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The Mystery of Saturn's Atmosphere
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Jan 27, 2007 09:03 AM
from the who-dun-it dept.
from the who-dun-it dept.
eldavojohn writes "Scientists are being forced to rethink theories on why Saturn's upper atmospheric temperature is hotter than can be explained by absorbed sunlight. 'This unexplained "energy crisis" represents a major gap in our understanding of these planets' atmospheres,' the scientists write. 'We need to re-examine our basic assumptions about planetary atmospheres and what causes the observed heating.'"
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Mandatory GW (Score:2, Insightful)
But, we understand ours .
Re: Mandatory GW (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the article you'll find that "these planets" refers to the gas giants. It's a specific phenomenon with as-yet unknown causes, not a general problem with understanding atmospheres.
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Since winds are usually caused by heat differences in various parts of atmosphere, the question remains: where does the heat come from ?
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Gravity Rules, EM Drools! (Score:2, Interesting)
Special Relativity also doesn't explain the price of tea in China either, but I've never heard that cited as a disadvantage.
I've also never heard any "relativity crowd" claiming that "grav
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Clip clop clip clop what's that under the bridge, Mr. Billy Goat Gruff?
I smell a troll.
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I couldn't agree more. "The electric universe" has been busted, changing it's name to "the plasma universe" won't help.
Re:Mandatory GW (Score:5, Funny)
Besides, the high tempuratures on Saturn can be explained easily, Star Jones unleashed massive anal born methane attacks on the planet while doing non-stop Barrel Rolls fueled by the only food that could survive the long trip or a nuclear winter, Twinkies.
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In fact I would go one step further, and predict that once we understand our atmosphere we will be able to show that we can never predict events of that atmosphere. Chaos and all that. So to double the predive accuracy or time length you need exponetially more data. I predict that even with ultra addvanced mesurement methods and supercomputers we still won't have a good weather forcast past 1 month.
I still wonder why so many put so much faith in our gloabal warming prediction wh
Re:Mandatory GW (Score:4, Interesting)
"I still wonder why so many put so much faith in our gloabal warming prediction when our ablity to predict anything is rather poor."
Not only prediction, the prediction is the result of historical fact:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming [wikipedia.org]
Note that such an increase in temperature in such a small period of time has nothing to do with our understanding of Ice Ages, the athmosphere of gas giants, the effects of year-long oil industry propaganda and campaign funding, or the weather forecast on Fox.
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Re:Mandatory GW (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't seem to understand the chaos theory you rely on, especially the difference between predicting small-scale events and long-term trends. The difference between weather and climate has been beaten to death in this forum, so I'll just limit my commentary to stating that your demand for a good thirty day forecast strikes me as irrelevant.
You say that climate is always changing, and that's true. But you're only arguing against a rather naive and simplistic view that the environment is entirely static, which no informed person on any side of the global warming debate shares (read: strawman). Having said that, it's clear that we've had about ten thousand years of relative stability, followed by a century of abrupt warming that coincides with mankind pumping billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. While certainly there is such a thing as coincidence, no alternative explanation can compete with the anthropogenic theory. Solar forcing is often proposed, but it only manages to account for a small fraction of the total [realclimate.org].
Scientists know full well that they're dealing with a chaotic system when they're looking at the climate. But the climate has been reasonably stable over recent history, and that stability has been very good for human activity. Chaotic systems often fall into regions of stability, but they can be knocked out by external influences (say, pouring billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere). So if we know nothing else about the climate (as you want to lead us to believe) that only leads us to conclude that we're better off not messing with it so brazenly, because we don't know where it will end up or how easy it will be to adapt to the new conditions.
You want to convince us that "real science" doesn't do consensus, and that the media has been painting a false picture of emerging scientific agreement. I would argue the opposite: that the consensus among active researchers is far stronger than the media usually portrays. Two things are happening here. First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided, so if journalists believe that there might be two sides to the issue, they usually try to at least pay lip service to both. Second, entrenched industrial interests take advantage of this by paying a small, incestuous group of climate skeptics and policy organizations to cast doubt [ucsusa.org] on the reality of global warming, its human origins, and the need to take political action to counter it.
In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming, and I would be skeptical of claims of robust disagreement. Industry forces have certainly tried to manufacture the illusion of deep disagreement in the past [sourcewatch.org].
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>> What media is that! The popular "media" I see and read is about as one sided as you can get.
You're right, the two of us do seem to be getting our news from completely different sources. The media I read is more than happy to bring up the views of climate skeptics like Fred Singer and Willie Soon, and their bought-and-paid-for-by-Exxon advocacy groups like the George C. Marshall Institute, CATO, and the Heritage Found
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Too darn hot (Score:4, Interesting)
The corona of the sun is hotter than the surface or the core. Maybe they can examine the energies at work in the stellar phenomenon, as the gas giants are often referred to as "failed stars."
Re:Too darn hot (Score:5, Informative)
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Showing proper knowledge is important for your argument to be considered. I reserve the right to consider anyone who doesn't know "Kelvin" is a unit as not properly educated and, therefore, under-qualified to make comments on Physics.
With so many incompetent people making such bold statements about Climatology, there is little time to be wasted with what can only be considered as layman ramblings.
Would you consider someone who doesn't know Mexican is not a language or who doesn't know when a fis
Or is it? (Score:2)
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5 billion years ago? (Score:2, Funny)
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Religion is not wrong, it's just using different meanings of words and God's special units (GSU) rather than SI units.
Re:Too darn hot (Score:5, Informative)
Particles in solar corona are accelerated by the magnetic field, and the process is more or less well modeled by now; gas giants do not possess that strong magnetic fields. One should note that it's the particles that originate in the core in fusion reactions and are emitted away; however, there are no fusion reactions in the cores of gas giants AFAIK, so we're talking about quasi stationary processes in the atmosphere. This difference is fundamental, and the analogy seems broken to me.
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My hypothesis... (Score:5, Funny)
Space Is The Place (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah, I didn't realise just how many Saturnian members of the Angel race hung out around here.
Friction (Score:1)
Oh noes! (Score:2)
Atmosphere warming? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Chemical reactions (Score:3, Insightful)
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Planetary chemical reactions generally run to completion on relatively short timescales compared to the age of the solar system. For example, if Earth were deprived of life there would be no free oxygen left in its atmosphere after a million years or so due to weathering.
Giant planets are mostly hydrogen and helium, so there isn't a lot to work with chemically. There have been suggest
See!!! (Score:2)
An easy answer... (Score:2)
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~X~
Wait.... (Score:2)
Pish-tosh. I watched An Inconvenient Truth and am certain that we already know everything there is to know about atmospheric science.
Warmer? Less cold? (Score:2)
While technically correct, using "hot/hotter" to describe -185C just seems wrong. Sure it's 88K over absolute 0, but still well below the freezing point of people, let alone their perception of hot.
Re: If memory serves correctly (Score:4, Funny)
No, you're thinking of frosty pist.
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Re:Its all our fault (Score:5, Informative)
One of the things that we can't ignore is the affect of spontaneous radioactive decay. If Saturn is just a ball of gas then it probably won't have very many heavy elements that can decay over time (heavy supernova remnants with half-lives in the billions of years like uranium). But if Saturn has a large hidden rocky core then it is certainly reasonable for it to have significant heat generation which would be insulated by the gases. Of course this is well known since it is what keeps the Earth warm (with the crust to insulate it from space).
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