Global Warming on Mars?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Alexander Cockburn:
Or take Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, of St. Petersburg's Pulkovo 
Astronomical Observatory. He says we're on a warming trend but that 
humans have little to do with it, the agent being a longtime change in 
the sun's heat. He says solar irradiance will fall within the next few 
years and we may face the beginning of an ice age. The Russian 
scientific establishment gave him a green light to use the nation's 
space station to measure global cooling.

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http://www.astronomy.com/ASY/CS/blogs/astronomy/archive/2007/03/21/333108.aspx

Extra! Extra! Global warming on Mars!

For 3 weeks, an angel and a devil have perched on my shoulders. The 
devil whispers in my left ear, "Blog about the global-warming-on-Mars 
thing! C'mon, it'll be fun!" The angel on my right shoulder says, "Don't 
do it! You can't win this one, bub."

OK, the devil wins. But, mind you, I will not use the following words: 
global-warming deniers; liberal climate-change agenda; Rush Limbaugh; Al 
Gore. That would be politics. We don't do politics; we do science. So I 
will talk about the latter.

On February 28, National Geographic online posted an article about a 
"controversial theory" that an increase in the Sun's energy output 
explains global warming, not the buildup of greenhouse gases like carbon 
dioxide.  The controversial theorist quoted in Habibullo Abdussamatov, 
head of space research at Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. 
Petersburg, Russia.

Abdussamatov says that "simultaneous warming" on Mars and Earth backs up 
his solar-warming theory. The logic: Earth is warming; Mars is warming; 
the common denominator on the two planets is the Sun; therefore the Sun 
must be causing the warming on both planets.

By the way, Abdussamatov doesn't go along with the greenhouse effect, 
either. The National Geographic article says that he does not believe 
carbon dioxide contributes much to climate change on Earth and nothing 
at all on Mars. To say this is at odds with prevailing scientific 
understanding would be an understatement. But let's not go there. Why 
consume your valuable time "proving" the greenhouse effect. I might as 
well offer evidence that the sky is blue, too, while I'm at it.

I was moved to write this blog after watching this "global warming on 
Mars" story spread like a virus across the blogosphere for 3 weeks. One 
thing became obvious after reading all the posts: political agendas, not 
facts, were in the driver's seat. Nobody seemed curious about 
Abdussamatov's data — if he has any — or what an actual living, 
breathing Mars researcher might have to say. Nobody even raised these 
questions.

Also absent was any attention to the obvious flaw in the "global warming 
on Mars" logic. On Earth, what we commonly refer to as global warming is 
a systematic pattern of climate change driven by a rise in the 
atmosphere's average temperature. It's supported by decades, if not 
centuries, of data, decades of climate modeling research, and endorsed 
by the most knowledgeable climate researchers in the world: the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC recently came 
to the consensus that 1) global climate change is happening and 2) 
humans are responsible for making much of this change happen because of 
stuff they do, like pumping enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the 
atmosphere.

And the "global warming" on Mars? Over a period of several years, Mars 
Global Surveyor images showed that the planet's south polar cap of 
frozen carbon dioxide has been thinning. This suggests the martian 
climate may be warming — at least at the south pole. The bloggers also 
mention research they say shows warming is also occurring on Triton, 
Pluto, and Jupiter.

But what does this mean? OK, I thought, maybe anti-global warming 
bloggers can't just e-mail a scientist and have any hope of getting an 
answer. So I did. I contacted Bruce Jakosky, a professor of geological 
science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Among many other 
things, Jakosky studies the evolution of the martian atmosphere and 
climate. Here is what he said in his e-mail:

"I've heard the argument and it is not a valid one.  The ‘global 
warming' on Mars is an observed transient effect that manifests itself 
as a decrease in one location of the covering of CO2 frost (as I 
understand the argument). The key issue is that it is a transient, not 
that it represents a monotonic warming ...

"Using the Mars data as an argument for a changing solar constant is 
absurd. We don't understand Mars well enough to make that case.  And, 
more importantly, we have direct measurements of the solar input to the 
Earth over a couple of decades now that show no such increase."

But you don't need a Ph.D. in Mars science to figure out that a pattern 
of warming in one region of Mars (the south pole) observed for a few 
years does not "global warming" make. It's comparing apples and oranges.

But, like I said, this isn't about science. It just reminds us that 
nothing — not even our beloved egg-headed planetary research — is immune 
from being turned into fuel for partisan political warfare.