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Mars Is Coming Out Of An Ice Age (reuters.com)
Taco Cowboy quotes a report from Reuters: An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age that is part of an ongoing cycle of climate change, scientists said on Thursday. Using images taken by satellites orbiting Mars, the researchers determined that about 20,872 cubic miles (87,000 cubic km) of ice has accumulated at its poles since the end of the ice age, mostly in the northern polar cap. Scientists are keenly interested in piecing together the climate history of Mars, which contains strong evidence that oceans and lakes once pooled on its surface, bolstering the prospects for life. From the perspective of an Earthling, every day on Mars may feel like an ice age. According to NASA, temperatures on Mars may hit a high at noon at the equator in the summer of roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), or a low of about minus-225 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-153 degrees Celsius) at the poles. The Martian ice began its retreat about 370,000 years ago, marking the end of the last ice age, according to the research published in the journal Science
It was Volkswagen and their inefficient diesel cars, shame.
> temperatures on Mars may hit a high at noon at the equator in the summer of roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius)
So, the Martian equator is like living in the UK?
Might affect all my climate research kickback schemes.
Think of the children!
Listen buddy, I like my snow more than I like vehicles or Beef.
How can that be? If you are the equator, there are no seasons.
Too fucking bad.
Ice spread from the poles on Earth because water which vaporized in the tropics condensed at the poles when the planet was cool. But Mars doesn't have free water in the tropics. There is probably permafrost there but its locked away, immobile.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Not many people tbh. 26% is above the level where spontanious fires can occur. You think forest fires in todays 21% is bad? You REALLY wouldn't want to go for a walk in the woods in summer if it was 26%. Not only that , high O2 levels = hugh insects and arthropods.
You must be amazingly strong!
An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age
Golly gee, so is Earth!
Except in Earth's case, Earthlings and their civilization are somehow to blame for the temperature rising and not the natural cycles the planet has gone through in the past, long before humans were a gleam in Darwin's eye.
Silly Earthlings!
No wonder star-faring civilizations have avoided direct contact!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The warmunists don't say warming is bad for life. They say the rapidity of the warming is gonna be bad for humans.
Why deal with petty things, this is INTERPLANETARY warming!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Perhaps we can ask the martians what they did to reverse global warming.
In Mars’s current atmosphere, water boils away quickly. If there pools of liquid water, logically, that would imply a denser and heavier atmosphere in the past. Can we do any math to predict bounds on what the atmosphere on Mars (given its gravity, etc.) would have had to contain in terms of content and total mass?
Listen buddy, I hate snow much more than dislike dinosaurs and toxic levels of O2
I did some looking into the effects of solar changes on global and solar-system temperatures, because I wondered how much of an effect it might have, if any.
I know most people are already fans of a certain "team" when it comes to global warming / climate change, so they are more interested in bulstering their original guess than learning more information, but those those who are curious here's what I found out. Temperatures on the other planets have, on average, risen less than on earth, but they have risen some. It's hard to be certain, but a reasonable estimate is that changes in the sun might account for 25%-35% of the warming we've seen on earth.
Digging through all the propaganda and distorted data on AGW is difficult, but there seems to be pretty good evidence to support the notion that 25%-35% is caused by increased CO2, caused both by fossil fuel use and deforestation. Deforestation also increases average daily high temperatures more directly by reducing evaporative cooling during the hottest part of the day (and corresponding rain).
That leaves about 40%-50% of the increase that can't be clearly attributed to any specific cause. Objective research by people not funded by political entities would be helpful.
Yes, but don't forget that the higher atmospheric pressure, with a higher ratio of oxygen to CO2, is what allowed the arthropods to grow to nightmare inducing sizes. I don't know about you, but *I* sure as fuck don't want to see centipedes the size of surfboards!
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
I guess "at the equator in the summer" must mean those 2 days per year we call equinox....
Very true. Well, if you are a poikilothermic animal, that is. Or if you're an insect and would like to grow larger. Because that's pretty much not possible with petty oxygen levels of about 20%. You should also not be living near a shore, unless you're an aquatic animal (but if you are, life's going to be great... provided you're not too dependent on, you know, a shore).
So yeah, life would be a lot better if conditions were again as they used to be back then. If you're a lizard. Or a dragonfly. Or a fish.
Huh? You're a human? Boy, sucks to be you!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Look, if you can't even do the match correctly on this, you have no business giving your input on this.
I hate when this happens to me. Just yesterday I didn't do the match correctly and I ended up wearing a brown belt with my black shoes, I looked stupid all day.
lucm, indeed.
Could anyone genuinely be this much of a moron?
I wasn't sure about the scientific value of his argument, but thanks to your in-depth analysis I am now a born-again anti-denier.
lucm, indeed.
Even though Clinton/Gore did nothing to stem the tide of greenhouse gas emissions on Earth, we all still blame Bush for it. We should therefore extend the blame for Mars's global warming on Bush as well. This is what the media tells us to do. This is what universities are teaching us.
I thought electric rovers running on solar panels do not emit greenhouse gasses. This must be bad news for Elon Musk !!!
I blame the Martians. Mars was such a great place until they started colonizing it.
All those Martian cars are creating pollution and killing off the M-Zone layer.
This is definitely Martian-made. No doubt about it.
Mars' global warming is exactly why we need common sense socio-economic mandates here on earth. I'm so glad to see that a lot of large tech news websites, like Wired and The Verge, spontaneously all wrote articles on the anniversary of "An Inconvenient Truth."
So are you saying this is just Glowball warming - you know, caused by that giant glowball up in the sky?
OK, apparently the answer is "yes", so I'll spell out why the notion is stupid. First, let's be clear what AC is implying: that the fact life thrived under high CO2 Jurassic conditions means that a rapid shift of climate in that direction will be good for the environment. Or at least harmless.
The Jurassic period was over 200 million years ago. Not only did the continents we're familiar not exist, neither did any of the species that currently populate the Earth. In fact major classes and orders of species had yet to emerge. Mammals. Flowering plants -- including all grasses (and that means every cereal crop) and most orders of common trees other than conifers and ginkos. Modern conifers and ginkos of course aren't the same as their ancestors; they've evolved to be adapted for modern conditions.
For that matter every single species currently living on Earth has evolved over the last two hundred million years to thrive and compete in a low CO2, lower O2 atmosphere than in the Jurassic. If you could wave a magic wand and instantly restore Jurassic atmosphere the result would be rapid, mass extinction of most of the species familiar to us. This won't largely be due to individual plants not surviving, but in a massive competitive advantage for plants on the right end of the bell curve for being able to exploit these conditions. Naturally this would be accompanied by massive animal die-offs. Many animals will die off due to direct effects (ocean acidification), others by having the plants they depend on directly or indirectly disappear. This in turn will result in more plant species extinction as animal species they depend upon disappear.
The higher oxygen levels will also hurt some species. O2 isn't just necessary to life, it's also toxic to life at high partial pressures. The level at which it is toxic to humans is slightly higher than Jurassic levels, but many other species won't tolerate it. It's just like water; all plants need water, but watering some plants too much will kill them.
So the result of a shift to a Jurassic atmosphere wouldn't look much like the Jurassic period. Jurassic ecosystems had evolved over tens and hundreds of millions of years along with the changing levels of CO2 and O2. In our rapid CO2 shift scenario plant life would grow explosively, but not all plant life. Very soon we'd be living in a planet overgrown with weeds. This in fact is just a more severe version of the scenario we're actually facing, in which we lose quite a bit of biodiversity as the atmosphere changes on faster-than-evolutionary timescales. But of course the situation *will* right itself -- in a few million years.
So to recap, you can't compare the effect of CO2 in the modern era to the Jurassic era, because the Jurassic era was 200 million years ago. The sun was different, the continents were different, the species on the planet were different, and all those species had adapted over millions of years to gradual changes in the atmosphere.
It's probably true that there's no reason to prefer living on a planet with 200 ppm CO2 to one with, say, 2000 ppm CO2;but there's every reason to prefer living on a planet where the atmosphere has been changing slow enough for evolution to track.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
See my other post. I thought it went without saying that what was good for Mesozoic ecosystems isn't good for Cenozoic ones, but apparently people need this spelled out.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You're mostly correct, but there are many species that have existed since the Jurassic and before, e.g. coelacanath, sturgeon, horseshoe crab, and some jellyfish. As far as plants, there probably aren't many that would be useful to us, but I know for a fact some fern species existed. So your easily-disproved allegation, "neither did any of the species that currently populate the Earth", is incorrect.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Nibiru is coming. The 12th Plannet...?
We haven't even had a colony on Mars and our SUVs are destroying the planet.
I considered the "living fossil" argument, but in general the "living fossil" thing is a bit misleading. When organisms are discovered living that are known from the fossil record (or vice versa), initially the public news is that a "living fossil" has been discovered, but then the systematics geeks get to work and the modern and fossil versions end up classified differently. They continue to be promoted as "living fossils" to a public that needs every encouragement to care about science and the environment, but researchers generally have a more nuanced view than the simple but romantic picture of a population that has remained totally unchanged for millions of years. That just doesn't happen.
The "living fossil" par excellence is of course the Coelecanth. However in the 80 years since the first living example was discovered, living Coelacanths have been placed in a separate genus (Latimeria) from any example in the fossil record. The anatomical resemblances between Latimeria and fossil genera are striking, amazing even. The differences perhaps may be too subtle for a layman to discern, but to a taxonomist they're there. Same goes for horseshoe crabs, ginkgos, etc.
If you think about how genetics works, the idea that a species could be a stable construct over millions of years is extremely implausible. Even if you can't see an anatomical distinction, if you had a time machine and brought back a DNA sample it's bound to put the ancient population in a different taxon just by genetic drift alone. That doesn't count selective advantage for mutations that adapt an individual for changing environmental conditions such as heat and gas composition and, for marine organisms, pH.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Total solar radiation has varied less than 0.2%, comparing the average across the roughly 11-year cycle. It has neither increased nor decreased. What has changed over time os the length of cycle, and the variance in length correlates very closely with global temperature. See the chart here:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g...
You may have noticed that of you fill a bathtub with hot water in the evening, it's still warm the next morning. Water is very good at holding on to heat. (Compare the air in your house, or the furniture, which will cool in minutes). The huge volume of water in the oceans may hold heat for years, such that the length of the solar cycle matters.
And that is only a "guess". My guess, is humans, at least the smarter ones, will survive by migrating to the more temperate zones. The rich with their Miami Beachfront homes will try everything to save their lifestyles. Meanwhile, all those liberals fleeing to Canada when Trump gets elected will suddenly have nice weather in winter. So, in a funky way, Liberals should be all for AWG! ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
No mod point left. So :
thank you for your posts, +5 Informative.
I did some looking into the effects of solar changes on global and solar-system temperatures, because I wondered how much of an effect it might have, if any.
Solar output has been dropping over the last several decades. The sun does (obviously) affect the surface temperature, but to the extent that it does it has been driving temperatures DOWN: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/s...
That means something else has been not only counteracting the cooling effect of the sun but also warming the planet at a rate unprecedented in the last 10,000 or so years.
Meanwhile Mars has been coming out of an ice age for the last 370,000 years (according to TFS). There are other factors at play here than just the sun.
Here's somen interesting information on that topic:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g...
As you mentioned, there are a lot of different factors. As mentioned on the site you linked to, woodfortress.org, it's very noisy data - reliably identifying trends is difficult. Further, it's so political - 96% of the studies do things like start their time series at a time of record-low temperatures, guaranteeing an increase relative to that time, or conversely start a graph at a warm time, meaning the trend will be cooling compared to the time of record highs. The actual science and analysis itself is difficult, and the obvious political bias in most of the studies doesn't make it any easier.
So, if you're one of those species, climate change is a big win!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Score 4, Interesting, yet parent provides not one shred of support for how he arrived at those estimates.
Ahh, Slashdot. You amuse me. Proving, on a daily basis, that you're all smarter than average.
Scientists who have attempted to quantify the human contribution to the current temperature rise have found that anthropogenic sources account for between 80% and 150%. See Tett et al. 2000, Meehl et al. 2004, Stone et al. 2007, Lean and Rind 2008, Huber and Knutti 2011, Gillett et al. 2012, Wigley and Santer 2012 , and Jones et al. 2013. It may be unintuitive to think that humans may have cause more than 100% of the current warming, but remember that natural factors have generally been forcing planet towards another glacial period. We've just had the weakest solar cycle in over 100 years. If solar variability is a strong contributor to global mean temperature then other forces have not only caused all of the warming that we have recently observed, but also caused enough additional warming to offset the cooling caused by the sun.
According to the article, the ice age on Mars occurred when the planet was warmer. Ice was able to form in a stable state at lower latitudes when the climate was warmer.
Unlike Earth, ice ages on Mars occur when its poles are warmer than average and frozen water is more stable at lower latitudes. Transitions between lengthy climate phases can leave telltale features in the ice, the research showed.
That's an interesting question. I did a very rough approximation years ago, just to get an idea of whether it might be significant or not. All of the heat from machines comes from a fuel or power plant, of course. And all fuel energy eventually turns to heat. So we can look at the total energy use to get the amount of energy used by machines, which is equal to the heat the generate.
Each year, we use, globally, 15,000 Twh of energy.
Each year, about 1,000,000 Twh of sunshine hits Texas. So the heat from the sun in Texas alone is in about 66 times as much as the heat from all the machines in the world. The heat from machines is negligible compared to the heat from the sun.
No one with their head screwed on straight can buy the belief that "everything will be fine" if there was sudden massive climate/atmospheric change. However at the same time the statements by the enviro-fundies that even the slightest change in either would result in the planet becoming a burning, lifeless, cinder are equally foolish (heck there was an article recently claiming as much). As you noted major short term climate/atmospheric change would give some plant/animal species a significant advantage/disadvantage and cause major upheaval in ecosystems, but changes on such a short timescale are only the stuff of Hollywood movies. No reputable scientists are claiming changes on such a short timescale, even the "polar icecaps are melting" crowd admit that it will takes hundreds to thousands of years. That would allow many species to at least partially adapt, humans can partially adapt to higher/lower pressures/oxygen in a matter of weeks.
The extra warming has been compared to 400,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions per day, or 2.5 x 10^14 Joules per second, or 250 TW. This is a very large number, but total solar energy intercepted by the Earth is around seven hundred times greater. World power consumption in 2013 was 18 TW. Power consumption is a term in the energy balance equation; we are eventually going to have to rein in energy use purely because of climate considerations, but not soon.
This is the kind of question that belies a complete lack of understanding about the scale of energy involved. I can't even qualify your comments on friction. However, to believe that there is any kind of hidden source of 100-125 TW located on the planet defies any kind of credulity.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I'm sure it is global warming from human activities on Mars. Darn humans. Not enough they are ruining the Earth, they have to mess with Mars!
I expected to see comment after comment pushing blind faith in the "human-created climate change" narrative. It's good to see that so many people realize there's more to the story - and that there is so much propaganda out there.
and Undoubtedly, humans caused it!!
And Jupiter's red spot is shrinking. We are all doomed, I tell ya, dooooomed!
Table-ized A.I.
None of these are the same species as what was there 200 million years ago. There may have been species that looked like them, and they may even have been direct ancestors of the current animal, but there has been 200 million years worth of evolution since then, and the modern species are adapted to modern conditions (or pre-industrial conditions, anyway. 150 years isn't a whole lot of time for evolution to take place).
The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times!
What you fail to note is that the Sun was several percent cooler than it is today, the topology of the continents and therefore ocean currents were completely different than today. You can't try to compare then and now without taking all of that into account.
I am not sure about the causes of Earth's global warming. I have not studied this issue and I declare my ignorance. This is not my area of specialization and this is not one of my topics of interests.
Having said that, it seems to me that this should be a scientific issue and not a political issue. Watching a lot of people (from two sides) get angry, dismissive and obsessive about this topic makes me sad. When science becomes ideology, something is amiss.
This is a post about Mars' climate. What's more neutral than that? But people cannot stop talking about their obsession.
Well, let's dispense with one argument at a time. The GP was arguing that more CO2 would not be a problem per se, even if we were to go to Jurassic levels of CO2. I dispensed with that.
You and I both agree that the Jurassic levels of CO2 aren't in the cards anytime soon. We also agree that the world isn't going to turn into a "lifeless cinder", although nobody brought that up so it's a straw man. But can climate change enough in the lifetime of people now allive that it represents a disaster?
Even under natural rates of climate change, if you look across the globe you find a patchwork climate change disasters -- individual localities where human industries like agriculture are stressed by natural changes in stuff like temperature and rainfall. Imagine painting those spots black on the globe. Now as you accelerate the rate of climate change above the natural rate you get more and more black spots. But even under the highest imaginable rate of change you'll never paint the entire globe black. But you will affect a lot of people.
Now your chance of being affected depends on how you make a living. If you're a Bengladeshi farmer eking out a living in a low-lying area, you're a sitting duck. If you live off the proceeds of financial assets, however, a long as you keep rebalancing your portfolio to drop investments that you don't expect to do well and pick up ones that you do, climate change on any conceivable scale will never be a disaster for you. In fact you'll make money coming and going. This is not climate-specific. In general people who can live off a well-managed asset portfolio do well out of all kinds of disasters, like war, even though those disasters are catastrophes for many people.
So no level of climate change will ever be a disaster for everyone, unless it's enough to cause a general economic collapse which is unlikely. And no level of climate change reduction will avoid disaster for everyone. But any level of accelerated climate change represents a marginal increase in the number of people experiencing climate-related disasters.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They still give out mod points around here?
even the "polar icecaps are melting" crowd admit that it will takes hundreds to thousands of years.
Look at the trajectory of summer sea ice area in the arctic: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/n... . We have about 1/2 of what we had just 30 years ago and the loss appears to be accelerating.
If we just were cockroaches....
imagine the possibilities
That -225ÂF night time low is interesting. I have a super freezer with a double compressor that goes down to -121ÂF which is colder than dry ice. I use this for shipping meat from our on-farm butcher shop. It's so cold that if you touch anything inside the freezer with your bare hands you'll stick to it and get instant frost bite. When you first open the chest freezer there is a mist undulating of CO2 vapor that hasn't quite frozen yet. Very cool to play with. Night time on Mars is far colder. Ouch!
We know that the proxies have much lower resolution than the actual measurements and are not comparable at all
Nonsense. Many paleo data sets have an annual resolution. There is only so far global mean surface temperature can stray in 1 year.
The reconstruction I used overlaps the instrumental record (with remarkable agreement) and shows (you guessed it) a sudden spike at the end!
Those jerks at NASA started driving rovers around on Mars, and sure enough: ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING!
Where's Al Gore when his little green friends REALLY need him??? If only they'd build a high-speed train instead!
Republicans deny this Martian climate change. They insist oil companies continue bia on Mars as usual. Oh- wait a minute. We aren't there yet. Never mind.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Another global warming process that has nothing to do with human activity! When will the sheeple face his reality?