A Lapse Rate is standard for planetary and moon atmospheres in the solar system. See Alan Siddons via NASA planetary fact sheets, and Common 0.1 bar Tropopause in Thick Atmospheres Set by Pressure-Dependent Infrared Transparency, 2013, by Tyler D Robinson and David C. Catling, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2020
Temperature–pressure profiles for worlds in the Solar System with thick atmospheres [refs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 28]. Temperature minima commonly occur around 0.1 bar. Venus has a very weak 0.1 bar tropopause in the global mean (see text). More information regarding data sources is given in the Supplementary Information (to above paper).
andthentheresphysics,
Thank you for your interest, and taking the time to read some of our summaries. 🙂
Your derivation of the dry adiabatic lapse rate is indeed a standard result, and as you correctly point out is independent of greenhouse gas concentrations.
However, in our “The physics of the Earth’s atmosphere” Paper 1 and Paper 2 (which you are referring to here), we were looking at a different phenomenon.
We were looking at the absolute temperature profile. That is, we weren’t just trying to understand how temperature changes with height (“lapse rate”), but trying to understand the absolute temperatures at each height (in Kelvin).
Surprisingly, when we analysed a large sample of weather balloons (several thousand for Paper 1, and more than 13 million for Paper 2), we found that the temperature profile for each balloon could be described entirely in terms of the thermodynamic properties of the bulk gases (i.e., nitrogen, oxygen & argon) and water vapour concentration.
This was an unexpected result (at least to us!). According to the greenhouse effect theory, the presence of greenhouse gases should be substantially altering the temperatures at different altitudes. Roughly speaking, they should be:
(1) Increasing the mean temperature (and height) of the troposphere, relative to a pure nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere.
(2) Decreasing the mean temperature of the stratosphere, relative to a pure nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere.
What we found is that the mean temperature profile throughout the troposphere and stratosphere is essentially the same as that of a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere (with some variation near ground level due to water vapour).