Was reading this article today and my question is…why is Mars heating up at this time? Why would dust storms be increasing? And what effect might this have? If it continues on Mars, could water again (assuming it ever did) be seen on the surface? Or is there just too little atmosphere to ever allow that again?
-XT
Here’s one good article on Mars’ warming:
To summarize it: Essentially, yes Mars has been heating up for 3 years, but that’s not a trend, just a current fluctuation.
It should be noted that we’ve been observing Mars for a lot shorter time than Earth. For Earth, we have records going back as 600,000 years, from Antarctic ice cores, which is plenty enough to say that Earth’s current warming is not just a fluctuation. For Mars, though, the earliest we have any data at all is a hundred years ago or so, and good data for only a fraction of that.
Could it be… Galaxial Warming? (Now THAT would be inconvenient, wouldn’t it?)
Sooo…those little ol’ ice cores…
they be tellin’ the CO2 levels or the temperatures?
both
SiouxChief - We have 6 earth years of data suggesting that the environment on Mars is getting warmer. It’s not a trend at all at this point. That is barely enough data to say we know anything about the climate on Mars much less predict a warming trend.
CO2 I can understand, but how do you tell the temperature from a chunk of ice?
Heavier isotopes have higher vapor pressures; therefore, temperature can be determined from the ratio of heavy isotopes in the ice.
I think that studying other planets in our solar system for temperature trends would be a vital clue as to the reason for our global warming. If Earth is the only planet to show a clear trend, the cause is likely to be human activity; conversely, if all planets (and the sun) seem to be showing the same trend, human contributions are much less significant.
If you google mars jupiter pluto warming
you will get info about global warming on:
Earth
Mars
Moon
Jupiter
Saturn
a moon of neptune
Pluto
And perhaps a few more
Ironically I got a no global warming on Venus on one site, which is suppose to be what unchecked CO2 emissions would lead to.
Frankly, we don’t have enough data to do that. We would need to land something on each planet and find some way to determine several thousand years of temperature difference in order to be able to determine anything.
What we can do, though, is assume that the only linking factor between all the planets is the Sun. Specifically, how hot the Sun has been historically. And for that, you’re just as good to look for evidence on the Earth as you would be to look on any other planet. Thus, we get this graph of the history of the sun:
This is a joke, right? Less than a third of a Plutonian year has passed since it was first discovered. That’s like saying that global warming is going on on Earth because it’s warmer now than it was four months ago.
Where is that graph from, and what does each plot represent?
I don’t follow your logic. Presumably you are referring to seasons on earth, which would make a 4-month time span a poor indicator of yearly temp averages.
But those seasons are primarily caused by the earth’s tilt. If Pluto doesn’t have a tilted axis, (do we know?), and even though its orbit is not very circular, I think some reasonable, tentative, adjusted extrapolations could be made from the data we have accumulated for even a third of a Plutonian year. However, the margin of error would be great, and that might overwhelm any conclusions that could be drawn.
That would be much better, to be sure. But if we observe several planets all with warming trends even for the last few years, it would reduce the validity of claims that humans are largely responsible for the Earth’s similar trend for a similar time frame.
While the sun is the most likely common influence, it would be a leap of faith to assume that any planet in our solar system exhibiting warming was just reacting to solar fluctuations. Of course, if they all did, the chances of the Sun being the main factor increases.
This source suggests that Mars’ temp increases might be better linked to dust storms than solar fluctuations. Volcanic activity might be a cause on other planets or moons. The more planets/moons we find with temp increases, even for a short time, the more we can discount human influence on our own world.
It comes from realclimate.org, and it plots the number of solar flares (essentially the “hotness”) of the sun on the vertical axis, and the year on the horizontal. Next question, congressman?