Kicking the Sacred Cow

by James P. Hogan

  Besides an efficient medium for absorbing and reradiating incoming radiation, an effective greenhouse also needs adequate penetration of the medium by sunlight to utilize the available mass. With Venus, for a start, only about twenty percent of the incoming sunlight gets past the cloud tops forty to forty-five miles above the surface, the rest being reflected back into space—which is why Venus is so bright. The surface pressure on Venus is around ninety times that of Earth's, which translates into something like seventy-five times the mass of gases, giving it more the optical characteristics of a sea—in fact, corresponding to a depth of about three thousand feet. Virtually all the sunlight entering the oceans is absorbed within the top three hundred feet. Likewise, any greenhouse mechanism on Venus would be confined to the top fifteen percent of the atmosphere. These objections were well known. In 1968 the British astronomer V. A. Firshoff, in The Interior Planets, put it like this:

  The greenhouse effect cannot be magnified ad lib. Doubling the [glass] thickness may enhance its thermal insulation, so raising its temperature, but it will cut down the transmitted sunshine, so reducing its heat. In the end the process becomes self-defeating. . . . The sea is a perfect "greenhouse" of this kind—none of the obscure heat from the bottom can escape into space. But it is not boiling; in fact it is not much above freezing point. Sagan's deep atmosphere would behave in exactly the same way. . . . An adiabatic atmosphere of a mass envisaged by Sagan is possible only if it is heated from below. In other words, the surface of Venus would have to be kept at a high temperature by internal sources.

  By the time the official version of the proceedings was published over two years later as Scientists Confront Velikovsky, Sagan had embellished his argument by reference to the Soviet Venera 9 and 10 landings in October 1975. (True to the spirit of the whole affair, while Sagan was permitted to add a revised appendix of new points, Velikovsky was denied space to respond to them.) The Soviet craft, Sagan claimed, were able to obtain clear pictures in sunlight of surface rocks, showing Velikovsky wrong in saying that light does not penetrate the cloud cover. This doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that the Soviet landers were equipped with floodlights. Further, as reported by Professor Lewis Greenberg, 138 the Venera instruments detected nothing but gloom and darkness after descending through the clouds, until a glow appeared and grew brighter as they neared the surface. The atmosphere at the surface was much brighter than had been expected. V. A. Avduevsky, deputy director of the Soviet Space Flight Control Center, described the terrain as showing distinct, dark shadows that persisted even when the floodlights were turned off, which was unanticipated since sunlight from the clouds would be diffuse. He and his colleagues agreed that it indicated a direct light source on the surface but they could not guess what it was. Velikovsky had proposed that there could still be hydrocarbons burning on the extremely hot surface.

  If Sagan is permitted to draw on information from after the symposium, then so shall we. In Scientists Confront Velikovsky and also in Broca's Brain, Sagan charges that the reflected spectrum from Venus is entirely consistent with the infrared cloud temperature of 240ºK, in other words the temperature is what would be expected for the amount of sunlight, and this negates Velikovsky's prediction of Venus giving off more heat than it receives from the Sun. That is to say, Venus is in thermal equilibrium with its surroundings, whereas Velikovsky says it shouldn't be. Well, in an article headed "The Mystery of Venus' Internal Heat," the U.K. journal New Scientist reported in 1980 (November 13) that data from the Pioneer Venus orbiter showed Venus to be radiating fifteen percent more energy than is received from the Sun (later figures put it at twenty percent). This would mean that Venus is producing ten thousand times more heat than the Earth—stated as being "inconceivable, according to present theories of planetary formation."

  It was so inconceivable, in fact, that the scientists resorted to "correcting" the data that clearly pointed to it. Calculation of thermal balance is quite sensitive to the figure used for albedo, the fraction of sunlight that's reflected. Ground-based measurements (examples: 0.878, Muller, 1893; 0.815, Danjon, 1949; 0.815, Knuckles, Sinton and Sinton, 1961; 0.80, Travis, 1975) and measurements from space probes (0.80, Tomasko et al., 1980), allowing for the better accuracy of modern instruments, show a clustering around 0.8, which would normally be averaged to give what would be taken as a good indication of the actual figure. 139 But for Venus to be in thermal balance, while at the same time having an internal heat comparable to Earth's, the figure should be about 0.76—more sunlight being absorbed to account for the temperature. The procedure followed, therefore, was that both these conditions were assumed, and the error ranges of the instruments recalculated to allow the observed data—all the presumed errors being biased in the desired direction. And lo and behold, the final massaged figure comes out at 0.76 +/- 0.01—entirely consistent with expectations. So why bother sending anything at all?

  It doesn't end there. Albedo corrections deal only with the situation at the cloud tops. For Venus to be in thermal equilibrium, a balance between emitted and incoming energy should apply all the way down. If Venus is the predominant source of heat, the imbalance should become greater closer to the surface. And this was what all the American and the Soviet landers found. The four Pioneer Venus probes entered at locations varying from 30º south to 60º north, both in daylight and night, and each one found more energy being radiated up from below than was coming down as sunlight. To complicate things further, the upward energy flux varied from place to place by a factor of two, which is difficult to reconcile with any greenhouse model but fits perfectly well with some areas being hotter than others on the young and still primarily volcanic surface of a recently incandescent planet. The Pioneer data indicated a progressive increase in thermal imbalance from twenty percent at the cloud tops to fifty percent at around seven miles altitude, where all inputs terminated. The Soviet Venera landers showed the trend accelerating all the way to the surface, where the emitted infrared flux was forty times more than that coming from overhead.

  None of which was acceptable, of course. Accordingly, the investigators again searched for instrument errors, and having found one that they considered could have increased the Pioneer Venus readings, adjusted the figures for the low-level data to what they considered to be "reasonable values." But with Venera, there was no saving the situation. So as with the scribes who cut the Babylonian tablets, and the dating of reed and nut samples from Egyptian tombs, the story of what they say they saw was dismissed.

  As a final word on Venus's temperature, Dr. George Talbott, whose field is thermodynamics, particularly with regard to space application, wrote in the pro-Velikovskian journal Kronos that the thermal calculations presented in Scientists Confront Velikovsky were irrelevant, and developed a cooling curve for an incandescent body the size and mass of Venus. It showed that in the course of thirty-five hundred years the surface temperature would fall to 750ºK—just about the observed value. 140 My understanding is that Talbott's paper was not well received in establishment circles.

  Problem 9. The Craters of Venus

  Sagan turns to Venus's topography to show that it must be as ancient as the Earth. He tells us that radar observations reveal enormous linear mountain ranges, ringed, basins, a great rift valley and abundant cratering, maybe with areas saturated like parts of the Moon. Such tectonic or impact features couldn't be supported by the thin and fragile crust that Velikovsky's theory requires.

  Well, whatever the earlier interpretations of the radar images may have been, many of these features seemed to have disappeared in later years. Studies of the Pioneer-Venus radar mappings were described in various journals in 1980. Science, July 4, reported (p. 103) that "plate tectonics is also absent"; Scientific American, August, (p. 65) concluded "the motion of large plates appears not to have played a dominant role"; while the Journal of Geophysical Research, December 30, found a pattern "indicative of global tectonism has not been identified" (p. 8232). Rick Gore wrote in National
Geographic, January, 1985 (p. 36), "Until the orbiter's cloud penetrating radar began, crudely mapping the Venusian surface, we knew relatively nothing about the planet's terrain. . . . [until a surge of new imaging revealed] Venus as a volcanic cauldron . . . with shapes suspiciously like lava flows across the planet."

  So maybe that accounts for the elevated formations that Sagan knew were mountain chains and continents—which couldn't have been produced through tectonic processes since there weren't any. Thick plates and a supporting mantle like those the Earth possesses wouldn't have had time to cool and form on a young planet. Gore's article goes on to say, "Stunning images from the Soviet Union's Venera 15 and 16 orbiters not only revealed abundant evidence of volcanism, but also far fewer ancient meteoric impact craters than on the Moon or Mars."

  By then Sagan had stopped seeing areas saturated with craters like parts of the Moon. His book Comet of the same year, coauthored with Ann Druyan, tells us (p. 258) "[T]he sparseness of craters on Venus shows that the surface is continually being modified—probably by volcanism."

  Problem 10. The Circularization of the Orbit of Venus

  This was a continuation of the insistence that had been heard since 1950 that electromagnetic forces play no part in celestial dynamics. However, Einstein, since the outset, had been of the opinion that given some unlikely coincidences they didn't have to, and since Sagan himself conceded that the odds against a Velikovskian scenario were "not overwhelming," it wasn't essential that they be brought up. Velikovsky had introduced the suggestion as a possibility, and as mentioned earlier various candidates for contributory mechanisms have been investigated, such as proto-Venus being in a charged plasma state, and tidal effects on a plastic body acting to pull it toward a lower-energy, hence more circular orbit, converting orbital momentum into heat. And let's bear in mind that electrical conditions across the Solar System following an event like the ejection of Venus from Jupiter could well be vastly different from the relatively quiescent conditions that we observe today. The debate is still going on, and while nothing put forward so far has been sufficient to convince everybody, the subject is far from closed.

  And then there's the unthinkable question: Is conventional gravitational theory really on such solid ground as is almost universally supposed? Sagan assures us that literally millions of experiments testify to its validity. Yet, those reports keep coming in from what would seem to be reputable sources of pendulums doing things they're not supposed to under certain conditions of electrical charge and during solar eclipses, when the Sun is obscured. 141 Sagan reminds us of the accuracy achieved in injecting Venera 8, and Voyager 1 precisely into their designated orbits, and getting within one hundred kilometers with the Viking orbiters, using Newtonian mechanics alone. . . . Well, yes; but they did employ course-corrections in flight. And Mariner 2 missed its target area by twelve thousand miles. And in the last year or so we've been hearing that probes now in the outer Solar System are deviating from their expected trajectories and nobody is sure why.

  Appealing though Newton's gravitation law may be in its simplicity, the only tests actually performed so far have been very close by in our own backyard. Everything beyond that is based on faith that it continues to apply over unlimited distances because the formula says so. But what if, as in many relationships of physics, this turns out to be an approximation to a more complex function whose deviation becomes more significant as distance increases? The only observational evidence we have of how gravity operates over distances much larger than those found in the Solar System are from the courses of stars within the disks of faraway galaxies, thousands of light-years across. And these are so much in violation of expectations that all kinds of exotic unseen matter are invented to explain them. Could the whole exercise, I can't help wondering, turn out one day to be another case of self-deception arising from a refusal to accept the most simple explanation—that the evidence means what it says—because "we know" it can't be possible.

  After the Inquisition:

  The Parallel Universe

  Velikovsky died in 1979. From working essentially alone through most of the first twenty years of his research, supported by a few who, while receptive to his ideas and prepared to defend them, in the main tended not to be active contributors, he saw the emergence of a vigorous new generation of participating researchers from archeology, history, philosophy, as well as practically all of the physical sciences.

  The journal Pensée, was founded by Stephen and David Talbott in 1971, and that gave way in 1976 to Kronos, under the editorship of Lewis Greenberg, stimulating the growth in North America of what has become something of a parallel universe of catastrophism existing alongside the traditional mainstream disciplines. In Britain, the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies was founded under the impetus of Howard Tresman and puts out the journal Chronology and Catastrophism Review, besides hosting a regular program of workshops and conferences. In 1989 the journal Aeon appeared, edited by David Talbott, Dwardu Cardona, and Ev Cochrane, and since 1993 Charles Ginenthal has been publishing The Velikovskian, usually running at four issues of 120 pages or so each per year.

  Establishment science, on the other hand—in its official stance, anyway—seems still to be ruled by its own propaganda from twenty-five years ago. The notion of catastrophic events figuring in the Earth's history has become commonplace, sure enough—but only if they are kept comfortably in the remote past and involve impacts by minor objects occurring in essentially the Solar System as it exists today. But any thought of major instabilities and encounters between the planets themselves is still off-limits, let alone the possibility of their happening recently. It would mean opening minds to accepting that it could happen again, and maybe unconsciously that's simply too much to face.

  Electromagnetic influences far from Earth are a familiar part of the picture revealed by the space program; conferences are held regularly to present papers on such topics as ancient cometary encounters, revisions to history, mass extinctions, sudden climatic changes, and the fission of minor planets from the gas giants. It's hard to find one of Velikovsky's ideas that wasn't once derided and rejected with ill grace, only to be quietly wheeled in through the back door of "respectable" science later. That would be forgivable to a degree if the originator of the ideas were acknowledged and given credit as such in the references. But in what are considered the mainstream journals, he never is. Any mention of Velikovsky is a fast ticket to rejection by the review committees, academic ostracism, and probable oblivion. It would be too clear an admission of how the system works to preserve the Establishment monopoly on funding, tenure, journal access, and influence on policymaking.

  But fiction writers are free to follow their inclinations, and so I gave Velikovsky's work the dedication for Cradle of Saturn—a tribute to a person I consider to have been one of the most original and innovative thinkers of our time. I'm sure he didn't get everything right, and his supporters remain divided over many issues. But Velikovsky's true genius, I would submit, lies in recognizing the possibility that ancient myths and legends might represent cosmic events that actually happened, and asking why planets that most people today would be unable even to find in the sky should have dominated human life to the degree that they did, and been seen universally as objects of awe and terror.

  Copernicus didn't have all the details right either—he got the Sun in the center but thought the planets moved on circles rather than ellipses—but that doesn't diminish what we refer to today as the Copernican revolution. For that to get past the Aristotlean professors of the day and catch on generally took about a hundred years. Of the names that took part in the Inquisition hearing in San Francisco in 1974, I wonder which will be known, say, two centuries from now.

  FIVE

  Environmentalist Fantasies

  Politics and Ideology

  Masquerading As Science

  Every age has its peculiar folly: some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain
, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.

  —Charles Mackay,

  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

  Nothing is more predictable than the media's parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by others, whether or not the story is true. . . . In the news game these days we don't have the staff, time, interest, energy, literacy or minimal sense of responsibility to check our facts by any means except calling up whatever has been written by other hacks on the same subject and repeating it as gospel.

  — John le Carré, from The Tailor of Panama

  I mentioned in the Introduction that one of the things that first turned me from being an eager apologist for anything pronounced in the name of Science to taking a more skeptical view was the discrepancy between what the world was being told about such things as pesticides and holes in the ozone layer, and the accounts that I heard from people I talked to directly, who specialized in such fields. Once again we have a massive body of evidently wrong information being delivered to the public, endorsed by an authoritative stamp of science. The difference here, however, was that for the main part the working scientists in these areas seemed to have a reliable picture of the way things were in the real world. But nobody was hearing from them. The lurid accounts of a despoiled and poisoned planet accelerating in a headlong rush to doom were coming from popularizers and activists with other agendas, or from institutional administrations with an eye on political visibility and funding. So I've grouped the selection of topics that this applies to into one section. (It also makes organizing the references easier.)This is a highly politicized area in today's world. Compared to the long-established and prestigious institutions that we've talked about so far, the environmental sciences are new arrivals to the scene of experiencing constant public awareness and exercising a voice in the running of society's affairs. Departments which thirty years ago consisted of a few dedicated specialists running on a pittance, whose subjects and terminology few on the outside had heard of, today wallow in lavish federal funding, send delegates to internationally reported conferences, and provide headlines for the evening's news. This makes them a target for invasion and takeover by the kind of opportunism that thrives wherever the limelight shines and the reward system beckons. In such circumstances the integrity of preserving truth is quick to suffer, since the object of the game was never to discover and report truth for its own sake in the first place, but to mold the beliefs that affect what is construed as success.