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Global Warming Mostly Confirmed - On Mars
dinotrac writes "A just-completed 23 month study, carried out over the course of a Martian year, found that the Martian polar ice caps are rapidly eroding, sending large amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the Martian atmosphere. If this pattern continues over time, Mars could go from a planet whose winters are cold enough for dry-ice snow to having a shirt sleeve atmosphere. Humans would still have to provide for oxygen, but plants could go naked.
I wonder if this means tougher emission controls on the next Martian rover?"
..tougher emission controls on the next Martian rover..
They have dogs there? So, emission controls like 'Don't crap of the Martian face' are needed?
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Well, considering that those of us in the Boston area just had record-breaking 70 degree temps in the first week of December, we should make plans to colonize Mars before the weather there gets any worse.
But hey, don't worry, global warming (be it a natural cycle in the global ecosystem, a condition caused by man's encroachment on the carbon sinks of the planet, depletion of the ozone layer, of just plain bad luck) isn't anything to worry about. Just think of it as an extra reason to work on your tan.
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse
We must stop polluting the martian atmosphere! It's all man's fault! Damn those fossil fuels!
Oh wait, it's not man's fault.
Hmm. I wonder if we would pause to look at man's contribution to our own "global warming." Maybe we aren't as significant as we think.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
This would be ideal. When temperatures get into the correct range, we could likely start placing algae or some other similar plant onto the surface to terraform it.
Hmmm...
"Leave only rovertracks. Take only pictures."
The first step for terraforming mars is to increase the greenhouse effect. So if it's already occuring, it will help us go a little faster in the very slow process of terraforming mars. Just don't expect to breath the martian atmosphere in your lifetime ;)
True warriors use the Klingon Google
If we can find plants that can survive in the Martian atmosphere then we may be able to make Mars livable for humans. The plants would produce oxygen for us humans to breathe. I don't know how much time it would take (that would depend on the photosynthisis rate of the plants) but eventually they should produce enough oxygen to make Mars habitable. Now we just need to lobby NASA to increase the frequency of missions. Terraforming takes a long time, the sooner we start the sooner the planet will be habitable.
Enigma
We must stop the destruction of the martian environment....the Ice caps are melting and soon the planet will be flooded.........the atmosphere is going to become warm.....we must maintain this bastion of solar system history!!!!
:-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
So, scientists have discovered that this does not only occur on Earth but also elsewhere.
Which impact will this discovery have on the recently overhyped global warming debate?
This may for example help relativize this eternal flame war which have been going on for years between pro and anti-ozone layer militants...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This really shouldn't affect local global warming theories. After all, it's only been 23 months, and its the only data we have. We have no real historical record the way we do with earths temperature. (both with ice-cores and with recorded history).
And, earth and mars, obviously, have vastly different atmospheres.
The fact the temperature on mars increased slightly over the past 23 months doesn't actually change anything with regards to mans affect on the earths atmosphere. We already know that earth can change without us, it has in the past.
What we need to find out is how much (if any) effect on our climate we actually cause.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
I still don't think this is very significant. Mars still doesn't have a sufficent AMMOUNT of atmosphere, which is probably needed to help keep the heat. Besides which, mars has a very eliptical orbit. It might be nice during the summer, but who would look foreward to over a year (earth time) of a winter that is FAR colder than any we've ever had on earth?
True.
But one idea put forth about Global Warming on Earth is that there is an effect from solar flares. The CO2 posse has flatly rejected that, because of course you can't bitch about the sun.
Perhaps the warming on Mars's polar caps is evidence of an effect from the solar flares.
Or perhaps it's evidence that climates will undergo changes without American SUVs.
So, in perperation for us eventaully going, there, and exluding tthe actual logistics and amounts, couldn't we lots and lots of plants there to help make O2 for us? what conditions do they have that would prevent plants from growing, and how can we get past that?
Mod point free since 2001
> And, earth and mars, obviously, have vastly
> different atmospheres.
That's right. But the fun thing is that our earth athmosphere is a very complicated one. Slightly different temperatures can have a large impact on the biology in the air or in the water. Those are things we can not easily predict. Some weird bacteria may like two degrees (celsius, I am european...) more that much, that it will grow rapidly, first killing its food and thereby killing itself as well.
On Mars, there is no such thing as widespread biological activity, we've proven that by now. This does not mean radical chances can't take place, but when they take place, it's easier to point a finger at something.
Given the "what if we..." comments following up here, I strongly recommend reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars", "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars". The books start with a near-future colonization of Mars and go through one very well developed "what if" path, covering not just the technology but also the social and political engineering that follows. The idea of deliberate greenhouse warming shows up, among others.
Oh, yeah: they're also good reading, with an interesting set of characters.
At such low pressure, some of the water in the soft tissues will vaporize and cause swelling of the human body (note that the blood will not vaporize, because it is always under sufficient pressure in the blood vessels). This can be prevented by "a properly fitted elastic garment", but such garments are only know to work at pressures of more than 20 millibars.
Which means that a lot of carbon dioxide would be needed until you could walk around without a space suit.
Simple - Remember the film 'Total Recall' - What's happened is that's somone's managed to get that martion (sp?) underground generator going!!
Isn't water vapor a Green House Gas(tm)? Recent reports are that Mars once had very large oceans. I see that Mars is a frigid, very dry desert these days. So the gas leakage problem may be a very big problem in planetary engineering.
The only possible fix would be a constant inflow of water and other resources to replace those that are being lost. Terraformiong wouod have to include a rain of very smal icy comets to allow for more water in the atmosphere, etc.
In a Way, I would be kinda cool to be there for the first rainfall on Mars in millions of years.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Sorry, but it does prove one thing. The climates of planets is many times beyond our pale ability to understand or have an effect on.
Are we so egotistical to believe we can readily affect the Earths climate? We would seriously have to try very hard to make a noticable effect. A single volcano outdid us in 3 days... reducing sunlight striking the earth!
Yes we have pollution issues, but the fact remains that that 23 months of Mars data is very similar in one way to the earth, both are attempting to extrapolate what the resulting climates will become with limited data.
We simply don't have enough data to prove one way or another for the Earth
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That Mars is also undergoing global warming without input from humans? Perhaps the Suns energy output is on the upswing. Would think that would be easily detectable though.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
I've read about a possible mission to Mars that would speed up the Green House effect. Basically, it was a lander whose only purpose was to emit as many green house gases as possible into the Martian atmosphere. The thinking was that if we could get the polar ice caps to melt,we could begin terraforming within 20 years, and then areas would be ready for humans in another 50-60 years.
--From a fragment found underneath a Martian pyramid
Hate trolls? Troll 'em back...at home!
Stating that mars may be in for a period of global warming based on ONE years data is, well, so much hot air.
If some good data could be presented indicating long term erosion of the polar CO2 caps, I'd say they might be onto something, but this is just irresponsible reporting.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
1) Pick a good headline/title: "Global Warming Mostly Confirmed - On Mars"
2) Make claims even whey they don't make sense: "A just-completed 23 month study"
3) And keep making stupid statements: "If this pattern continues over time, Mars could go from a planet whose winters are cold enough for dry-ice snow to having a shirt sleeve atmosphere."
Let us see how does this all add up. We spent less than 2 years studying this planet called "Mars" and concluded/found-out that it is heading to its domes-day. Oh right? Does this makes sense to anyone?!!
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
- Magnetic Field
- The Sun
Then again, I could be wrong. Profoundly wrong. Not even within a parsec of the right answer. Most of my posts are that way anyway, why break the trend?As I understand Mars, even if the CO2 the Martian atmosphere became thicker, it would not be able to hold it for long. This is because at present, Mars does not have a magnetic field as does Earth. Without it, the strong solar wind would strip the atmosphere away. (BTW, this is one theory as to how Mars could have lost its water. It is believed Mars did once have a strong magnetic field, which protected its atmosphere and allowed enough heat to be trapped for liquid water to flow. As the magnetic field died, so did the planet.) However, if Mars was somehow re-establishing its magnetic field (don't ask me how, I just spit out wild, non-sensical theories, I don't explain them), maybe it could.
It occurs to me that this new "development" could be tied to the gradual warming of the sun. Perhaps a threshold has been reached, and is causing the release of Martian CO2 (this un-thought out, unsubstantiated "threshold theory" may also apply to Earth).
Looking forward to running naked on Mars (although Mars certainly isn't) . . .
-- If any of the above made sense, I assure it was purely by accident.
Guess that pretty nails down that "global warming" is due to the effects the Sun has on planets while going through its different cycles of energy release rather than a bunch of politicians that disagree with the pop culture environmental movement. I am just so shocked that the noted global warming scientists Sting, Drew Barrymore and Ted Danson completely missed this fact.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
If Mars gets enough CO2 to support a plant atmosphere, then it's not terribly unlikely that we could try to start terraforming the planet. All we'd need is to find a nice little phytoplankton-type algae that'll thrive there, and before you know it we'd be able to produce a breathable atmosphere.
Of course, we'd have to find a goodly source of N, but there's probably enough of that elsewhere on the planet that could be freed up in other ways.
The alternative, of course, would be to cross-breed plants and humans so that they'd use a chlorophyl-based metabolism instead of the current human-based solutions. Then, they'd be able to breath and metabolize the CO2 in much the same way that we do O2.
With the change in diet that would be necessitated, I expect that such plant-human mixtures would be several feet shorter than your average human.
More to the point, we'd have to create little green men and invade Mars.
That green slime had it coming.
Plants, like us, need oxygen for their respiration. They photosynthise to create a lot of what they need, and kick out more O2 to the atmosphere than they will use, but there still needs to be a high enough O2 concentration in the atmosphere for them to take some of it back in.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Just 23 months is pretty much nothing in terms of planetary cyclical events. Maybe this warming is just part of a very long cycle in Martian atmosphere, taking decades of even centuries, that we haven't observed yet. I'd hate to see the November 13, 2614 headlines of The Martian Times stating something like "Global cooling confirmed - atmosphere compromised".
(BTW, will Greenpeace stablish a Martian Chapter called "Redpeace"?)
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
So, if all we need to do is speed up the melting of the ice caps on Mars, we just drop a few nuclear-powered heaters, let them wander around the caps for a few decades, and assuming the new atmosphere stays put we'll have a habitable environment? There has to be more to it than that, but if the issues could be worked out...
;-).
By the time the atmosphere is properly cooked we should be able to transport people to Mars in significant numbers (hundreds, thousands). Give priority to people (the new pioneers!) who want to raise large families, and in a century or two Mars could have a fairly substantial human population.
Possible side effect: Mars could wind up very Catholic
(Sorry, I've been waiting weeks for a chance to use that line...)
Why oh why don't we send up a greenhouse gas generator? if we were to get the climate close to what earth has then we fling seeds all over the planet and see what happens. I'd bet that with current technology we'd have greenery on the surface within 100 years and a breathable atmosphere within 500 years, far earlier than we would see any mars base (given the current disregard for space and planetary exploration by the worlds governments.)
maybe someone could start the "seeds for mars foundation" although having the anticipated huge influx of cannibus seeds would probably be a detriment to the project's standings.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Expect blue skies on Mars in less than an hour!
<joke>
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
This graph from this report shows a striking correlation between the length of solar cycles and mean temperature over the last hundred years (interesting that the length of the cycle should give the best correlation - the authors suggest the shorter solar cycles correspond to higher solar output).
Also, there is considerable historical evidence that the current change in climate is really pretty small beer compared to what has happened in the past:
"The Norwegian farmer Folke Vilgerdson made the first attempt to settle in Iceland in about 865 AD... He lost his cattle in a severe winter and disappointed went back to Norway after having seen a fjord filled up by sea ice. Therefore he called the country Iceland. Only a few years later, in 874, Ingolf Arnason succeeded. He was followed by many others, and settlement was completed in 930 AD... In 982, Erik the Red discovered new land West of Iceland. He called it Greenland; according to the Greenlander Saga this was only to persuade people to follow him... But the O(18) curve suggests that the name described a reality... So the drastic climatic change [warming] late in the ninth century may be part of the reason why Iceland and Greenland did not get the opposite names." (Dansgaard: Palaeo-Climatic Studies on Ice Cores, in Oeschger, Messerli and Svilar, 1980).
Here is another account, also suggesting that Greenland had a suprisingly comfortable climate at the time.
This is some of the best evidence so far that HUMANS have nothing to do with the climate changing on earth. The fact that mars is undergoing the same climate changes(relatively speaking) that the earth is should prove that HUMANS are having little or nothing to do with the earths climate changes. IT is rather a normal climate cycle that we are having little or no effect on.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Humans wouldn't have to provide any oxygen, just plants. A large number of plants would provide the Oxygen. (for a small group anyways) Plus, as the carbon "melts" and the plants spew Oxygen into the atmosphere, the pressure would go up as well.
Of course this won't happen for a few thousand years.
Teto
that's stupid
they studied it for ONE YEAR, and feel they can make this conclusion
thats a little fuckign drastic, dont you think?
________________________________________________
I must say I find the accussation that Global Warming is over discussed, hyped, etc... bemusing. To me FOOTBALL is overhyped, CELEBRITY is overhyped, the WEATHER is overhyped- each of these are covered in every news bulletin in the world, every day.
This is not a fair statement. The consequence of talking too much about football or celebreties is nothing more than an uninformed populace (which government officials love). The consequence of the "global warming" debate involves (if the leftists get their way) the removal of individual rights. The two are drastically different.
The greenhouse effect (the ability for certain atmospheric gases to trap more heat than others - leading to an overall warmer planet) is a scientific fact. Whether the effect is increasing or not is currently being debated - with the vast
majority saying yes, it is.
Vast majority of whom? Experts? You are trying to roll an ad numeram argument into your ad verecundiam argument, while ignoring the simple fact that destroys the validity of what you claim. The fact is that experts disagree on the subject of global warming. And as long as experts continue to disagree, I'm not going to be convinced. I wonder how you can be so sure of your position.
It's also interesting that the whole global warming argument seems to be brewing within the political sphere. It should not be a political argument, it should be a scientific one. When Al Gore states that the Worst Thing Ever (tm) was the internal combusion engine, it lends credence to the notion that "global warming" is a convenient tool to use to keep individuals from driving cars, riding 4-wheelers, buying Evil Horrible SUVs (like the one Tom Daschle owns), playing with jet skis, and all sorts of other individual activities that leftists just plain hate.
The earth is warmer now than it was 100 years ago.
You can say this all you want, but until I see all the data to draw my own conclusion, it's just words. And even if what you say is true, that does not imply that all of the ramifications tied up into the nebulous political beast named "global warming" are true.
I'm a 'don't piss in the bath' person myself.
Neither do I, but it doesn't matter since you're assuming the point in dispute.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
This means that the oxygen, nitrogen and carbon are probably in the soil. This would explain why Mars is so red (all that oxidized iron) and why the atmosphere is so rarefied (most of the gases are tied up as permafrost, adsorbed gas or chemical compounds like nitrates). It also means that the right kind of change can release them and make them into a thick atmosphere again.
Bob Zubrin of the Mars Society has written that we could start what would probably be a substantial greenhouse effect on Mars with only a few million tons of greenhouse gases (such as sulfur hexafluoride and methane) per year. This is the output of one large-scale industrial plant. Once you start heating the soil the adsorbed gases come out and the permafrost melts, leading to more warming and more gas release. Once you've got 200 millibars of atmosphere you can walk around outside with nothing fancier than a heavy parka and an oxygen mask. That's not bad for a planet that's currently an iceball with 7 millibars of fire-extinguisher contents for "air".
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
No scientist ever claimed that global warming (or cooling) was anything but a natural effect. Indeed the earth is constantly in a state of flux. The suggestion is that we are *rapidly* hastening the next warm period, and given the number of coastal cities we have, this is something that we do not want. Earth has a pretty well balanced system... increased heat will spread plants and drown a bunch of animals, and that will decrease the carbon dioxide in the air, which will then cool us down.
Indeed, it's long been speculated that mars once had running water... this is probably just part of their cycle. I'd be interested to see how this cycle work.
Dammit, i want to live forever.
All of these posts about sending up a machine to generate/liberate the CO2 and we can live on Mars in 20 years.
If it is that easy, why don't we just build a big plant here on earth to suck up all of the greenhouse gases and CFC's? Surely it must be easy to counteract the effects of the worlds ENTIRE industrial production. Then I can go buy an SUV and blast the A/C without any guilt.
It all sounds very simple in theory. Do you realize the volume of gas that you would have to generate? How about the amount of energy that you would have to produce to power the devices? Even the staunchest proponents of global warming say that it will take hundreds of years for the cumulative effects of our ENTIRE industrial system to spoil the Earth's atmosphere. What makes everyone thing that a couple of little plants that we put on Mars could do anything?
Mars has its own cycle of precession of its rotational axis, and it's known that a long period of summer in a hemisphere tends to cut down on the amount of ice there. If the period of Mars' aphelion (where it is moving most slowly in it orbit, and thus spending the most time) now coincides with southern-hemisphere summer, you'd expect the CO2 icecap to be shrinking. Note that this would mean nothing whatsoever with respect to conditions on Earth.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
My daddy is a geologist and he says that there isn't any concrete proof about global warming.
That isn't true, Global Warming will kill us all. The Republicans are responsible. (Waves hand in manner of Jedi Mind Trick)
Thank you!
On another note, maybe this just means that the first man on mars should be Ralph Nader.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that man is the sole cause of global warming. While it is foolish to think that we don't have *any* effect on global warming, it is perhaps even more foolish to think that we are the sole cause of it.
If you take away the entirety of the world's industrial production, you're still going to have global warming long after the "industrial" gases are gone.
In discovery channel they showed how some scientists were doing research in greenland that would allow them to calculate(via layers in glacier ice) the average temperature for any given year for the past several hundred thousand years. There results were interesting. In all the temperature history they found, the ONLY time that average temperatures stayed stable for a significant amount of time is during the lifetime of man; the past few thousand years. Before that, there were constant, rapid changes up and down in average temp.
In other words, evidence that such changes can occur without the intervention of humans already exists.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
It's a pity we don't have sufficiently accurate models to be able to track and predict stuff like this, I want someone to be able to prove to me that this will lead to an atmospherically sustainable increase in the levels of CO2 (ie they won't just leak out into space), which will lead to rising temperatures, which will melt all the ice that's under the surface (obviously I'll need someone to prove that too ;) giving rise to seas, then all the little martians that have been hibernating for the last few centuries can wake up and be our friends.
;)
Ok, so it isn't going to play like that, but it would be nice
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
Does this mean we can expect the non-pro-lifers to spout:
Think of the in-animate matter, think of the in-animate matter - don't you see what we're doing there.
Peter Jennings: "Tax cuts proposed by President Bush could jeopardize funding for a NASA/EPA mission to restore ice caps on Mars."
Dan Rather: "Most scientists we talked to agreed the ice caps melted after the Mars rover landed. Have we created an SUV problem on Mars?"
Oprah: "On today's show we have Jane A. Token, NASA's Director of Space Ecology, to give us the women's perspective on the future of space exploration."
Tom Daschle: "We need the Republicans to stop blocking funding for our new program to hire Mars ice watchers as federal employees to raise the level of professionalism..."
I wrote parts of this stuff
The Sojourner Rover had not emissions. It was solar powered.
I'm shocked that a NASA scientist would make such sweeping statements and predictions based on what the article portrays as a few photographs over on year of Mars history.
They don't seem to rule out that this ice is being shifted to another location. Perhaps the other pole? Could it be settling underground in solid form? Yes, they make some comments about ravines and such, but the comments are superficial.
As I think I saw another poster mention, could it be a part of some longer event cycle? Could some other chemistry be at work, with the CO combining with something else instead of transforming to a gas?
There are lots of questions that weren't answered about the WHY and WHERE. Not to mention that this throws more evididence at the global warming issue of Earth. If Mars is warming, perhaps the Earth warming is a part of some larger issue such as a warmer period in a solar cycle. Perhaps we are moving through a warmer part of the galaxy/universe and that's making everything hotter. Perhaps the higher gaseous CO2 levels on earth are due do higher temperatures on the planet, and not the other way around.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
This is complete BS. You cannot draw such conclusions from a one year survey. You cannot even state that this year has been hotter/colder then the previous (because you have no data on the previous), let alone do long term greenhouse predictions.
Both the researcher and the journalist should be transferred to an observational station on one of the Martian poles and not come back until their brains have thawed by this 'greenhouse effect'.
Oh, no, wait - this is the media, my mistake.
There have been quite a few posts speculating on what exactly you would need to walk around on the Surface of mars should it warm up. But wouldn't the atmosphere still be too then for our fleshy-and-pressurized bodies?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
:-)
The "Kyoto Protocol" was watered down into a feel-good hack that wouldn't have done a thing to reduce CO2 emissions in the long run, for exactly the reasons you claim. What's more, it would have *increased* emissions in the medium term, as half of the industry in the unfairly restricted first world decided that this was the last draw and moved to third world countries where they could release CO2 without pesky limits (oh, and where they could be exempt from limitations on all sorts of toxic pollutants and regulations about smokestack scrubbers as well).
Even if none of these obvious consequences happened, Kyoto still would only have delayed rising CO2 emissions for a few years, barely noticeable on a graph. What, you think the exempt countries are going to stay poor and agrarian forever?
Deploy a massive solar powered heating elements which raised the ambient temperature near the CO^2 glaciers. This might have the effect of accelerating the rate of melt, or sustaining a rate of melt if the change is seasonal.
I don't know what kind of heating system you'd want... the idea of monsterous hair dryers with heating elements blowing "hot air" over the martian glaciers is an amagingly funny image to conjure, but you could also bore pipes through the glacier and run hot liquid through the pipes... and I'm sure someone with a better science background than mine could come up with more.
Honestly though, this is something that's been talked about for years. Sci-fi authors have speculated about any number of ways in which we could terra-form mars. And many of them are scientifically sound. The problem is this:
Going to mars costs money. Terra-forming mars will cost alot of money. No individual, no matter how long lived, will ever see a teraforming project through from beginning to end... and few people are willing to start such a massively expensive endeavor when there is no payoff in thier own lifetime (nor the lifetimes of the next three or four generations).
Without doubt, this announcement is good news. It gives more for Sci-fi authors (self included) to work with to write plausable fiction. Remember, the best of sci-fi authors have a good grasp of physics / biology / astronomy when writing. That's why Aasimov and Sagan and the other Grand Masters have been able to write their imortal works... because they understand science well enough, that years later we aren't laughing and saying "wow, shows how little they knew!"
Okay, I'm done with my mini rant... back to work.
If I can't see it in Lynx I'm not interested.
The interesting thing is that the levels of carbon dioxide, while increasing, are nowhere near the highest levels during human history. That credit goes to the time of the Roman empire.
How do we know? Well, for thousands of years, people have been making crimped brass buttons. When you make one of these, a little bit of air gets trapped inside. All you have to do is get one of these buttons from an archealogical dig, make sure it's really sealed, put it in a vacuum, drill a tiny hole in it, and subject the gas to spectrographic analysis.
It probably did lead to global warming. The Middle Ages, by all accounts, were astonishingly temperate. This explains a lot of things, such as the explorations of the Vikings, who come from places that nowadays seem a bit on the cold side. Back then, it wasn't so bad.
I wouldn't dismiss the concerns about global warming entirely. However, it is also worth remembering that small increases in temperature are associate with fairly large increases in plant growth. What with the depletion of the rain forests and the need to grow more food, a period of lushness may be exactly what the world needs.
I also wouldn't trust environmentalism entirely. Concern for the environment is good, but some of the efforts have been rather shortsighted and destructive. Pressure from Greenpeace caused the State of Florida (possibly others as well, but I have personal knowledge of Florida) to get rid of all the hospital incinerators. Now, infectious medical waste is buried in landfills in Alabama, unless it winds up washing on shore, due either to deliberate dumping, accidental spillage, or jettisoning of cargo required during hurricanes and the like. I don't see this as an improvement. Medical incineration was hardly a massive source of air pollution in the first place.
Ok, but I'd like to check for indigenous Martian life first before we risk killing it off by altering the climate.
Haha! You funny.
Does anyone who submits stories here HAVE to make comments like this? I keep seeing them. Is this supposed to be humor? Insightful?
Sorry for blowing like this, but this is the kind of useless comment I could do without.
What's really going on with global warming on Earth is that those darn Venutians are trying to terraform us! Nuke Venus Now!
Humourless git.
Okay, now that's interesting. Mars is warming up, and it's not like we can blame industrialization :). So perhaps the global warming we are experiencing is actually more tied to some change in the Sun. I wonder if there is any accurate information on historic temperatures on Venus? If it was a solar phenomenon, then we should be able to see a correspondingly higher temperature change on Venus.
:)
Of course this could be caused by some unknown geologic phenomena on Mars, but this does point out that there are things that can cause global warming besides dumb humans
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Here are some "cool" animations where you can see the ice caps melting. Also, here's a JPL press release which is a little more level headed than the news coverage.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I am currently reading the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson, and find many of the ideas presented in book to be very in line with some of the few published scientific papers I have read. And I think they are very well written as well.
Just curious about other authors that are considered to be very good regarding the Mars topic. Any recommendations?
Can we then launch rockets of greenhouse gasses to Mars in order to speed up the process?
If so, we could then begin to terraform the planet by sending probes with seeds or plants which can then begin growing once the temperature gets to a normal range.
Then we could start a colony and clone really cute women that love geeks and then...
whoops.
Sorry.
Got ahead of myself.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
The martians would grok it immediately and teach the atmosphere to cool down a bit.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
that's where all that aersol's been going...
Hey! I'd pay subscription to see naked plants!
I think a lot of posts discussed green house gases in general but, really, I don't think the amoutn of gas has changed all that much.
If you take a look at the orbital mechanics of Mars over hundreds of thousands and millions of year, this sort of warming naturally occurs.
It has nothing to do with the production of gases, like I said, they are already there.
But Mars, as it goes around the sun and its orbit naturally cycles over time to being closer or further away from the sun causes these warm ups.
Due to the fact that Mars has a high eccentricity factor it its elliptical orbit, these warm ups are far more pronounced than say, Earths are.
I know a lot of discussion about Global Warming has centered on Human activity, but in Mars case, it is just a cycle or phase it goes through in its orbit about the sun over large spanses of time.
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
It's probably too late in the life of this post, but has anyone considered microbial contamination from the Soviet probe landings on the moon?
In other words, it's MORE likely than not that the Soviets had poor decontamination standards for their interplanetary probes. The Russians may have inadvertently introduced "life" on Mars. Such microbial life could be linked to the increase in atmospheric density.. while they do consume C02, they could also be releasing some from the "soil".
This isn't as far fetched as the hostile conditions could make it sound. We keep finding unique life forms on this planet, some found in the darndest places... in boiling water pits, trapped in glaciers, or miles beneath the Earth's surface. The best conditions on Mars are colder and harsher than our Northern and Southern poles, but life does still exist at our poles.
Some theorize that life on Earth did not "happen" here.. that it was transplanted here my space debris (comets?). Conditions for life to begin might not exist everywhere in the universe, but once it DOES exist... it's pretty damn hardy (especially the low-complexity stuff)!
Quoting the last line "``We don't have enough data on Mars to draw any clear conclusions about climate change,'' he said. "
But this does underline the fact that continued research on Mars and other planets has some value. If Mars were seeing long-term climatic change -- e.g. warming, then there is reason to believe that what we see on Earth is not solely human in origin.
I agree with your unstated opinion that the evidence that human intervention is causing global warming has yet to be supported by a preponderance of convincing evidence. There are far too many unknowns. However (and this is why more research is important) we may not know until the question is moot.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
I read all of Red Mars, it had some strong points but in general was too long. I read Blue Mars and was forcing myself by 1/3 of the way through. I read 2 chapters of Green Mars and couldn't keep it up. Boring. Characters and action no longer believable, slow (turgid), it reads like the author was hoping to get a money machine like the Wheel of Time novels going. Needs a good old-school editor.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
The Martian Race and other writings of Gregory Benford
It's Hard SF. Much less socio-political exploring than in Kim Stanley Robinson's series.
Google search results
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Don't the hippies worship the sun? Aren't they called "sun children"? Maybe we should take away their vitamin D.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
And throw a bunch of seeds on Mars! What better way to oxygenize the planet than to populate it with a fast-growing weed! Then we can land on the planet and have as much smoke as you want! :)
Oh, and you global-warming non-believers (or believers) should watch "After the Warming" by James Burke (Connections guy). I can't believe how many ignorant Slashdotters we have, who can't believe that us "innocent" humans would be destroying the planet.
Zodiac Survey
A mass melting might release enough C02 to jump start the warming process and trigger global warming on mars. A few nukes might just do the trick.
...which explains why it's 800 degrees in the shade.
Next...
This is proof that there's life on Mars. Everyone knows the real cause of global warming is farting cows! There must be cows on Mars. BTW, there also used to be vast herds on Venus, standing around cuttin the cheese. You can see the result.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This should be glaringly obvious, but the author clearly didn't want the facts to get in the way of a good story.
1) This happens every year anyway. The martian atmosphere gets thicker every year as a result of its less-than-circular orbit. Every year, there are times when Mars is closer to the sun than the rest of the year, which allows the planet to absorb more solar energy, melting more of the carbon dioxide in the ice caps and adding to the atmosphere. This might actually snowball if it weren't for the fact that there are other times of the year where the CO2 starts to freeze out, snowballing in the other direction.
2) While it might be exciting and all that in a million years, you *might* not need a spacesuit to walk on the surface of mars, more than likely it's just a statistical anomaly because it was slightly warmer this year than last. As if we never see that sort of thing on earth or anything. The author saves this little tidbit of information for last, because otherwise there's not much of a story here at all. (and of course, there really isn't.)
3) This is, if anything, simply proof that some years the sun is hotter than others, which might be a much easier explanation for an increase in the average surface temperature of the earth in recent years over the theory that the media likes to push that we're all to blame. The media likes this theory simply because scaring people is good for business. As in this article, it's not the actual facts that matter as much as an exciting story.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
(I am not a scientist)
If global warming is going on in two different planets, doesn't this show at least in a small part that humans are not responsible for {some|most|all} global warming? We obviously have nothing to do with Mars' warming trend, couldn't it just be some type of solar phenomenon?
I believe that we help global warming along, but we're in no way responsible for it. Furthermore, I highly doubt there is a "point of no return" like some people are claiming... There may be chaotic weather, and stuff, but the great thing about any world is that it'll go in cycles, and no matter what we do, it'll keep cycling...
We make it too hot, the polar ice caps start to melt. Water level rises, gets hotter, starts to evaporate more quickly, making the atmosphere heavier, and helping to block out more of the sun's energy, cooling the world... Folks, in my mind, we migh be heading towards an ice age, rather than a warm age(what are they called)...
Of course this is all my opinion,
Ex
While solar activity seems to have an effect on the several centuries time scale, don't forget also the Milankovich cycle! At least for the ice ages on Earth, it is very significant.
It is the interaction of the precession of the Earth's axis of rotation (tilted some 23 degrees) and the regression of the semi-major axis of the Earth orbital ellipsoid, to produce variations in effective insolation that can be pretty precisely computed by astronomers.
I wonder how this works on Mars? There is no (big) moon there, so precession is likely to be slow. But of course on the other hand, the Mars orbit is much, much more elliptical than that of the Earth.
Time scales for this would be tens of thousands of years.
Perhaps the explanation by an earlier poster that the observed disappearance of CO2 on Mars would be an interannual (i.e. several years time scale) variation, makes more sense.
Wow. A whole slew of fallacies all in one sentence.
It can remove cheap energy and transportation sources for billions of people, maintaining or increasing rates of poverty and starvation around the globe.
Burning fossil fuels isn't cheap. At best, you'll notice that the price of gasoline is pretty high per unit of energy obtained. Also, burning gasoline is hardly the most efficient method of extracting the energy from it. And burning it is also not the most efficient method of changing the energy into something useful. Most of the energy contained in gasoline is wasted as heat. As an added bonus, the mining, extraction, and refining of gasoline from petroleum is a complicated and expensive process.
The machines that allow us to exploit the energy released by burning gasoline are also not cheap. In fact, they are horribly expensive. When you bought your last car, did you already have the money you needed in the bank, or did you have to borrow that money? And when you take into consideration that you belong to the wealthiest 10% of the world's population, where does that leave the other 90%? If you didn't have the cash to buy this piece of machinery, what does that mean for everyone else?
I have news for you. We've had fossil fuels for a "cheap" source of energy for the past 150 years, and it hasn't done the world's poor a good goddamn bit of good. If anything, it's perpetuated empires that have stomped the world's poor into the dust.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
> Or perhaps it's evidence that climates will undergo changes without American SUVs. :-)
They sure do. And people do suffer genetic damage and contract cancer also without Chernobyl or atmospheric testing -- it's just added on top of the natural background due to crustal minerals and cosmic radiation.
Climatic change is generally deleterious. Fertile valleys going desert lose their usefulness to the settled population, and while desert becomes fertile elsewhere, that doesn't help. (It's a bit like the guy that explained to the officer that while he had indeed driven against red, he had also on a number of occasions stopped for green
Good reason to err on the side of caution.
I read Red Mars, and kinda liked it. Slow paced and unlikely, sure, but all in all good. But I couldn't get more than 10 pages into Green Mars before the nutty feminist communist society made me chuck the books out.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Because of course, it's not a natural phenomenon, huh?
Okay, I'm going to be going half way off topic so mod me if you must.
The issue I'm going to deal with pertains to what is Global Warming and what humans have to do with it.
Many people lately, mostly hardcore environmentalists and unlearned individuals have lumped our industrialized ways and its byproducts as what causes Global Warming. This is not the case. Industrialization has nothing to do with what Global Warming is. I will explain.
For starters, Global Warming is a climatic effect that deals with how our planet traps energy from the sun and keeps us warm. (in the very basic sense) Various gasses and particles in our atmosphere are what help the effect. The main contributers being CO2 and 'dust' particles. When you remove 'man' from the model and work with the Global Warming model, it can be shown to be a very represenative model of how one aspect of our climate works. The base model of Global Warming, as a theory, is fairly well rooted.
The more recent definition of Global Warming has evolved into something far more than what it really is. Extremists have taken a sound model and twisted it into something that they can 'fear monger' with. The phrase 'Global Warming' implies warming, but that isn't always the case in the Global Warming model. Now it includes everything from industrial waste, power plants, and SUV's.
The real puzzle isn't whether Global Warming as a theory is true, but rather what is the effect on the Global warming model by man? As far as we know so far, we NEED Global Warming. Without it we would be living far colder than the Eskimos.
So please, before you try and argue that Global Warming is bad or that we need to stop it, PLEASE or PLEASE figure out what the hell it is first. Hint, it usually isn't what your favorite movie star says it is.
This is all good fun, but the kind of atmosphere we need couldn't exist on Mars unless it had a stronger magnetic field, similar to the one we have here. Without a magentic field, comsic rays would make the 03 reaction rate increase dramatically (203 -> 302). This in turn would let cosmic and solar radiation "burn" the surface of the planet. While we could live in such an environment if we were constantly shielded, plant life would probably have to evolve a bit more before it could survive (but I'm no biologist).
There's a small detail that they neglected to mention. Mars is constantly loosing what atmosphere it does have. Mars masses about 1/3 of the Earth. At this low density, a molten core cannot exist for a long period of time after formation (there is radioactive decay, which will melt it for a brief time). Without this molten core, there isn't a planetary magnetosphere. This allows the solar wind to literally blow away the Martian atmosphere. Mars looses somewhere around two tons of atmosphere a day. So yeah, maybe the caps are melting.... but it's still getting blown away. As time goes on, Mars will become increasingly similar to bodies such as mercury and the moon, and less like the Earth.
Jesus fucking crow.
It's OBVIOUSLY way too easy to get moderator status. The above post was not only ON TOPIC, it was insightful, presenting related information most people wouldn't have thought of.
Nothing in the post was flamebait (not even sarcastic).
I guess Commander Taco is too busy with AnimeFu to care how the trolls have infiltrated the moderation system.
Whatever happened to the days of BBS's, when you could hunt down an annoying motherfucker and beat his lights in?
Forgive me, but I thought that I was responding to the person who had originally replied. I was not paying attention and didn't realize that a different individual had picked up the banner. I have attributed some statements to you and that was not intended. If you recognize something that does not apply to you, please ignore it.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I spoke with Uncle Isaac on several occasions regarding his favorite stock pick, MSFT. He explained that from day one, he knew that Microsoft was one of the most nimble companies that ever existed. Pointing out their rapid turnaround in the browser wars and in internet integration, he said that with billg at the helm, Microsoft would always prosper.
"What about .Net," I asked. "Do you really expect that thing to
succeed?"
".Net will put Microsoft in a position more powerful than any other company in the nation." When I pressed for details, he explained what Microsoft was planning to do:
Passport, in fact, is going to be marketed to web site owners. Sure, personal information is sometimes fun to have, but that isn't the main attraction. Microsoft plans to offer Passport up as a system to facilitate micropayments. They are targeting the owners of the many unprofitable information sites that are being propped up by venture capital (and pathetically meager ad revenues) today. This will force users to use Passport and pay for the information they receive off the web, with Microsoft taking a cut every time. Microsoft will become the largest middleman in the world, and multinational banks will look on in envy.
As a technical matter, this isn't a very difficult thing to do, but it needs a strong, reliable company with a good name, like Microsoft, to hold it up and to fund it during tough times. Microsoft has shown itself to be willing to subsidize many unprofitable ventures (such as IE and Bob) in order to attain a stronger position in the market, so it should come as no surprise that Passport will work the same way.
And, after Passport has taken over, there will be no more need for Linux/Apache on commercial sites. Microsoft can't compete with us directly, so they will destroy our market share by making the economics favor their product. We can give them Free software but Microsoft can sell them a big profit.
We, as the open source community, need to come together to stop this plan dead in its tracks. We can't rely on our government to do it for us, so we need to innovate and find ways to stop Microsoft. Maybe a bunch of open source hackers can get together and start producing macro virii and IIS worms nonstop, so that users are more aware of the poor security afforded by Microsoft products and services. Perhaps frequent DDoS attacks on Passport-compliant web sites are in order. Or maybe something completely different. Either way, we need to do something, so that Microsoft does not use Passport to take the internet away from us.
df
My 396SS Chevelle only gets 9 mpg most of the time ;)
I like how there is no thermostat on the A/C... Last time I measured the temp, when I was charging it, it was a cooool 27 degrees f.
When Mt. Pinatubo erupted, more greenhouse gasses spewed into the air then all the green-house gasses man has produced in all of man-kind... And the Earth is still here after how many eruptions? We are not really affecting the earth as much as people say we are. And our fixes are not really fixing anything...
Besides, scientists can't even predict the weather next week, let alone next millenia... For the longest time, scientists in the 70's thought we were on a cooling trend heading for an ice age... Now all of a sudden we are on a warming trend? But aren't emissions output from the 80's and 90's make the 50s'-70's look like a piece of coal?
Besides, when the Earth first formed the atmosphere was like all C0/C02/and other noxious gasses. The earth managed to fix itself just fine, so I doubt the earth wouldn't be able to handle us.
When I was in college taking astronomy, they said many many scientists consider this the REAL reason for the cool-down/ice-age periods...
And as the previous poster said, we simply do not know the true answer, and probably never will. There are too many variables, and we do not understand the universe. If we did, einstein's theories would be laws/postulates, not theorems. And there would be one set of "laws of physics", not the "classical newtonian" physics and the "throw out the door everything you know about physics when dealing with Quantum Mechanics" Physics...
Rather than dropping rocky asteroids onto the Martian surface, which would have a pretty uncontrolled effect on the surface, I think it might be more effective to throw comets into shallow, grazing trajectories. They'd disintegrate in the atmosphere, contributing lots of heat along with their water. I suggest comets rather than the icy bodies around Saturn because they're already moving, so you don't need to provide the energy for acceleration, just that required to nudge their orbit to inersect with Mars. Also, you can pick the large, fast-moving comets, to get the biggest kinetic bang possible.
Space elevators need more advances in materials science before they'll become pratical.
Cyanobacteria as they currently exist wouldn't be able to handle the cold and dessication. There are various forms of mosses and lichens that survive in Antarctica, but only because they spend the winter as spores, and live in snowless areas that actually warm up a bit in the summer. With continuous bright sunshine on dark colored rock in sheltered valleys, the microclimate gets warm enough that the plants get access to liquid water and can actually survive, grow and reproduce. Is there anyplace like that on Mars, even part of the year? I don't know, but I'd tend to doubt it.
However, you could set up permanent glasshouses, insulated and filled a bit of water, dark rock and some hardy lichens. Make the dome out of UV-tolerant glass and sit it out in the sun, a little home away from home. Put a gas permiable (but not water permiable) film on it, engineered to regulate the oxygen and carbon dioxide permiability rates, and I might envision this as a little oxygen factory, driven by the weak Martian sunlight, releasing the O2 as it gets generated and drawing in fresh CO2 from the surrounding environment. Set up a factory to make these out of local materials, and I could see that after a couple of hundred thousand of these are in place, you'd start to see some increase in the O2 partial pressure.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain