In a global warming discussion on the Larry Niven mailing list (spawned by this article in Jewish World Review, about how Senator James Inhofe is being persecuted by the establishment for his anti-global warming views), somebody claimed that we’ve observed climate changes on Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in addition to those occurring on earth.
I believe this was intended as evidence against anthropogenic warming on earth; the poster said that all the warming or climate change we’ve seen might just be a result of “unusual solar action.”
Avoiding a political discussion about global warming (I hope), is his claim correct? Have we observed the climate of Mars and Jupiter and Saturn changing? Mars I could potentially believe, but how do we even measure the climate of Jupiter and Saturn?
Theres this site and associated links to it covering the issue as far as Mars goes at least. Possibly a lot has moved on since Oct 2005, but the overall point that the dataset is tiny by comparison would presumably still be valid.
There’s some truth to that claim, but let’s not jump to conclusions too soon. It’s correct that we have probably observed some climate change on both Mars and Jupiter; I’m not aware of any such observations on Saturn, though, but feel free to cite otherwise. The important thing here is that if we want to link these phenomena together, there must be some outside effect that affects multiple planets, such as that “unusual solar action”. Since we haven’t observed such unusual solar action like the continuous rise of solar radiance, this is no evidence.
However, what then causes climate changes on other planets? Like you correctly say, climate in a massive gas giant such as Jupiter and to a lesser extent Saturn is vastly different than climate in a small terrestrial planet such as Earth and Mars. Being so massive, Jupiter radiates more enegy to space than it gets from the Sun. The storms on Jupiter’s atmosphere have different energy source than those on Earth: Jovian storms are powered by the planet’s internal heat, while ours are stirred by solar energy. So the global warming up there that generates new storms is almost certainly caused by some internal, cyclical process. This comprehensive article explains more about it. They suggest that the Jovian climate cycle is just 70 Earth years long and will change temperatures a tremendous 10 degrees Celsius. Needless to say, that process is much quicker and more dramatic than any climate changes on our planet.
On the other hand, while no “climate change denier” with the slightest idea of planetary differences would suggest that a gas giant’s climate change had anything to do with Earth’s, many have drawn a parallel between Earth and Mars in the recent few years. This is because of some change in Martian polar regions which seems to hint on rapid warming in some parts of the planet. However, as this article describes on detail these are based on observation of rather small regional change around southern polar cap, from which some have deduced a global change. Of course, what we are really observing is probably just a small-scale regional trend lasting for a few years, although obviously it’d be nice to know what exactly causes it.
So, to me these are just phenomena of various scales of climate change in other planets. They are interesting, even fascinating, but to use them as arguments against the claim of anthropogenic climate change is, I think, disingenuous. No one’s saying that climate changes haven’t happened or won’t happen without human tampering; but if you want to say that the current climate change on Earth isn’t caused by humans at least partly, you won’t find your arguments on other planets.
The term “agnostic” has nothing to do with faith, even in its religious context. And in this case, it has nothing to do with religion at all; it’s merely being use to express the author’s doubt about the cause of global warming.
I imagine that statement is meant to imply that there are a lot of people, with VERY strong feelings on both sides, and that both sides tend to proslytize. While there is evidence for both sides, neither one has a solid provable stance that will negate the other.
That may be true, at least to some extent, but it reminds me of the people who write articles about evolution being a religion. Not a very productive way to discuss things.