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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."
Take THAT hippie environmentalist tree huggers! I'm gonna go set a pile of styrofoam on fire in celebration.
We must destroy the sun!
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Let's suppose that the orbit alteration is not the case. Wouldn't it still make sense to prepare for the worst? Why not stop CO2 emissions, we're better off slowing CO2 output and being wrong about global warming than we are heating up the planet with CO2 and being wrong about not having a human global climate impact.
It is common knowledge that the sun goes through cycles in which its output is increased thereby increasing the the solar radiation that strikes its planets. However we are still putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere which act to trap the solar radiation on the Earth. No reputable scientist will claim that every fraction of a degree in temperature increase is due to human influence on our atmosphere but they do know that the methane and carbon dioxide that we put continually pump into the atmosphere acts as a solar trap and can't help but raise the overall temperature of the planet.
When the temperature hits 200 F in a couple of years, we will be glad to know we didn't cause it.
Either way, no way I'm giving back my Oscar! -Al
Ya but what changes? Can we measure said changes?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there are solar physicists around the world observing every measurable characteristic of the sun (that we can measure from here) all the time. Seems a bit silly to infer what's going on with the sun by looking at Mars instead of the sun itself. Unless some solar observations back this up, this'll probably be the last we hear of it.
There are two questions still open for debate --
Are humans a significant cause of the increase in temperature?
Are steps to mitigate the human effect on temperature worth taking?
I believe the answers are yes and yes, but we don't have to be the primary cause to make it worthwhile to reduce our carbon emissions.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
It must be those SUVs NASA is operating on Mars that is the cause of the temperature rise...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Unfortunately, I just lost my mod points by replying to a previous comment in this thread. But this is not a troll; there are plenty of scientists observing the sun directly, whereas we know bugger all about the weather patterns on mars. If there were significant changes happening to the sun, we would already know about it. Anyway, does the source of global warming actually matter much?
The bottom line is the correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature is well known (you can reproduce it in a simple lab experiment), so does it actually matter, in the end, what the source of warming is, if we aleady know how to prevent it? That is, even if the recent increases in temperature are due to some other cause, we know for sure we could reduce the effect by reducing human output of greenhouse gases (exactly how much we can reduce it by, is another question...).
Searching through for his previous works he has never published anything on climatology. This would be make his speculations well outside his field of study. Now, being a physicist myself I know that knowing physics gives you better understanding many other things. But, his one article doesn't get precedence over the mounds and mounds of other published work by people in the fields of climatology, environmental sciences, atmospheric sciences, etc. who are considered experts and are well published. If anything he might just be mentioning global warming to get money, as some /.'ers assumed about the deep sea temperature oddities article a while ago. Both sides can do it you know :).
Patrik
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Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
Probably just that correlation doesn't imply causation. There's a strong (negative) correlation between the number of pirates plying the seas and global warming, too, but that doesn't mean the solution to global warming is to increase piracy on the high seas.
...read page two of that article. Abdussamatov is a nutcase, and neither recent overall warming of Mars nor any attribution to increased solar output are serious scientifc propositions.
Stephan
Abdussamatov is a nutcase,
Why do you say that? Does he hurl vitriolic condemnations at people who disagree with him? Does he try to shout them down, or demand that their funding be cut off?
BTW, you fulfilled my expectation that there would be an ad-hominem directed at the researcher in question within the first ten replies.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The worst case scenario according to IPCC is only a 1 inch sea level rise in 100 years, how is that going to cause a 20% drop in GDP?
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? type=worldNews&storyID=2007-02-02T212335Z_01_NOOTR _RTRJONC_0_India-286068-7.xml
No, it's not. They're predicting 4-30, and they've been widely criticised for being too conservative on the issue - ignoring unusually fast melting in Antarctica and Greenland, for one thing.
Sure if sea levels rise 6m it will displace quite a few people, but I still don't think it would cause that much upheaval.
10% of Bangladesh would be under water with a 1 meter sea rise. That's about 15 million refugees in one nation alone, and you can be sure Bangladesh can't afford to pay 10% of their population's land just to let it get eaten up by the ocean.
A 6 metre sea rise would also destroy Miami and a number of other major cities on the East Coast of the US. We're talking about pretty huge repercussions with that big of a sea rise.
The Stern report isn't just pulling numbers out of their asses.
As far as the asteroid is concerned what would your recommendation be?
You're missing my point. The OP stated that the Earth had seen much higher CO2 in the distant past. My point is that just because it has happened previously doesn't mean it'd be fine if it happened again - after all, the Earth started up molten and airless, but that wouldn't be conducive to human survival today.
That is what you environmentalists don't get, you never factor in risk/reward
Again, read the Stern report. For a 1% cost of GDP we protect 10-20% of GDP. How is that not factoring in risk and reward?
On the CO2 front I guess Scientific American got it wrong then I'm just quoting their article verbatim... So either they are lying, or you are, but whatever.
If you have the article in front of you to quote from, surely you can provide a citation?
I'm reasonably sure I'm not lying, and so is NOAA: Vostok's 420,000 years of data and EPICA's 650,000 years of data, for your perusal
The IPCC did not state anywhere any sort of statistical probability as you state.
http://www.google.com/search?q=IPCC+90%25+certain
" The scientists said it was "very likely" -- or more than 90 percent probable -- that human activities led by burning fossil fuels explained most of the warming in the past 50 years.
That is a toughening from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) last report in 2001, which judged a link as "likely", or 66 percent probable." - http://in.today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx
How does that not support my statement, quoted as follows: "there's a 90% certainty that human activity is causing warming at least in part"?
I don't see #1 - the 60% chance figure - in the 2006 IPCC report. Sure you're not looking at the 2001 report?
Christ, man. This is not POLITICS or ETHICS or anything where OPINIONS is all that counts. This is SCIENCE.
I'll call a man crazy if he disagrees that the Earth orbits the sun, and it is not just because he disagrees with my "opinion".
That's the thing about science; it's not about `truth', it's about progressively more accurate approximations of reality. For a lot of cases, a fairly coarse approximation is all that is required; Newtonian mechanics is valid for all of the situations 99% of people will find themselves in. If you are on the leading edge of science, however, then relying on superseded approximations is a mistake.
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