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The warming of other solar bodies has been seized upon by climate sceptics; but oh how wrong they are, says Oliver Morton.
If the shooting of fish in barrels offends you, look away. The publication this week of a Nature paper on global warming on Mars offers a fantastic opportunity to kill off one of the silliest climate-sceptic arguments, and I'm more than happy to be pointing the gun at the water.
Posted by Nicola Jones on April 04, 2007
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The arguments regarding a solar wide warming needs to continue. The reasons given in this article are minimal at best and leave no scientific help in the theriors presented. It is my belief that a hyper- dimensional change is occurring in our solar system.
Posted by: troy weis | April 5, 2007 02:31 PM
"So what these disparate observations actually tell us is that the scientific community — the scientific community that enjoys a firm consensus on the causes of Earthly climatic change — has a fairly impressive grasp of the fundamentals of how weather works elsewhere, as well. It's a rather inspiring insight. But it is not the lesson that climate sceptics want their readers to learn."
Perhaps our scientists should figure out our own weather patterns before they claim they understand how it works on the other planets. In the 1970s, didn't scientists claim we were in the middle of a "cooling period"? Perhaps I can be the first human being to accurately predict the weather by saying that in the 2020s, we should be experiencing cooling climate changes. Perhaps we can look at the biggest source of energy and heat in our solar system, the Sun, as a viable reason why it might be getting hotter. Seems to be causing havoc on the other planets.
Posted by: Brewer Crain | April 5, 2007 03:35 PM
The idea that man is causing global warming and man can un-do the damage and cool things down is ludicrous. The real agenda is the rise to ascendancy of the green party at the expense of economic health. These scientists know that they have blinders on...but they justify it with their idea of "greater good".
Posted by: Tom Gardner | April 5, 2007 06:56 PM
It is pretty sad that Nature is publishing such articles, flawed on the basic tenets of science. So for all the other planets on the Solar system, you can come up with alternative explanations for their heating, and the sun-related one must be disregarded. At the same time, a perfectly silly explanation of CO2 heating earth - when it is perfectly obvious that its effect is neglegible- must not be challenged at all costs. And anyone who does not agree with the current silly theory is not skeptic, as scientists were once proud to be, but "right-wing fanatic skeptic". Then IPCC, who cannot predict the weather for 2008, with their models not including the effect of clouds, predicts it for 2100, when their predictions can never be tested. One thing definetely correlated with the global warming: The amount of research money alloted to the climate "science", the number of research positions, and the number of pages Nature devotes to the topic - somewhere around 1/3. It is not the US corn production profiting from weather change, but weather scientists themselves.
Posted by: Rodrigo Gouveia-Oliveira | April 7, 2007 03:32 AM
Your assertion that believing the Sun’s radiance could influence planetary temperatures is “foolishness” on the part of ignorant people is extremely arrogant and condescending! Scientists tend to get overconfident in their abilities, like teenagers who think they know everything. The truth is that we’re all still early on in the learning curve on this stuff. Although the Sun may not be a factor, it hasn’t been measured with enough accuracy over the past 100 years to rule it out with certainty. The fact that you’re trying so hard to do just that suggests that you’re more interested in holding onto an agenda than you are in pursuing the scientific truth on this topic.
Posted by: Paul Huber | April 9, 2007 06:35 PM
Amazing the lengths people will go to try to avoid the simple and obvious answer. Planets in the solar system all warming up at the same time? It can't possibly be the sun, it must be an astounding coincidence of individual events on each planet, totally unrelated to each other!
Because to say otherwise would be to admit that the global warming hysteria might not be entirely valid, and that must not be allowed!1!!11!
Posted by: Christopher Taylor | April 11, 2007 04:32 PM
"all the other planets on the Solar system," "Planets in the solar system all warming up at the same time?"
Nowhere in the article does it say that. Actually, as pointed out, only some of them are. So much for the sun being the culprit.
As for "the real agenda is the rise to ascendancy of the green party," I find it hard to believe that the whole scientific community is in cahoots with the green party.
But for argument sake, let's look at this in another way: there are two possibilities, either human activity is one of the sources of global warming, or it isn't. This being said, there are two general courses of action: we can either try and do something to curtail the phenomenon, or not. If we do, it means changing one of the basis of our economic system (fossil fuel); which means costs to a lot of well established industries and practices. Also means investments in innovation (another foundation of our economy).
So there's four situation:
- we're not responsible and do nothing: business as usual
- we're responsible and do nothing: outragous human and economic costs
- we're not responsible and do something: some industries suffer and new ones prosper; we become less dependent on oil-rich countries;
- we're responsible and do something: some industries suffer and new ones prosper; we become less dependent on oil-rich countries; we prevent more catastrophies.
What does risk analysis tells us?
Posted by: Marc Andre Belanger | April 11, 2007 05:17 PM
Troy Weis: Not sure I can be of any help on the hyper dimensional thing. Sorry the article didn’t do it for you.
Brewer Crain: on the much oversold question of the 1970s global cooling scare, see here. On the rest, maybe you’d care to look at the arguments not just reaffirm the premise?
Tom Gardner: Your assertion about the limits of human capability is wrong.
Rodrigo Gouveia-Oliveira: I should have been clearer. The sun is not warming up. Even among those who favour a solar explanation for the bulk of global warming on earth, current opinion does not favour a direct effect through increased radiance, but an indirect effect which invokes changes in the cosmic ray environment that produce changes in cloudiness. This explanation is not a very compelling one for warming on earth, (see here) and doesn’t apply at all to the other planets, where there is no suggestion of a role for cloudiness, cloud physics will not be that similar, and cosmic ray interactions with the magnetospheres, if any, will be different too. To suggest that an effect that has been ruled out even by people who believe that solar effects are responsible for warming the earth might be warming Jupiter is deeply eccentric. By which I mean silly.
Paul Huber: Your point about the 100 years is not particularly germane to a discussion of warming on other planets that its proponents have limited to a decade or so. I also think it’s wrong. There are reasonably good solar proxies going back a few centuries. Bear in mind that if very small changes in the sun’s radiation, changes which it requires great accuracy to pick up, are having a direct effect on the earth’s climate then that climate is by definition behaving in a very sensitive way. And if the climate is indeed very sensitive then doubling the carbon dioxide level with have a proportionately greater effect.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think I was extremely arrogant and condescending in the article – moderately arrogant and condescending at most. But this comments thread threatens to render me less temperate…
Christopher Taylor: Funnily enough, the obvious explanation is not always the best. Science is great at finding the non-obvious explanations that are better. (Incidentally, why do you intersperse your explanation points with the number one?)
A slightly richer discussion of all this is taking place over at Stoat.
Posted by: Oliver | April 11, 2007 05:40 PM
I think the logic is questionable. First, just because we can come up with an explanation for why the other planets/dwarfs/moons are warming, does not prove we really understand why, unless we are able to test those theories better. It just means we can come up with a plausible explanation. Also, I presume that the current computer models we use to predict climate chage were partly developed using observations not only on earth, but what has been happening on other planets as well. If so, than we can't be too self congratulatory about our models, if they are confirming some of the evidence on which they were developed. Also, just because all planets have some variability in their temperature does not mean we can say that half should be heating up at any one time, if there is some sort of statistical consideration given to account for random variation. I don't know if that was done, but if the planets are warming in excess of random variation, than that part of his argument also does not hold.
Posted by: Rick T | April 16, 2007 08:11 PM
Funnily enough, the obvious explanation is not always the best. Science is great at finding the non-obvious explanations that are better.
One of the reasons something is obvious is because it is the most apparent, clear, and reasonable of choices. As Occam's Razor points out, if all things are equal, the simplest answer is usually the best.
In this case, looking for other reasons why each individual planet began warming at the same time instead of the sun is not better science, but smacks of desparation. Which is why the 1's... that's what happens when people type too fast, sometimes the shift key doesn't get those !s correctly: it's mockery.
Posted by: Christopher Taylor | April 18, 2007 04:22 PM
I can't see Mr. Morton's full Op-Ed piece, sadly, but judging from the rah-rah'ing it's provoking in various blogs around the 'Net, it's lighter on persuasion, and heavier on derision. Such is often the nature of talk on climate change: Much anthropogenic hot air; fewer cooler heads prevailing.
Setting aside the straw man of Martian heating and Jovian summers for just a moment, some scientists think the Sun has a role in heating the Earth. Variably.
Not only are there the obvious variations due to Earth's orbital dynamics (rotation, revolution, precessional wobble, Milankovitch cycles), but the Sun itself is quite dynamic. Witness sunspots, CMEs, solar wind variations (which in turn affect Carbon-14 availability...)
Some scientists even look at the Schwabe cycles across the Gleissberg Period and track against recent historical records, finding correlations to climate.
If I recall, there are Russians and Americans and Danes doing this. (Abdussamatov, Svensmark, Bard and Frank, et al.)
Probably worth a read, regardless of what one's underlying climate agenda is.
Posted by: ross | November 15, 2007 10:57 PM