Every once in a while I get a request from one of my readers to explain what is going on. If you want to go with fantasy then you believe the Earth has a thermal blanket of co2, and this will soon boil us alive. This idea came up for political reasons and has never been tested by the Scientific Method. Unfortunately, since it breaks all the laws of physics, any experiment will fail the hypothesis, and these guys know it.
With no experiments, this ideal can never die, and I just put it out there as 'Influencer Science'. If it is never tested, it has to be true.
If you follow Feynman, then I call 'Feynmanism' the 'physics side'.
On the physics side, we have an Earth that has been stable for life for 4.2 billion years (the latest estimate for life). For any planet, that is amazing, that we have had 't-shirt weather' for all that time, plus or minus a few degrees. In that time the Earth has had to shed an enormous amount of heat, since we had a 'molten rock' start.
In geology, we assume that any mechanism we observe today has been operating for those billions of years. There are no great changes in general geology. The major atmospheric change was going from an atmosphere with 80% nitrogen and the rest methane and co2. Life started, and then found a mechanism to eat all that carbon by quantum tunnelling to release oxygen as a horrible pollutant (photosynthesis).
However, for all this time, the Earth cooled, tectonic plates collided, and mountains formed. No change in the overall mechanisms.
By 'Influencer Logic' the oceans should have been boiling like the planet Venus (considering their sensitivity to a speck of co2 and methane). But Earth had a thin atmosphere, and that allowed total convection throughout the whole atmosphere to the very top. Neat. The best 'heat pipe' around, and it was self-regulating. Not too hot, not too cold. That's very difficult to do, and may be the reason that DNA life is very rare in the Universe.
- to be continued
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