Remember, in the 40's, 50's, Velikovsky's books were some of the all time best sellers
and his claims were going against "the standard view"
disproving Velikovsky and getting him off the best seller list, was deemed necessary to save "science"

his prediction was that Venus would be hot, despite all the scifi and scientific claims of tropical bliss

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Until the 1950s, science fiction writers gave about as accurate a picture of the nearest planets as scientists themselves held. The writers, after all, read up on the science.

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As for Venus, visitors might expect something even more Earth-like, a steam bath under perpetual clouds. Some scientists suspected that the atmosphere was largely carbon dioxide gas (CO2), but even so abundant life was not ruled out

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As for Venus, radio observations published in 1958 showed an amazingly hot temperature, upwards of 600°K, around the melting point of lead. "It was very disappointing to many people," one of the discoverers recalled, "who were reluctant to give up the idea of a sister planet and perhaps even the possibility of life." Some astronomers worked up arguments that the radio measurements were misleading, representing something in the upper atmosphere, so that life might still exist on Venus.

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Already back in 1940, Rupert Wildt had made a rough calculation of the greenhouse effect from the large amount of CO2 that others had found in telescope studies of Venus; he predicted the effect could raise the surface temperature above the boiling point of water. But raising it as high as 600°K seemed impossible.(4*) Nobody mounted a serious attack on the problem (after all, very few people were doing any kind of planetary astronomy in those decades). Finally in 1960 a young doctoral student, Carl Sagan, took up the problem and got a solution that made his name known among astronomer

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Sagan, a science fiction fan from his early years, was among those who had dreamed of a living sister planet of swamp and ocean, but now he had to admit that "Venus is a hot, dry, sandy... and probably lifeless planet.

So after data shows that the scientists were wrong, both about Venus being "Tahiti in outer space"
or heated up by "global warming", other ad hoc "solutions" were needed

Venus, it turns out, was hotter than the scientists predicted or could fathom
but a mechanism was necessary to counter Velikovsky and explain the heat


so who to believe
someone whose predictions were correct from the start
or those who were initially wrong and still can't come up with a mechanism for the data......