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Sun May Be Warming Both Earth and Mars
MCraigW writes "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes might have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause. Mars, it appears, has also been experiencing milder temperatures in recent years. In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide 'ice caps' near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."
1) The Earth has been warmer than it is now before! We are not seeing temperatures outside the spectrum of nature.
2) CO2 levels are not high now. There was an article in Scientific American which documented this, CO2 over the last 2 million years has fluctuated between ~200ppm and ~1400ppm. Right now we are at about 300ppm.
3) The Sun and the Orbit of the Earth both fluctuate and are beyond our control and both influence the climate much more than anything we could possibly do. (This is mentioned though not explored in the latest IPCC report, but it is a known fact and the cause of ice ages and temperate ages in the past)
4) The Earth has been through many cycles of ice age and temperate age all before we were here.
5) The last temperate age melted almost all of the polar ice and caused sea levels to rise 4-6 meters this was 125000 years ago. It is safe to assume it will happen again (with our without us). (This data was specifically pulled from the IPCC report, your 650000 year comment is obviously false even according to your supporters).
6) We are still coming out of the last ice age, and we haven't seen temperatures comparable to the last temperate age yet, so we can easily assume temperatures still need to go up before the cycle starts again.
I find your thesis incorrect. I am quick to look at the historical record to debunk global warming. Based on the historical data we are no where close to an "abnormal" state. I think that global warming supporters are quick to look at the last 50-100 years and state that obviously we are destroying the planet. I don't buy it. I think that 50 years is nothing compared to the millions of years the Earth has been here. I think it is incredibly short sighted. Looking back 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years only supports the fact that current temperatures, sea levels, etc are not abnormal. It even supports that the CO2 concentration is not abnormal.
In saying this I hope you don't think I'm some son of an oil man. I hate fossil fuels. I hate oil companies. I would love to drive an electric car, have solar panels on my roof and not pay the electric co. Unfortunately, what's going to happen is the global warming clan are going to get all sorts of subsidies passed for the oil companies et al to "research" alternative energy sources. Research which I am going to have to pay for with tax dollars. Tax dollars I could have spent on a solar array for my roof.
Actually the sun is older than once thought. We were always told we had 4.5 billion years before the sun died. While that is probably true as the sun burns more fuel it will burn hotter and hotter. In a scant 1 million years the mean temp on earth could be around 160 degrees. I you look over the history of the earth it has been a big snowball, a big desert with 140 degree temps. No oxygen, so much oxygen that it made life that can't live in the oxygen levels we have had for the last 300 million years.
The earth will survive. We might not. Nearly all the creatures that have every lived have been wiped out long before we showed up for our very short stint, so far, as the top monkey.
If they are so good at predicting long term weather trends how come they can't get the weather next week correct?