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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
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!
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
So if you think that you know better than the vast majority of climatologists, perhaps you can give us your scientific evidence? For a start, perhaps you could tell us how much CO2 we would need to significantly affect the world temperature compare d to what we produce now.
Hell, even Bush accepts that global warming is a fact.
Yes, I do realise you're just trolling, but some half-asleep moderator is going to give you a +1 Insightful any minute now.
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.
I see another problem. :)
The article mentioned that this changing is happening rapidly. Well, its had the past few eons to make this change. Why now? And what makes anyone think this will be permanant? The only thing that doesn't change is change itself. I find it highly unlikely that this will give Earthlings the chance to start setting up trailerparks around Olympus Mons. I find much more likely that any change will just give us another obstacle to colonizing rather than giving us an advantage.
I'd give this argument more thought, but I've got work to do.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
Well, global warming might be kicking in in Boston, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like it in Saskatoon (it was -27 C last night). But that's what I get for living in Canada...On the upside, getting up at the crack of dawn isn't so hard when dawn comes at 9am.
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?
One of the effects of global warming is predicted to be a global destabilization of weather systems. More extreme temperatures in both directions are expected as the global average temperature rises.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
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
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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.
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.
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
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