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It's the sun
Climate's changed before
There is no consensus
Surface temp is unreliable
Models are unreliable
It's cooling
Ice age predicted in the 70's
Al Gore got it wrong
We're heading into an ice age
CO2 lags temperature
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Global warming on other planets in the solar system

The skeptic argument...

Studies show Mars, Neptune, Jupiter, Triton and Pluto are warming. As the sun is the only thing they all have in common, the sun must be causing global warming.

What the science says...

There are three fundamental flaws in the 'other planets are warming' argument:

  1. Not all planets are warming - some are cooling
  2. The sun has shown no long term trend since 1950
  3. There are explanations for why other planets are warming

Not all planets in the solar system are warming

Only 6 planets or moons out of the 100+ bodies in the solar system have been observed to be warming. On the other hand, Uranus is cooling (Young 2001)

Solar activity isn't increasing

More crucially, the whole theory that a brightening sun is causing global warming falls apart when you consider solar output hasn't risen over the past 30 years (when warming has been highest) according to direct satellite measurements that find no rising trend since 1978, sunspot numbers which have leveled out since 1950, the Max Planck Institute reconstruction that shows irradience has been steady since 1950 and solar radio flux or flare activity which shows no rising trend over the past 30 years. Ironically, it's the sun's close correlation with Earth's temperature that proves it has little to do with the last 30 years of global warming.

So what is causing warming on those other planets?

Of course that begs the question - what's causing warming on other planets? With the exception of Pluto (which is still an enigma to astronomers who recently voted it out of the planet registry in a moment of pique), climate change on other planets are fairly understood:

  • Martian climate is primarily driven by dust and albedo and there is little empirical evidence that Mars is showing long term warming. More on Mars...
  • Neptune's orbit is 164 years so current brightening is a seasonal response (Neptune's southern hemisphere is heading into summer). More on Neptune...
  • Triton's warming is due to the moon approaching an extreme southern summer, a season that occurs every few hundred years.
  • Jupiter's storms are fueled by the planet's own internal heat (the sun's energy 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. More on Jupiter...
  • Pluto's warming consists of two observations 14 years apart noting a difference in atmospheric thickness which implies warming - scientists are unable to explain why yet. But considering Pluto's orbit is equivalent to 248 Earth years, this says nothing about climate change. It's like saying Earth is warming when comparing winter to summer. Plus Pluto is more than 30 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth is. If the Sun were warming up enough to affect Pluto at that vast distance, it would blowtorch the Earth.

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Comments

  1. You realize that the argument, Jupiter is heated from within and only receives a small fraction of the energy from the sun that the Earth does, depends upon that 4% of energy being incapable of driving weather. We know this to be false from your own report regarding Neptune.
    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.
  2. Philippe Chantreau at 20:44 PM on 14 September, 2007
    Papertiger, your comment about Jupiter is in disagreement with research conducted by Gierasch (summary and comment readable on space.com), and several other teams.

    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.
  3. Phil,

    Here is the first two sentences from Gierasch
    "The energy source driving Jupiter's active meteorology is not understood. There are two main candidates: a poorly understood internal heat source and sunlight."

    Doesn't sound like he has extensively analyzed the Jovian storms to me.
    Further on he says,
    We estimate that the total vertical transport of heat by storms like the one observed here is of the same order as the planet's internal heat source. We therefore conclude that moist convection-similar to large clusters of thunderstorm cells on the Earth-is a dominant factor in converting heat flow into kinetic energy in the jovian atmosphere.

    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?
    [ Response: I think the point of the "is not understood" is that his paper sheds some light on Jupiter's meteorology. Also, there is water on Jupiter. Ingersoll 2000 says "We estimate, based on the inferred abundance of water in the deep atmosphere that the base of the water cloud is at 6 bars. From the base to the top of the cloud clusters the vertical distance is 80 km, or 0.1% of Jupiter's radius. Water is the principal agent of cloud electrication, as the other condensates are thought to be less abundant than water." ]
  4. I have heard discussion about ammonia clouds (being imaged for the first time and such). What is the conductivity of ammonia as compared to water? As I remember it, water is only a conductor due to impurities.
    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.
  5. Uranus has just passed into the equinox of its orbit where the whole of the planet is receiving sunshine evenly, as opposed to just the one pole getting continuous sunlight. So of course it is going to cool down on the poles.

    By the way, you left out Saturn and Enceladus on your list of planets or moons undergoing climate change.
  6. Philippe Chantreau at 16:10 PM on 20 September, 2007
    What "local" climate statistics do you use to justify the assertion that Saturn or any other outer SS planet is undergoing climate change? The IPCC definition of climate for Earth involves a 30 years period. I'm sure you know what kind of time period that translates into for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune or Pluto (respectively 356, 884, 2522, 4947 and 7435 years, give or take).

    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.
  7. Philippe Chantreau at 01:54 AM on 25 September, 2007
    Rereading through Papertiger posts, I thought it would be interesting to address the issue of water on Jupiter. Here is what I found in 10 minutes of straight, basic googling. Observations by the Galileo probe in orbit around the planet led to more information on this subject than the atmospheric probe, which entered over a very dry, cloudless area. This release gives the skinny: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7136/abs/nature05718.html
    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.

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