What do you think the climate of Venus would be like if it's atmosphere was closer to the earth's in thickness?
Well, CapsOwn, on Venus you have a day of 243 Earth days, and a year of 224.7 days. It's 50 million km closer to the Sun, with 88% of Earth's gravity. So the place would be pretty strange, even with an atmosphere that was only as dense as ours--with all those factors, you're going to have a mighty interesting weather cycle. BTW, the atmosphere is always bleeding off because of the extreme heat of the much-closer sun; when the geological cycle ends on Venus as the internal heat of the planet dies down, the atmosphere will no longer be replaced by constant volcanic outgassing. So with the gravity being slightly less, for the first time in its geological history Venus is going to be losing atmosphere faster than it's being formed. Venus may eventually lose enough atmosphere to cool down significantly, but it will take a mighty long time, and there's no guarantee that the environment will be any more comfortable even then.
It would be much cooler, because you would have less of a greenhouse effect (although still probably pretty warm).
Yeah I'm just wondering because I would imagine venus would be terraformable if you could decrease the atmosphere and cool it down a bit. I mean considering it's size compared to earth and it's proximity from it, it may be a great place for terraforming. I would think it would have the gravity to hold an atmosphere, considering it's only about 5% smaller. But I don't really know if you could cool it down enough. Thanks guys for your answers.
Depends if it's as dry as Mars (and it's drier) it would have a albedo of 0.25 increasing the heat even more.
