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Mars hots up

Dust storms and dark rocks are making the red planet hotter

Mars is getting hotter. Measurements of the brightness of the planet's surface over the show that the thermometer has ratcheted up some 0.65 °C over a few decades.

Read the story here

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on April 04, 2007
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Holy Cow! Capitalist pig America is not only causing global warming on Earth, now we are heating up Mars! We gotta DO something! I'm gonna buy me a Prius!

Posted by: Tom Gardner | April 5, 2007 06:45 PM

I found it interesting that in discussing Mars, the temperature change is viewed as caused by nature, and perhaps transitory (the ice caps could melt and then return), since you can't take 10 years of data and extrapolate to 1000 years. However on Earth, these common sense scientific rules don't apply, and man-made climate change is a foregone conclusion and we are all doomed.

Posted by: John Dal Pino | April 5, 2007 09:53 PM

I love the quote:
"The warming on Mars is likely to be seized by climate-change sceptics here on Earth - if Mars is hotting up even without any cars or pollution, then perhaps the Sun or some other natural, Solar-System-wide factor is to blame. But to infer that would be "crazy" says Christensen"

"Crazy"?.... 'dust storms' removed the dust covering darker bedrock? What is the ultimate 'engine' that drives weather on all the planets in our solar system? Umm... maybe **THE SUN**!!! So... maybe it IS the sun after all, causing global warming!! GASP! Now I guess I'm crazy too? (rolls eyes) Jeese!

Posted by: c. moore | April 6, 2007 08:43 AM

So this is how "science" is done. Instead of putting forth a hypothesis and allowing others to weigh its merits, one just has a temper tantrum and says, "If you don't agree with me than you are a FOOL." How scary! And I guess scientist who disagree with you will be defrocked of their position. Numerous climatologists' jobs seem threatened by your "inquisitional" condemnation already.

Posted by: Patrick Dye | April 7, 2007 12:08 AM

Surprising and disturbing to see these fora (both here and in the Morton article blog) commandeered by the global warming deniers. Geologically-recent climate change does look to be occurring on Mars; quite apart from dust-lifting and albedo variation there is a host of constructive and degradational landforms that attest to this observation. However, solar forcing cannot be implicated in the temperature rise during the past 30 years on Earth. Scientists are not trying to fool you all - they get paid irrespective of their standpoint. The geological and environmental community of today is just trying to warn us all of the risks of doing nothing - just as the physical scientists (see Russell-Einstein Manifesto) brought us back from the brink in the 1950s. If you don't want to help, at least listen..

Posted by: David Page | May 16, 2007 02:11 AM

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