Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Boyle's law. Very good, Senator Scarr. That, of course, is PV = nRT. What's pressure? Pressure is force over volume, so there are your two Vs gone. What's pressure? It's mass times acceleration. What's acceleration in the atmosphere? It's 9.8 metres per second squared. That's constant as well. So mass is effectively equivalent to temperature. Long story short, we have to look at the entire mass of the atmosphere—not the radiation, not how much it absorbs—in order to work out the weight of the atmosphere.

If you don't believe me, look at the planet Uranus. It's actually 150 astronomical units, or three billion kilometres, from the sun. It gets very little direct sunlight. The temperature at the top of its troposphere is minus 220 degrees. Down on its surface—and I acknowledge that it is a gas surface—it's 47 degrees.