Global Warming

On Mars.

Apparently, so much CO2 is being produced on Earth that some of it is leaking to Mars and triggering global warming of that planet as well.

The article also makes another interesting point:

"It is no secret that increased solar irradiance warms Earth's oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."

I'm no global warming denier - I just think there is a lot of reasonable doubt.  And the politicization of the issue - complete with a campaign to stifle dissent - is appalling.

How can it be that in 1975 we got it so totally wrong... and now we have it absolutely and unquestionably right?

I'm inclined to side with former Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger (from WaPo):

What has concerned me in recent years is that belief in the greenhouse effect, persuasive as it is, has been transmuted into the dominant forcing mechanism affecting climate change -- more or less to the exclusion of other forcing mechanisms. The CO 2 /climate-change    relationship has hardened into orthodoxy -- always a worrisome sign -- an orthodoxy that searches out heretics and seeks to punish them.

Ominously, Schlesinger wrote this well before the resease of the popular propaganda flick "An Inconvenient Truth."

He also points out better than I can:

In the Third Assessment by the International Panel on Climate Change, recent climate change is attributed primarily to human causes, with the usual caveats regarding uncertainties. The record of the past 150 years is scanned, and three forcing mechanisms are highlighted: anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases, volcanoes and the 11-year sunspot cycle. Other phenomena are represented poorly, if at all, and generally are ignored in these models. Because only the past 150 years are captured, the vast swings of the previous thousand years are not analyzed. The upshot is that any natural variations, other than volcanic eruptions, are overshadowed by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

Most significant: The possibility of long-term cycles in solar activity is neglected because there is a scarcity of direct measurement. Nonetheless, solar irradiance and its variation seem highly likely to be a principal cause of long-term climatic change. Their role in longer-term weather cycles needs to be better understood.

Well, yeah.

Comments

[David Gaw]

The obvious explanation, since we know that Mars is a terraforming target, is that the government has already started in secret. After all, if the Bush Administration was able to fake a moon landing 31 years before it stole the 2000 election, sneaking up there to destroy the Martian environment must be easy by comparison.