Venus' Stop/Start History Highlighted By Probe

An anonymous reader writes "Science Daily reports on scientific findings from the ESA's Venus Express probe. The device, which is even now orbiting Earth's sister planet, is feeding back data hinting at Venus' origins. Initially, the probe has found, the planet evolved far too quickly. As a result Venus' liquid oceans were boiled away. With those gone, the planet's development stalled and ceased. 'They may have started out looking very much the same,' said Professor Taylor, 'but increasingly we have evidence that Venus lost most of its water and Earth lost most of its atmospheric carbon dioxide ... The interesting thing is that the physics is the same in both cases. The great achievement of Venus Express is that it is putting the climatic behaviour of both planets into a common framework of understanding.'"

Re:global warming comparison in 3,2,1....

[hattig]

They'll be cooler this year from effects of La Nina. It won't reverse the general warming trend, globally.

It's called Global Climate Change because not everywhere will get warmer. Many places (Northern Europe) could get colder. Some places will get wetter, others dryer. The weather systems might get far more random in places as well.

However idiots who watched some oil funded programme on TV will now declare themselves experts on the subject and say it's bunkum. Right. Really. Your limited hours of funded popular science really make your opinion worth more than thousands of people who have spent years and decades working on this stuff?

Of course cleaning up emissions will do more than potentially slow down this global climate change (arguably man's effect is one of accelerating change, which may result in more momentum and thus higher highs ultimately), it will make the air nicer to breathe, day in, day out. This is a far better benefit. If it wasn't for this, I'd rather the money was spent on dealing with the inevitable, rather than delaying it.

Why does Venus rotate retrograde?

[theolein]

One thing that has always bothered me is the question as to why Venus rotates in a retrograde manner (east to west) around its own axis. My personal idea, from the little amount of very inconclusive data available on this on the web, is that there must have been some cataclysmic collision early in Venus' history. One wonders if Venus had had a normal, and faster rotation, if it would have developed differently?

Most likely same reason Earth has a Moon

[localroger]

The late stages of rocky planet formation are now known to be extremely violent, involving collisions of mars-sized bodies in the final accretion of a body the size of Earth or Venus. The exact collision vector can have a huge impact on the final body's rotational inertia, and can even heave a planet-sized hunk of debris like our own Moon into orbit.