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New Results From Venus Express
Riding with Robots writes "For the past two years, Europe's Venus Express orbiter has been studying Earth's planetary neighbor up close. Today, mission scientists have released a new collection of findings and amazing images. They include evidence of lightning and other results that flesh out a portrait of a planet that is in many ways like ours, and in other ways hellishly different, such as surface temperatures over 400C and air pressure a hundred times that on Earth. The article lists seven papers that will be published today in Nature."
The missing factor is the spin. A Venus day is nearly as long as a Venus year. Earth's relatively rapid spin, acting upon its molten iron core, generates a powerful magnetic field which blocks the effect of the solar wind. We were lucky enough to have been sideswiped early in our planetary history with a large object, with the broken-off bits coalescing into the moon and the planet itself given a rapid spin. So really, it's the absence of spin rather than the presence of carbon dioxide that made the outcomes so different. On the other hand, the moon's tidal effect is acting as a brake on our rotation. Some billions of years from now, the Earth will constantly present the same side to the moon, just as the moon does to us now. Whatever is around at that time will be in big trouble. We can expect the climate alarmists to provide additional spin, but it's probably not going to be enough.