Getting Warmer

By | November 11, 2004
12 Comments

Things
are heating
up on Mars…literally. The planet is experiencing its own version of global
warming. The dry-ice polar caps are diminishing. Paul
Hsieh speculates that this must be on account of our failure to sign Kyoto.
Wow, when somebody close to me told me that I could vote for Bush if I wanted
to, but I would have to accept the fact that everything that happens from now
on is my fault…well, I just didn’t grasp the cosmic implications.

On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder — if two planets so close to
each other are both experiencing a rise in surface temperature, isn’t it just
possible that it might have to do with that nearby star they both orbit?
I’m just asking is all. I mean, what if…

What if.

And I’m just asking. But what if global warming is real,
but it isn’t our
fault and there is nothing we can do about it? (With current technology.)

Just asking.

UPDATE:
An Instalanche! Thanks,
Glenn. Nice Halliburton reference. For those of you new to The Speculist, welcome.
Please feel free to have a look around. We usually do more good
news than bad, although we’re not averse to occasionally tackling the tough
questions, e.g., if
turkey guts are good, wouldn’t raw sewage be even better?

  • Richard Nieporent

    And I’m just asking. But what if global warming is real, but it isn’t our fault and there is nothing we can do about it?

    We can always sacrifice the US to the gods. If it was good enough for primitive societies to make sacrifices to their gods to try to change the environment, then it is surely good enough for Europe and the rest of the “civilized” world to sacrifice the US to the goddess Gaia to “save” the world. And that is exactly what the purpose of Kyoto is.

  • http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2004/11/goebbels-warming.html M. Simon

    Actually there is research being done on this subject. The results will be in in 2006.

    Preliminary indications? The sun’s output has been rising for about 100 years.

    Man my have little or nothing to do with it.

    BTW did you know the Sun’s output can change +/- .2% in a matter of days? I cover that and what it means at the above url.

  • http://schweitn.blogspot.com Nick

    We would refer to Mars as the “control group” in our little solar system wide experiment on ecology. :)

  • Jon Ravin

    Well – we can use the money that was to be “spent” on Kyoto to build a real space industry to put sunscreens in orbit to lessen solar input… this would also give us the basis for microwave power stations in orbit, a further boon to the environment.
    Big plus: it is forward and outward looking, not a trivial matter when the Greens want us all to go back into caves ().

  • Karl Hallowell

    OTOH, CO2 content in the atmosphere has risen for more than a century and is at the highest level it’s ever been in the last few hundred thousand years. Hmmm, much higher CO2 levels existed in the distant past, but it’s not clear to me whether the Earth can substain CO2 levels of times in the geological past due to the expansion and increase in the power output of the Sun over hundreds of millions of years.

  • Dorian

    I remember hearing about research that suggested that the
    amount of earth’s reflected radiation or "earthlight" (found by measuring the
    light intensity on the dark side of the moon) has increased. The current
    explanation is that cloud production on earth is higher than normal. You pointed
    to another possibility of increased solar radiation production.

    The earth appears to be much more complicated and resilient
    than we ever imagined. It seems to contain many negative feedback mechanisms and
    appears to counter one environmental change with another stabilizing influence.

    Cloud production may be one type of stabilizing negative
    feedback response to global warming so may hurricane activity which transports
    surface heat to the upper atmosphere. There is even talk of global dimming due
    to air pollution:

    Global Dimming1      Global
    Dimming2

     So what’s really going on – global warming or global
    dimming or both? What do the implications of both mean? How will increased cloud
    production affect things?

    I’m not advocating the dismissal of current global warming
    explanations and I’m certainly not giving air pollution a stamp of approval but
    hype in the scientific community has really hurt their credibility in this area
    of research.

  • jdbraun2002

    Thanks for poking fun at the ridiculous talk of the United States causing global warming throughout our solar system.

    However, I followed your link about global warming not being our fault ( http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002432.html ) and found that the article futurepundit links to is from the Max Planck Institute ( http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2004/pressRelease20041028/ )-a fairly credible source. Unfortunately, futurepundit completely ignores another article published by the Max Planck Institute ( http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2004/pressRelease20040802/ ) which states right in the abstract: “solar activity affects the climate but plays only a minor role in the current global warming”

    I think it is a disservice to your readership to promote ideas that are based on distortions of the truth.

    Thanks,
    jdbraun2002

  • John Anderson

    The moons of the giants (Saturn and Jupiter) have also been warming at an unusual rate. As has Pluto, although some dismiss this as a “residual effect” of its having been closer to the Sun – even though the warming has been noted as its orbit takes it farther out… I have been asking for over a year now for GM and others to disclose their space drive by means of which they ship SUV’s to the rest of the system.

    jdbraun2002, you may want to read the article you point to again. Despite the subhead “…minor role in the current global warming” the study shows that for 120 of 150 years the sun was probably the culprit in any global warming (ie, since the last the Thames froze over enough to carry commercial wagons) with questioning only about the last 20-30 years: quite different from the usual 1940′s-on claim – but also notes that while sunspot activity (which is actually what they measured) is fairly normal, the sun has been more active than before for the last 60 years, which correlates more closely (by double) with the 1940′s claims. And that such high activity, without associated sunspots, occurred during the Medieval Warm, which many “Global Warming experts” have claimed never happened, or only happened around the Gulf Stream despite evidence from South America and China. Re this study “They come to the conclusion that the variations on the Sun run parallel to climate changes for most of that time, indicating that the Sun has indeed influenced the climate in the past.” Yet Prof. Sami K. Solanki says “…the significant increase in the Earth’s temperature since 1980 is indeed to be ascribed to the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide” without reference to the warming from 1880-1980.

    Man may be contributing to the warming, the evidence is unclear if leaning that way, but we are (in my opinion) neither the sole, or even very significant, cause. And it is certainly no answer to have the developed countries, which are already dropping said contribution, penalized while not helping the undeveloped world – where the contribution has been rising – to get other forms of power and heat.

  • j.pickens

    What you forget is that in the last thirty years, there have been human-induced atmospheric violations of the Martian system. Beginning with the Viking landers, and continuing with Russian, European, and four additional American spacecraft. These landers have distributed tons of propellant gases into the entire atmospheric column of Mars. While these gases would be insignificant on Earth, they constitute highly reactive pollutants injected into an extremely tenuous atmosphere of Mars.

    It is all our fault!!!

    /sarcasm off.

  • http://lesterblog.blogspot.com Jon Lester
  • Mike D in SC

    Intellicast’s “Dr. Dewpoint” (Dr. Joe D’Aleo) has tons of articles about climate change. He blames most of it on changes in solar output, and says that anthropogenic warming, if it exists at all, is very minor. He notes the correlation between the Maunder Minimum (~150 year period in 17th & 18th centuries when sunspot activity nearly ceased) and the “Little Ice Age”. He also notes historical records from around the ninth century unitl about the 14th, which refer to among other things, grapes being grown in England and northern Germany. (The climates there are now to cold for grapes).

    Tons of stuff there, too much to list here.

  • m.lambert

    hi i live in suffolk uk.I have noticed that all the tops of te trees are showing signs of excess radiation.All the tops are burning and changing colour.The leaves are becoming britle and dying.I have been in london on a weekly basis and i noticed the same effect on the trees there .Has anyone else noticed this?Its not on the news yet but it should be as this will also effect the food chain and all the people on earth!!!!