That is fascinating - do you have a good reference to the thermal imbalance? Does the heat imbalance provide any estimate of the age of Venus, I wonder.
This was a central argument between Carl Sagan who put forth the runaway greenhouse theory and Velikovsky. You can read a little about here, some references to the imbalance are within.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/talk.origins/F78ptTPCxi0/wOEzUn78EoUJ
Here's one specifically. Interestingly titled
Venus: highly radioactive or just cooling down?
https://www.science-frontiers.com/sf014/sf014p03.htm
I don't think the imbalance can tell us anything about age, although if it is in fact cooling perhaps some projection could be done. Venus is thought to be old because of it's cratering. But the kinetic impact theory of cratering is just that and does not fit with the observations of crater chains, overlapping craters, hexagonal craters, flat craters etc.. Electric discharge machining can account for all of these things.
As I point out from time to time, the word greenhouse needs quotes round it because it is only an analogy at best - I think it is a deliberately misleading analogy because, of course, greenhouses actually work rather well!
Ha, yeah, plants love em. They especially love them when you install Co2 tanks as well.
1) Except for the thermal imbalance, the situation on Venus might be consistent with a severe 'greenhouse' effect combined with the high reflectivity of the atmosphere.
High reflective doesn't help, you want to capture that energy. There's still problems of balance and diminishing returns, the more you increase a blanket effect of heat trapping insulation the more you reduce solar input to the surface. So there's a trade off. Think of what a runaway effect means, something akin to overunity.
2) With the thermal imbalance, you don't need the 'greenhouse' effect in the explanation.
It's possible to have both, but a thermal imbalance like this implies there is another source of heat. There should be some greenhouse effect, but it is not normal, that is why we call it a runaway effect. I don't think it's possible for reasons I've mentioned. Surely we could do a experiment for that?
All in all, what this shows is how little science really knows, and I love the concept of correcting data obtained from a very expensive space probe to fit the theory!
I am not very well up on Velikovsky - where did he start his discussions from?
David
He was an independent scholar from Russia. An outsider, you could say. Velikovsky was way ahead of his time, even still in this time. So much so that scientists wanted to burn him at the stake. A heretic among religious zealots. Truly not an understatement and an apt description I must say. He really did expose the problem with science that we are too well aware of.
He wrote the best selling book "Worlds in collision", even though it was a best seller the scientific community forced it to be removed from publication. Famous for his feud with Sagan. He made many incredible accurate predictions that were inconceivable at the time, they were so outside of the "norm" he was attacked for it. His accurate predictions stand testament to his genius.
You know my views on cosmology, it is a religion. Not much different to the epicycles of Aristotle and Ptolemy where matter is invented and physics is deformed by meaningless mathematical abstractions all built one upon another in a magical house of cards to the point of absurdity. This is the religion he challenged.