Slashdot Mirror
The Mystery of Saturn's Atmosphere
eldavojohn writes "Scientists are being forced to rethink theories on why Saturn's upper atmospheric temperature is hotter than can be explained by absorbed sunlight. 'This unexplained "energy crisis" represents a major gap in our understanding of these planets' atmospheres,' the scientists write. 'We need to re-examine our basic assumptions about planetary atmospheres and what causes the observed heating.'"
> But, we understand ours .
If you read the article you'll find that "these planets" refers to the gas giants. It's a specific phenomenon with as-yet unknown causes, not a general problem with understanding atmospheres.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Easy. It must be all the SUV's.
The corona of the sun is hotter than the surface or the core. Maybe they can examine the energies at work in the stellar phenomenon, as the gas giants are often referred to as "failed stars."
FairTax baby!
> Fisty Prost has a direct relation to weather patterns on celestial bodies.
No, you're thinking of frosty pist.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Actually, we STILL do not fully understand ours as of yet.
Besides, the high tempuratures on Saturn can be explained easily, Star Jones unleashed massive anal born methane attacks on the planet while doing non-stop Barrel Rolls fueled by the only food that could survive the long trip or a nuclear winter, Twinkies.
The Saturnians haven't invented Slashdot technology yet, so all their bull sessions generate high-energy hot air rather than low energy moderation packets.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm not exactly sure how things like greenhouse gases filter into this problem. Saturn has a cloudtop temperature of about 90K which means that it isn't going to be emitting much heat by Stefan's law which depends on the fourth power of temperature. But then again, Saturn only receives about 1% of the sunlight intensity that we get so it is not light we are shining a bright flashlight on an icecube--it is more like we are shining an extremely dim flashlight on an icecube which amplifies the importance of changes in things like greenhouse gases and emissivity.
One of the things that we can't ignore is the affect of spontaneous radioactive decay. If Saturn is just a ball of gas then it probably won't have very many heavy elements that can decay over time (heavy supernova remnants with half-lives in the billions of years like uranium). But if Saturn has a large hidden rocky core then it is certainly reasonable for it to have significant heat generation which would be insulated by the gases. Of course this is well known since it is what keeps the Earth warm (with the crust to insulate it from space).
If you study gas giants and you find out that your models don't match observations, it isn't that extreme to call it a crisis.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So is this the real reason why Sun Ra came to Earth?
"I still wonder why so many put so much faith in our gloabal warming prediction when our ablity to predict anything is rather poor."
Not only prediction, the prediction is the result of historical fact:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
Note that such an increase in temperature in such a small period of time has nothing to do with our understanding of Ice Ages, the athmosphere of gas giants, the effects of year-long oil industry propaganda and campaign funding, or the weather forecast on Fox.
You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change.
You don't seem to understand the chaos theory you rely on, especially the difference between predicting small-scale events and long-term trends. The difference between weather and climate has been beaten to death in this forum, so I'll just limit my commentary to stating that your demand for a good thirty day forecast strikes me as irrelevant.
You say that climate is always changing, and that's true. But you're only arguing against a rather naive and simplistic view that the environment is entirely static, which no informed person on any side of the global warming debate shares (read: strawman). Having said that, it's clear that we've had about ten thousand years of relative stability, followed by a century of abrupt warming that coincides with mankind pumping billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. While certainly there is such a thing as coincidence, no alternative explanation can compete with the anthropogenic theory. Solar forcing is often proposed, but it only manages to account for a small fraction of the total.
Scientists know full well that they're dealing with a chaotic system when they're looking at the climate. But the climate has been reasonably stable over recent history, and that stability has been very good for human activity. Chaotic systems often fall into regions of stability, but they can be knocked out by external influences (say, pouring billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere). So if we know nothing else about the climate (as you want to lead us to believe) that only leads us to conclude that we're better off not messing with it so brazenly, because we don't know where it will end up or how easy it will be to adapt to the new conditions.
You want to convince us that "real science" doesn't do consensus, and that the media has been painting a false picture of emerging scientific agreement. I would argue the opposite: that the consensus among active researchers is far stronger than the media usually portrays. Two things are happening here. First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided, so if journalists believe that there might be two sides to the issue, they usually try to at least pay lip service to both. Second, entrenched industrial interests take advantage of this by paying a small, incestuous group of climate skeptics and policy organizations to cast doubt on the reality of global warming, its human origins, and the need to take political action to counter it.
In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming, and I would be skeptical of claims of robust disagreement. Industry forces have certainly tried to manufacture the illusion of deep disagreement in the past.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!