Global Warming Mostly Confirmed - On Mars 325
dinotrac writes "A just-completed 23 month study, carried out over the course of a Martian year, found that the Martian polar ice caps are rapidly eroding, sending large amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the Martian atmosphere. If this pattern continues over time, Mars could go from a planet whose winters are cold enough for dry-ice snow to having a shirt sleeve atmosphere. Humans would still have to provide for oxygen, but plants could go naked.
I wonder if this means tougher emission controls on the next Martian rover?"
global warming (Score:2, Insightful)
Which impact will this discovery have on the recently overhyped global warming debate?
This may for example help relativize this eternal flame war which have been going on for years between pro and anti-ozone layer militants...
This dosn't affect local global warming theories (Score:5, Insightful)
And, earth and mars, obviously, have vastly different atmospheres.
The fact the temperature on mars increased slightly over the past 23 months doesn't actually change anything with regards to mans affect on the earths atmosphere. We already know that earth can change without us, it has in the past.
What we need to find out is how much (if any) effect on our climate we actually cause.
Re:global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
I must say I find the accussation that Global Warming is over discussed, hyped, etc... bemusing. To me FOOTBALL is overhyped, CELEBRITY is overhyped, the WEATHER is overhyped- each of these are covered in every news bulletin in the world, every day.
Until people generally have the scientific background to understand these issues there should be more not less discussion in the media. Atmospheric effects of mans activities are poorly understood, so two main points of view are adopted - 'how can little old us effect something so big???' and 'don't piss in the bath'.
The greenhouse effect (the ability for certain atmospheric gases to trap more heat than others - leading to an overall warmer planet) is a scientific fact. Whether the effect is increasing or not is currently being debated - with the vast majority saying yes, it is.
The Mars results are interesting because they demonstrate that even without life, let alone industrial level life, the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can change year on year.
What it does not, cannot, tell us is wether this is a cyclical or progressive change. Thats the same as here on earth. The earth is warmer now than it was 100 years ago.
I'm a 'don't piss in the bath' person myself.
not all that helpful (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If plants can go naked so can we (eventually). (Score:5, Insightful)
Plants are great, but they don't generate new oxygen, they just recycle the old stuff. If you start with 10^100 moles of CO2 and 10^100 moles of H2O, that works out to, 2*10^100 moles of C, 2*10^100 moles of H and 3*10^100 moles of O (1.5*10^100 moles of O2), right? So, all you need to do is:
a) find a massive source of CO2 (in the gigaton range, to start with) that will give you something close to earth atmospheric pressure
b) find a massive source of water (in the petaton range, to start with) to help with the atmospherics and the temperature stabilization
c) increase a and b to account for losses due to soil mineralization of the O
d) find a lichen that will grow (and reproduce) on Mars
oh yeah,
e) find some way to stimulate some plate tectonics to recycle the minerals and crack the O off the Fe in the crust (this is a long term goal, though)
Re:This dosn't affect local global warming theorie (Score:3, Insightful)
But one idea put forth about Global Warming on Earth is that there is an effect from solar flares. The CO2 posse has flatly rejected that, because of course you can't bitch about the sun.
Perhaps the warming on Mars's polar caps is evidence of an effect from the solar flares.
Or perhaps it's evidence that climates will undergo changes without American SUVs.
Re:Ecofreaks love to ignore all counter examples. (Score:2, Insightful)
Hell, even Bush accepts that global warming is a fact.
Yes, I do realise you're just trolling, but some half-asleep moderator is going to give you a +1 Insightful any minute now.
Re:Perfect! (Score:2, Insightful)
The article mentioned that this changing is happening rapidly. Well, its had the past few eons to make this change. Why now? And what makes anyone think this will be permanant? The only thing that doesn't change is change itself. I find it highly unlikely that this will give Earthlings the chance to start setting up trailerparks around Olympus Mons. I find much more likely that any change will just give us another obstacle to colonizing rather than giving us an advantage.
I'd give this argument more thought, but I've got work to do.
Re:Quick, call GreenPeace! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:global warming (Score:2, Insightful)
What it does not, cannot, tell us is wether this is a cyclical or progressive change. Thats the same as here on earth. The earth is warmer now than it was 100 years ago.
I don't think anyone's debating that fact. It would do well to remember that we are coming out of a mini-ice-age, and that there are warmer temperatures in recorded history. Remember that the Vikings did mange to settle both Iceland and Greenland (over 500 years ago, IIRC), and things were warm enough there for them to actually live off what they could grow there.
That the effect is increasing, or could be, doesn't mean that humans are responsible. We have no proof either way, though you're unlikely to see any meaningful discussion in the mainstream media. They've pretty much decided that its a convenient "fact" to be trotted out whenever they want to beat down industrial concerns, and something they can ignore the rest of the time.
Oh, and saying that the earth is warmer now than a century ago means nothing when one considers the scale of the processes involved. As many scientists have been trying in vain to point out, we don't have nearly enough valid data.
Re:global warming (Score:3, Insightful)
I must say I find the accussation that Global Warming is over discussed, hyped, etc... bemusing. To me FOOTBALL is overhyped, CELEBRITY is overhyped, the WEATHER is overhyped- each of these are covered in every news bulletin in the world, every day. Until people generally have the scientific background to understand these issues there should be more not less discussion in the media. Atmospheric effects of mans activities are poorly understood, so two main points of view are adopted - 'how can little old us effect something so big???' and 'don't piss in the bath'.
Hear, here! Meterologists don't have the slightest idea of what is going on is our atmosphere these days. IANAM, but I am a mathematician who does some fluids, so I'm hearing from these atmosphere guys all of the time. No serious scientist claims to understand these mechanisms.
What we do know is that the tempature of the planet has risen, pretty dramatically, over the last century, and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen steadily over the last 300 years. This is not necessarily a causal relationship, but we do have a mechanism by which they would be related (i.e. more CO2 -> more greenhouse effect -> more temperatures). Of course, we don't know that we are causing any of it. For example, maybe the sun got brighter, or whatever, and so the earth heated up, and this caused many plants to die, leading to an increase in CO2. There is (speculative) evidence that we are causing it, however, to some degree.
I think you're right about the two major points. The first position people take is specious. There are many examples of humans causing drastic biological and environmental changes. We have certainly caused changes big enough to end up affecting us. Can we raise the temperature of the earth? Who knows. We can, however, release enough junk into the air to wreck our own worlds, we have proved this time and again. I guess I'm more in the "don't piss in the bath" camp, because once we mess it up, it may very well be permanent. It is worth our while to be cautious.
Another thing which the anti-global-warming politicians and pundits need to be worried about: if the earth is warming up independent of us, this is not a victory for them! For example, let's say that we have some very small affect on global warming, and most of the warming is some natural process. We will then need to curb our emissions even more, because then we have less room for error. For example, if you're on a fixed income, and inflation goes up, you have to spend less. It's not your fault inflation went up, but you have to spend less anyway. Not fair, but c'est la vie.
hype (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not a fair statement. The consequence of talking too much about football or celebreties is nothing more than an uninformed populace (which government officials love). The consequence of the "global warming" debate involves (if the leftists get their way) the removal of individual rights. The two are drastically different.
The greenhouse effect (the ability for certain atmospheric gases to trap more heat than others - leading to an overall warmer planet) is a scientific fact. Whether the effect is increasing or not is currently being debated - with the vast
majority saying yes, it is.
Vast majority of whom? Experts? You are trying to roll an ad numeram argument into your ad verecundiam argument, while ignoring the simple fact that destroys the validity of what you claim. The fact is that experts disagree on the subject of global warming. And as long as experts continue to disagree, I'm not going to be convinced. I wonder how you can be so sure of your position.
It's also interesting that the whole global warming argument seems to be brewing within the political sphere. It should not be a political argument, it should be a scientific one. When Al Gore states that the Worst Thing Ever (tm) was the internal combusion engine, it lends credence to the notion that "global warming" is a convenient tool to use to keep individuals from driving cars, riding 4-wheelers, buying Evil Horrible SUVs (like the one Tom Daschle owns), playing with jet skis, and all sorts of other individual activities that leftists just plain hate.
The earth is warmer now than it was 100 years ago.
You can say this all you want, but until I see all the data to draw my own conclusion, it's just words. And even if what you say is true, that does not imply that all of the ramifications tied up into the nebulous political beast named "global warming" are true.
I'm a 'don't piss in the bath' person myself.
Neither do I, but it doesn't matter since you're assuming the point in dispute.
Re:Quick, call GreenPeace! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it can. It can remove cheap energy and transportation sources for billions of people, maintaining or increasing rates of poverty and starvation around the globe.
But if it turns out that it was the influence of man, there won't be an 'undo' button!
Yes, there will. The "undo" button will be to reduce CO2 emissions after we've proven that they are a problem, and watch them fall back to equilibrium. We haven't passed some invisible "point of no return"; the Earth isn't currently the hottest it's been this millenium, much less the hottest ever.
Re:Weather outlook on Mars (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Quick, call GreenPeace! (Score:2, Insightful)
Cutting down on CO2 the way GreenPeace wants to do it (i.e. by limiting emmissions and thereby limiting economic activity) will kill our already weak economy. It's a typical socialist non-solution by people who hate our modern world anyway. Besides, it is still very arguable that CO2 levels (or changes thereof) have nothing with human activity (or are drowned out by natural carbon-cycle processes, which is saying the same thing).
Besides, there are ways to deal with excess carbon dioxide that don't involve economic sucide, including the excellent idea of putting iron into the ocean [whoi.edu]. Sounds like an "undo" to me. If we ever need it. (Actually we may do it anyway for fish-farming reasons - in which case the chicken-little's of the world will start screaming about the coming ice age, like they used to before they got on the "global warming" band wagon. Always gotta have a crisis...)
This is from NASA? (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't seem to rule out that this ice is being shifted to another location. Perhaps the other pole? Could it be settling underground in solid form? Yes, they make some comments about ravines and such, but the comments are superficial.
As I think I saw another poster mention, could it be a part of some longer event cycle? Could some other chemistry be at work, with the CO combining with something else instead of transforming to a gas?
There are lots of questions that weren't answered about the WHY and WHERE. Not to mention that this throws more evididence at the global warming issue of Earth. If Mars is warming, perhaps the Earth warming is a part of some larger issue such as a warmer period in a solar cycle. Perhaps we are moving through a warmer part of the galaxy/universe and that's making everything hotter. Perhaps the higher gaseous CO2 levels on earth are due do higher temperatures on the planet, and not the other way around.
Re:Quick, call GreenPeace! (Score:2, Insightful)
This must be sarcasm, right?? Especially after the first paragraph. After all, this is politically-motivated junk science.
"drasticaly diminish the size of the global economy" == "commit economic sucide" == "spend the rest of your short life meanly scrabbling after food".
Re:hype (Score:2, Insightful)
Individual rights to piss in everyones bath, as it were? The individual right to pollute, the individual right to dump crap in the air that makes life harder for everyone else? The individual right to help destroy Micronesia through sea-level rise? Where in the Constitution does it say you have the individual right to pay less than a buck for a gallon of gas?
How about realizing that by polluting you are taking away the individual right to breathe clean air? How about realizing that by burning every drop of oil on the planet you are taking away the "individual rights" of future generations ?
Why is it so hard for some people to grasp that burning nonrenewable resources like petroleum is like driving through the desert in a car with half a tank of gas and NO gas stations ahead. Wouldn't it be wise to start thinking about alternatives?
Re:Quick, call GreenPeace! (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no scientific debate about whether or not global warming (on earth) is occuring. We have global average temperatures for a 150 years. This data shows a clear warming trend over the last 12 years or so. No amount of wishful ignorance can make these numbers go away.
The debate is whether or not we are causing it. However, the ignorant often group them, which parallels the debate around evolution. People say that they don't "believe" evolution happens, when scientists have observed it happening. The scientific debate is over natural selection, and to what extent it is the main mechanism for evolution.
As long as people perpetuate inane talking-heads style opinion over scientific fact, our populus will remain ignorant. Which is to say, will always be the case.
Re:Bad news for terraforming (Score:4, Insightful)
The escape velocity at the surface of Mars is only a little less than 1/2 of what it is at the surface of the earth. The thermal velocity of a particle scales with the square root of temperature. Hence a gas particle on Mars would only have to be a fourth as hot as it's Earth bound cousin in order to escape.
Now the particle has to not only be hot, but also have enough room to move that it can get away into space without hitting other gases and cooling off. This isn't really a problem since light molecules naturally drift to the higher levels, and in the case of Mars, it's pretty rarified air to begin with. Atmospheres (in the inner planets) drop off dramatically in the scale of hundreds or thousands of kilometers, whereas the planet is several 100,000s of kilometers in radius, so being high in the atmosphere only cuts a few percent off of escape velocity.
Now the real problem here is when you look at the numbers. On Earth, H2 and He won't escape at room temperature. In fact, they have to be heated to between 10 and 100 times room temperature (Kelvin Scale) in order to escape. We assume that cosmic rays, solar wind, and other atmospheric phenomena can give this much energy to an appreciable percentage of H2 and He so that non-neglible amounts bleed away into space. In any case it's not a very fast process at current.
N2 and O2, being 7 and 8 times the mass of He would have to be heated to 7 and 8 times as hot as He to escape. Given the historic composition of the atmosphere on Earth we can assume that this degree of heating is rare enough to have a pretty neglible impact on atmospheric composition.
However, if you have a considerable incidence of unshielded ionizing radiation then single atoms of N and O might be present in significant quanities and would need only 3.5 and 4 times the temperature of He's escape.
As I said, in the beggining, on Mars you can escape while being only 1/4 the escape temperature on Earth. So, yes, it is possible that ionizing radiation produces enough atomic N and O that an appreciable portion of it can escape into space. Temperatures may even be high enough to bleed of non-trivial quantities of N2 and O2 from Mars, but remember it's still a rare event since the temperatures needed are well about the surface temperature and little of the air will ever get hot enough. Could this alone account for the thin martian atmosphere? Probably not. More likely the dominant phenonema involves gases being absorbed into rocks and mineral deposits.
On one final note, thermal differentiation of atmospheric composition was probably most important early in the life of the solar system when the sun was significantly hotter. What is around today isn't likely to change much by virtue of bleeding gases into space.
Re:Quick, call GreenPeace! (Score:3, Insightful)
This statement is misleading. Since the existence of man, yes. In the history of the planet, No! C02 levels have been at least 10 TIMES current levels since the advent of life. IIRC, this is the value reported at the time of the Paleozoic/Mesozoic boundary. On the down side it also correlates well with one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of the Earth.
Would doing that over again be a bad thing? Yes, I'm sure it would, but you'll also notice that it didn't cause runaway greenhouse and produce a planet like Venus.
While I agree with your post in general, I doubt we are anywhere near bringing on the end of the Earth. However, we probably could muck up our ecosystem pretty badly with global warming and that is probably worth avoiding.
This article has nothing to say. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) This happens every year anyway. The martian atmosphere gets thicker every year as a result of its less-than-circular orbit. Every year, there are times when Mars is closer to the sun than the rest of the year, which allows the planet to absorb more solar energy, melting more of the carbon dioxide in the ice caps and adding to the atmosphere. This might actually snowball if it weren't for the fact that there are other times of the year where the CO2 starts to freeze out, snowballing in the other direction.
2) While it might be exciting and all that in a million years, you *might* not need a spacesuit to walk on the surface of mars, more than likely it's just a statistical anomaly because it was slightly warmer this year than last. As if we never see that sort of thing on earth or anything. The author saves this little tidbit of information for last, because otherwise there's not much of a story here at all. (and of course, there really isn't.)
3) This is, if anything, simply proof that some years the sun is hotter than others, which might be a much easier explanation for an increase in the average surface temperature of the earth in recent years over the theory that the media likes to push that we're all to blame. The media likes this theory simply because scaring people is good for business. As in this article, it's not the actual facts that matter as much as an exciting story.