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Venus' Stop/Start History Highlighted By Probe
An anonymous reader writes "Science Daily reports on scientific findings from the ESA's Venus Express probe. The device, which is even now orbiting Earth's sister planet, is feeding back data hinting at Venus' origins. Initially, the probe has found, the planet evolved far too quickly. As a result Venus' liquid oceans were boiled away. With those gone, the planet's development stalled and ceased. 'They may have started out looking very much the same,' said Professor Taylor, 'but increasingly we have evidence that Venus lost most of its water and Earth lost most of its atmospheric carbon dioxide ... The interesting thing is that the physics is the same in both cases. The great achievement of Venus Express is that it is putting the climatic behaviour of both planets into a common framework of understanding.'"
The words "probe" and "uranius" have now been officially put together in one post, and the subject need not come up again.Please mod this post down.
I Am the Cheese: Taking one for the team since 2008.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
relevent
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
To say that this puts "the climatic behaviour of both planets into a common framework of understanding" is gross exaggeration to the point of being just so much hogwash.
First, we do not even understand Earth's climate very well yet. And we live there. Duh.
Second, the two planets are at vastly disparate distances from the sun. Extrapolation from one to the other -- even today -- could be dangerous to one's career.
Add the fact that we know that they are geologically and chemically different. And there are more points I could make if I wanted to take the time.
You end up with one hell of a lot less real "comparison" or "similarity" than this implies. Even if all the assumptions about Venus were correct (extremely unlikely), we haven't even figured out how our own planet works yet, so I don't see how anyone could pretend to be predicting how climates have / had changed over the last couple of thousand years on Venus. I will stop short of calling this complete bullshit, but to say that I am skeptical is an understatement.
Venus overspent its budget? Would explain one or two things.
I record my sleeptalking
Does this mean Global Warming discussions will be replaced by Global Boiling? Even greater headlines!
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Global warming is a cube.
What does diatomic Cobalt have to do with anything?
Burn the land and boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me!
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Another huge difference is the the Earth has a companion that puts significant stresses on the crust and atmosphere through tidal forces. Not only that, but Venus' slower rotational period means there's less stress from solar tides as well. Surely this would have some effect on the rigidity of the crust, yes no?
I don't understand why people seem to use the label "climate change" against the people who warn against it. Perhaps, indeed, the "global warming" movement of yesteryear has changed its terminology to "climate change", but why would that discredit them? To me, it seems that "climate change" is simply a better term. After all, if we manage to wipe ourselves out by causing climate change, it won't matter if it was because we made it too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, or too radcliffy.
The real question isn't wether you like the "climate change" doomsayers or the words they use. The real question is if our activities are harming the environment to the extent that we should be worried about it, and, if so, what we can do to improve things. Launching ad hominems at the people who are pointing out a potential threat doesn't do anything to make the world a better place. What we need is more awareness and less bias. In the meantime, I will work on reducing the emissions I cause, not just to be on the safe side, but also because I think it is a fun challenge. I don't _know_ the truth, so I won't condemn you for driving an SUV or using incandescent light bulbs if you are so inclined, but I will be angry with you for insulting the people who are trying to warn you, especially if it turns out they were right.
Incidentally, I think that the effects of global warming are much more obvious in other aspects of the climate than in average temperature; for example, a barely noticeable increase of a few degrees in average temperature could bring about a much stronger increase in rain and storms. But that's just what I think, based on things I heard, so don't take my word for it. Do your own research...and not just to find publications that agree with you, but to actually find out the truth. I think you will find that the issue is much more complex than "only idiots believe in climate change" or "only idiots deny climate change".
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Well, as apparently Venus ran further ahead in planetary evolution by boiling its oceans, obviously Earth is way behind and has a lot of catching up to do. Our planet will have to evolve further and get its oceans boiled away, rather than stagnating as it has.
They'll be cooler this year from effects of La Nina. It won't reverse the general warming trend, globally.
It's called Global Climate Change because not everywhere will get warmer. Many places (Northern Europe) could get colder. Some places will get wetter, others dryer. The weather systems might get far more random in places as well.
However idiots who watched some oil funded programme on TV will now declare themselves experts on the subject and say it's bunkum. Right. Really. Your limited hours of funded popular science really make your opinion worth more than thousands of people who have spent years and decades working on this stuff?
Of course cleaning up emissions will do more than potentially slow down this global climate change (arguably man's effect is one of accelerating change, which may result in more momentum and thus higher highs ultimately), it will make the air nicer to breathe, day in, day out. This is a far better benefit. If it wasn't for this, I'd rather the money was spent on dealing with the inevitable, rather than delaying it.
Something can't evolve too quickly. "Too Quickly" is not compatible with the concept of evolution.
This doubled energy input probably is a really huge factor to the whole problem.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
After reading the BBC article that postulated the same as you do above, a friend of mine got very fired up. He explained it in this way:
The year 1998 was a statistical anomaly based off the strong El Nino currents that year. When looking at the temperature trends surrounding 1998, there is a nice best fit line to go through them. 1998 is quite far above that best fit line for the rest of the years. Thus the statement 'temps haven't risen in the last 10 years' is numerically true (1998 was hotter than this year), it does not change the fact that there is an underlying trend of temperatures upwards over the last 20 years.
That being said - he strongly believes in GW/CC. I am unsure as to the cause of the data points, but think that we should examine them as an interesting trend in our environment.
The largest problem that those who are trying to promote awareness of global warming need to start combating is to use the concept as the boogy man of every possible problem that is afflicting mankind.
Insect eating bat dying in mass number? Global Warming.
Hurricanes increasing in power and frequence? Global Warming.
Hot summers? Global Warming.
Powerful winter blizzards? Global Warming.
Missing girl? Global Warming.
Price of gasoline rising? Global Warming.
Earthquakes in strange places? Global Warming.
Republicans take control of congress? Global Warming.
Commander Taco didn't win a bet last night? Global Warming.
I could go on and on, but this is getting to the point that every "disaster" and nearly every minor problem is coached on the premise that global warming or climate change (take your choice here if you want to be politically correct) is the source of all of these ills.
Please, give it a break. If you can legitimately claim that climate change is responsible for certain changes, such as receding glaciers or measurable rises in ocean levels (I haven't seen that yet at all), I might put a little more authority on the study. But it is used far too often that it makes a mockery out of legitimate climatological studies that are trying to identify potential causes of concern.
For myself, I am convinced that there is a general global warming of the environment. I'm still undecided in terms of anthroprogenic causes, with a strong leaning to natural causes instead even though I will admit some impact by modern industrialize society on a local basis. It is a big world we live in after all.
One interesting term that I've heard that is neither climate change or global warming is "Venusforming" as a counter-point to "Terraforming". In other words, the process of making our world more Venus-like instead of trying to figure out how to make Venus more Earth-like. Frankly, I think turning the Earth into a geological/environmental twin of Venus would be just as difficult as turning Venus into something like the Earth, but then again either is a complicated process.
The problem with the global cooling argument is that there was not organized and deliberate government policy (at least anything that had teeth) that was established to deal with global cooling. It was people on the periphery of science that were complaining about that issue at the time, and generally not taken seriously in terms of anything people had to do. It was more a general worry that since ice ages (periods of massive glaciation in the northern hemisphere) were very common in the past, that they may be common in the future and perhaps in the near future.
That concern still should be there, and frankly we are at a near peak in terms of how warm the Earth's environment is at the moment for a variety of reasons. A 10 degree rise in temperatures might even be healthier economically speaking than a 10 degree drop in temperatures across the globe. Certainly a return of mile deep glaciers in the middle of North America would not only damage productive farmland but also force mass migration of millions of people... and that would only be the beginning.
The climate does change, and changes have been noted in even historical times. Northern Africa was considered the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, yet today its productivity in terms of crop production barely feeds itself. Greenland was a major Viking colony with enough people to support a full Catholic dioceses (not just an ordinary parish), but everybody moved out due to crops dying and the local climate being too cold to support a European model of agriculture and community building. Some people of European decent have return to Greenland, but even today it doesn't support nearly so large of a population as it did in the 1200's. I could use other historical examples, but the point is that change happens, so deal with it. Survival of species depends on their ability to cope with changes to their environment, and some succeed and others fail. That is called evolution.
I blame the Solar-System economy, Free-Trade agreements and open borders. If only the planets were farther apart or someone had built a fence... (Ya, I'm talking to you Mars.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Well, from a Venusian's perspective, the Earth evolved far too much. Leaving all those tepid sticky areas out beyond the Sun's cleansing rays has left the Earth to rot, infested with all kinds of vermin. Some of which just dirty the place up even more, and then get nosy, ogling the neighbors and insulting their tidy nearby neighborhoods.
That review of Venus was clearly written by an Earthling real estate agent.
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make install -not war
One thing that has always bothered me is the question as to why Venus rotates in a retrograde manner (east to west) around its own axis. My personal idea, from the little amount of very inconclusive data available on this on the web, is that there must have been some cataclysmic collision early in Venus' history. One wonders if Venus had had a normal, and faster rotation, if it would have developed differently?
Seems like a fairly critical point - yet it also seems like you are being deliberately vague about your sources.
There could be more points but the important thing is that we don't have this stuff completely figured out and something needs to be looked into, studied, adapted from the current model, explained in detail or otherwise accounted for beside a cooling anomaly that was sure to be present in previous years when the average is supposed to have been cooler.
The late stages of rocky planet formation are now known to be extremely violent, involving collisions of mars-sized bodies in the final accretion of a body the size of Earth or Venus. The exact collision vector can have a huge impact on the final body's rotational inertia, and can even heave a planet-sized hunk of debris like our own Moon into orbit.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Typical Earth-centric chauvanism. Venus isn't developmentally challenged, it *meant* to turn out that way.
I bow to your superior sense of satire.
Perfect example of the benefits of space exploration in understanding our own planet.
To its [rare] credit most NASA probes post their raw and processed data on the web almost immediately. There are over 200,000 Mars Rover pictures. ESA posts little of its data and mostly these are for press releases. "Out of sight, out of mind"
"Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down."
You mean allegations that research funded by the energy industry is somehow biased, as opposed to research funded by politicians hoping to get elected on a wave of paranoia?
Truth that there was Global Cooling, then Global Warming, then Climate Change?
Truth that Climate Change is seen as a mechanism to funnel money from rich countries to poor ones? Didn't watch the Bali conference too closely, did you?
Yes, some people actually honestly disagree with the mantra and greed that fuels it.