to discover!