Arguments
What climate change is happening to other planets in the solar system
The skeptic argument...
Other planets are warming
"[E]vidence that CO2 is not the principle driver of warming on this planet is provided by the simultaneous warming of other planets and moons in our solar system, despite the fact that they obviously have no anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.
What the science says...
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| There are three fundamental flaws in the 'other planets are warming' argument. Not all planets in the solar system are warming. The sun has shown no long term trend since 1950 and in fact has shown a slight cooling trend in recent decades. There are explanations for why other planets are warming. | |||||
The basis of this argument is that the sun must be causing global warming and in fact, warming throughout the solar system. There are several flaws in this line of thought. Firstly, the characterisation that the whole solar system is warming is erroneous. Around 6 planets or moons out of the more than 100 bodies in the solar system have been observed to be warming. On the other hand, Uranus is cooling (Young 2001).
Secondly, the theory that a brightening sun is causing global warming falls apart when you consider the sun has shown little to no trend since the 1950s. A variety of independent measurements of solar activity including satellite data, sunspot numbers, UV levels and solar magnetograms all paint a consistent picture. Over the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been moving in opposite directions.
That begs the question - what is causing warming on other planets? With the exception of Pluto, climate change on other planets are fairly understood:
- Martian climate is primarily driven by dust and albedo. Global dust storms increase the surface albedo by settling brighter dust on dark surfaces. Higher albedo leads to more sunlight being reflected which has a cooling effect. Snapshots of Mars' surface in 1977 and 1999 find that the surface was brighter in 1977 and darker in 1999. However, this doesn't necessarily point to a long term warming trend - the 1977 snapshot was made shortly after a global dust storm while the 1999 snapshot occured before a dust storm. Consequently, there is little empirical evidence that long term global warming on Mars is occuring (Richardson 2007). More on Mars...
- Neptune's orbit is 164 years so observations (1950 to present day) span less than a third of a Neptunian year. Climate modelling of Neptune suggests its brightening is a seasonal response (Sromovsky 2003). Eg - Neptune's southern hemisphere is heading into summer. More on Neptune...
- Neptune's largest moon, Triton, has warmed since the Voyager space probe visited it in 1989. The moon is approaching an extreme southern summer, a season that occurs every few hundred years. During this special time, the moon's southern hemisphere receives more direct sunlight (Elliot 1998).
- Jupiter's storms are fueled by the planet's own internal heat (sunlight is 4% the level of solar energy at Earth). When several storms merge into one large storm (eg - Red Spot Jr), the planet loses its ability to mix heat, causing warming at the equator and cooling at the poles (Marcus 2006). More on Jupiter...
- Pluto's warming is not clearly understood. Pluto's orbit is much more elliptical than that of the other planets, and its rotational axis is tipped by a large angle relative to its orbit. Both factors could contribute to drastic seasonal changes. As Pluto's orbit is equivalent to 248 Earth years and observed warming spans only 14 years, it is likely this is a seasonal response (Sromovsky 2003).
Last updated on 26 June 2010 by John Cook.
While Jupiter receives 25 times less energy per square meter from the sun that the Earth does, Neptune receives 900 times less.
How is it that the 900 times weaker sunshine can drive weather and promote seasonal changes on Neptune, as you testify on this very blog above, but the much stronger incident sunshine on the face of Jupiter is considered inconsequential?
The fact is Jupiter is a strong case for solar driven climate change. The Great Red Spot is a singular weather event without a peer or analog on any of the other known worlds. Some people insist on describing it as a hurricane. This is incorrect. A hurricane is a low pressure zone funneling surrounding warm air to the ground. The Great Red Spot is a high pressure zone, forcing hot air out of the middle of the planet. It rises 8 kilometers above the surrounding methane cloud deck, like a turkey timer that is popping out to tell us that the thanksgiving meal is ready.
And now we have another great red spot, which will probably be with us for a very very long time.
Neptune is changing in a spectacular and miraculous way which a cut and dried pdf file will not impart to you.
Have a look at it in color. Neptune's orbit is 164 years long, and Voyager only visited it once back in 1989, so we have no baseline to judge if this change is the natural effect of Neptune traveling through it's orbit, or if it is the result of an augmented solar effect.
But either way it is the sun driving Neptune's weather.
Voyager was launched in 1977 and didn't get to Neptune until 1989. Right now, thirty years later, Voyager still has ten more years of travel before it reachs the heliopause, where the solar wind gives way to the pressure of interstellar space. So don't let this joker fool you that the sun is too weak or feeble to affect Jupiter.
Gierasch has extensively analyzed the jovian storms and has concluded that they can not be fueled by solar energy, there is not enough of it. Other teams have built very successful models of Jupiter's atmosphere, they all use internal heat as the energy source. All this has been published and is easy to find. Jupiter's core is extrememly hot, from compression and the residual heat from the planet's formation. That heat is the main driver of the planet's weather and climate.
Here is the first two sentences from Gierasch
Doesn't sound like he has extensively analyzed the Jovian storms to me.
Further on he says,
Now isn't it interesting that when in doubt Gierasch offers up water vapor as his main transport of heat energy on a planet without water. Recall it is the water born heat exchange which is not well modeled, misunderstood, discounted, and ignored by the IPCC on Earth as the basis for alarm, regarding CO2 warming.
Does this not disturb you?
Ingersol and company "infer" water deep under the opaque cloud cover, beyond direct inspected, due to lightening strikes. Is it not possible that some other chemical is the source of lightening activity on Jupiter?
There were two events which allowed the direct examination of whether Jupiter's atmosphere contained appreciable ammounts of water. The Galileo atmospheric probe, which found no water, and the Shoemaker Levi comet crash. In the first instance, Ingersol explained the lack of water found by the probe as due to it falling in an area analogous to a desert region on Jupiter. IN the second case, the comet, due to it's disintigration, fell over a wide area of Jupiter. Spectroscopic analysis found some water but it wasn't native to the planet. The water vapor found was carried by the comet and after a short period of time was converted through photolytic processes into Co2.
By the way, you left out Saturn and Enceladus on your list of planets or moons undergoing climate change.
I find interesting that "skeptics" so eagerly recommend taking the enormous amount of highly accurate data available for Earth with a grain of salt (or the all shaker for that matter), while at the same time accepting wild conclusions on poorly understood extra-terrestrial "climates" based on very scant, spotty observations. If you want to tell me about climate change on outer SS planets, I'll take the skeptical approach and ask for some serious climate history and data before considering any conclusion.
As for Pluto's expanding atmosphere observation, it was made under ideal conditions, with equipment never available before (KECK, if I remember right). So, even if the event witnessed on that occasion is a regular occurrence, it could never have been seen before, for that reason and this other detail: with a year lasting close to 248 Earth years, Pluto has not been observed through a full orbit yet. Should we add that Pluto's atmospheric changes are suspected to be highly albedo dependent and that Pluto has been darkening since the 50's (collection of space materials is probable)? There are countless caveats and like considerations for all the planets supposedly experiencing "climate change."
How about crunching some numbers and showing us what kind of energy output would be necessary from the Sun to obtain those changes that you assert are Sun driven? Then we could compare that with the observed changes in solar irradiance. You could crunch some more and come up with theoretical values of increased energy input for Venus and compare with what is actually happening there (not much unusual if I recall), where the Sun is mighty close.
Jupiter deserves some crunching too: three vortices merged into one to form the so-called Red spot Jr. How unusual is this? By the way, the idea of Jovian internal heat is not new, see this:
But Galileo certainly helped restart the debate, as discussed here:
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/1996/96-103.txt
I noted the following passage:
" According to mission scientists, Galileo probe data
strongly suggest that circulation patterns in Jupiter's cloud tops and its interior (which runs 10,000 miles deep) are part of one continuous process. Dr. David Atkinson of the University of Idaho continues to report persistent Jovian wind velocities of over 400 mph. The probe detected no reduction in wind speed, even at its deepest levels of measurement,approximately 100 miles below Jupiter's clouds. Galileo scientists regard this finding as confirmation that the main driving force of Jupiter's winds is internal heat radiating upward from the planet's deep interior. The strength of the Jovian winds and the fact that they do not subside with depth is very significant, according to Dr. Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA." This blurb is interesting also: http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/julsep96/sep0996/model.html
Closer to Earth: for all the talk about Mars, it is worth pointing that it went trough significant cooling after the Viking landing, before experiencing the more recent warming some are so excited about (which is best explained by dust storm patterns). It does not leave that much correlation with Earth changes.
The bottom line is this: what is presented as climate change carries little meaning when the climates in question are so poorly known to start with. Outer SS planets are exposed to all sorts of influences that have as much weight as the solar constant in their "climate." Attempts to show a solar source to terrestrial climate change by pointing to observations on other planets whose significance is unclear should be received with the highest skepticism. Especially when there are satellite observations of solar irradiance available for Earth. Sorry for the long post.
Here is also a cool pic from JPL:
http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/captions/jupiter/watercld.htm
I had conversations with proponents of outer SS planetary warming before and for some reason, they seem to be fond of Dr Beebe. She contributed to this paper:
http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v31n4/dps99/212.htm.
Overall, it does not seem that Jupiter suffers a lack of water such as to invalidate the convective models proposed by Gierasch and many (most) others.
Remote mensurements would not be able to provide reliable data, as the technology used has changed and become much more precise in the past 40 years.
The Moon has no atsmosphere so only the surface temperature based upon the direct influence of the Sun would be recorded (I know there is a very slight atmosphere and there is slight internal heating but this should suffice as a baseline to compare the planets to)
There have been arguments that ground based weather stations can;t be reliable over a long period of time due to micro climate influences. Measuring stations near a grassy field 50 years ago may be a strip mall now. Before we commit billions of dollars in change. We should at least disprove the Sun's influence.
Anything that could melt IceCaps on Mars should have a noticable difference on our own Moon
Lower wavelengths travel further and are able to better penetrate atmosphere and other barriers. This is why both solar activity and solar intensity matter.
We know far more about the temperature trends on our own planet than on any other planet, and yet certain people use highly questionable speculations about other planet's temperatures to try to dismiss the trends we see here at home.
We have laughably few samples of temps on other planets as compared to the astounding array of data on our own Earthly climate trends. For example, we have a handful of probes on Mars and an orbiter. Mars is the planet we probably know the most about besides Earth. With that equipment we can only get the faintest idea of what's going on with the temps there.
To use this data (or records from other planets) as reliable evidence of anything more solid than the temperature sampling we have for Earth, is on its face absurd.
I would also like to say that there's too much attention paid to CO2 alone. Methane and Nitrous Oxides maybe be at least as problematic. Most of this comes from livestock production. Certainly, getting them under control first will give us more return on investment.
evolution is considered a fact because of the amount of evidence and no other scientifically plausible explanations, but that is not the case with climate change, it seems to me like every other theory is thrown out without the slightest consideration. there are plenty of plausible explanation for why the earth could be heating but none of them have undergone testing.
for example, i cant recall ever seeing a news report or debate where the participants were not already in agreement that humans are causing climate change, yet there are professors and such out there who do not agree with the UN's models so why don't we ever hear from them?
while different causes can still be debated there can be no settlement and laws should not be made to reinforce a theory that has yet to be proven, that would make it a religion, and not science
However scientists, being apparently quite anthropomorphically inclined, have placed their attention on a single variable, "human activity" and of course can then find lots of reasons to support their conclusions.
The more likely scenario is that highly-complex and interacting variables are behind warming or cooling of all the bodies in our solar system, and since this occurs both with and without the impact of homo sapiens, we have to consider that our puny contribution may possibly be of no consequence, and that we ought to be continuing our search for understanding of climate change in other directions.
This claim that scientists have placed their attention solely on a single variable is wholly incorrect. Please review this site and the primary sources that the articles link to, and consider that you may be doing exactly what you are condemning - finding lots of reasons to support a preconceived notion.
Also isnt this argument a (logical)fallacy ? 'Correlation is not causation' springs to mind
A&A 413, 745-751 (2004)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20031533
"Reconstruction of solar activity for the last millennium using 10Be data" I. G. Usoskin1, K. Mursula2, S. Solanki3, M. Sch?ssler3 and K. Alanko2
The study used ice cores. The authors concluded "In conclusion, we have presented here a new reconstruction of solar activity on the millennium time scale based upon a description of the related physical processes. It implies that the present high level of sunspot activity is unprecedented on the millennium time scale. The results will be the subject of further analysis."
With two out of three reconstructions showing negative sunspot numbers in some periods, and the third significantly under representing solar variability, it is clear that these methods are not sufficient to make so definitive a statement about sunspot numbers.
Even should we accept the reconstructions at face value, however, the fact is that solar forcing between twentieth century maximum and maunder minimum is about 0.3 W/m^2 at Earth's distance from the Sun. for Mars and the outer planets, the forcing is much less because of the inverse square law. Why we should ignore the 1.8 W/m^2 forcing from CO2 in favour of the much smaller solar forcing remains a mystery. Even more mysterious is why we should do so when the solar forcing has been declining over the last 30-50 years.