Our pleasant blue Earth has a sister planet, Venus, of approximately the same size and internal composition.

Our pleasant blue Earth has a sister planet, Venus, of approximately the same size and internal composition. Venus, however, is not pleasant at all. An atmosphere 93 times heavier than Earth's creates pressure at the planet's surface equivalent to that half a mile down in our oceans. Daytime surface temperatures run about 860[degrees]F, and it rains sulfuric acid. Al Gore warns that this fate awaits us unless the United States joins an international treaty to combat global warming. As with all pronouncements by our global-alarmist-in-chief, some significant science is blithely ignored here: the relative proportions of carbon dioxide in the atmospheres of the two planets, for instance (Venus--96.5 percent, Earth--0.04 percent), or their distances from the sun (Venus--67 million miles, Earth--93 million). To cook up an atmosphere like that of Venus requires conditions wildly different from those on Earth, not to mention several hundred million years of cooking. The Earth's atmosphere may indeed be entering a warming trend, but it won't be raining sulfuric acid here anytime soon.