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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.'"
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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.
Scientists renamed Uranus years ago to rid the earth of that stupid joke once and for all. Now it's called Urectum! Probes also work with Urectum.
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!
What does diatomic Cobalt have to do with anything?
Burn the land and boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me!
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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:[.]