Well, there is a possibility other than the sun:
Posted on 04/27/2007 8:29:45 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Mars is a very windy place--so windy, in fact, that bright, oxidized martian soil is being scoured away by martian winds and dust devils to reveal darker, sub-surface soil with the end result of making the whole planet warmer. Mars is experiencing its own brand of climate change. Is this related to planet earth's greenhouse gas driven climate change? No. Is understanding the process important for our understanding of how planets evolve and change over time? Absolutely.
In early April of this year, a young Carl Sagan Center Principal Investigator named Lori Fenton, together with her colleagues at NASA Ames Research Center and the USGS in Flagstaff Arizona, published an article in the journal Nature revealing the phenomenon of the rise in the martian global temperature over the past 20 years. The rise, less that 2? for both surface and air temperature, is still significant from a geologic perspective.
The mechanism for the warming is due to the change in brightness, or "albedo" of the martian surface. The light, bright, oxidized martian surface soil reflects a significant amount of solar radiation, tending to keep Mars cool, just as wearing white on a hot summer's day is cooling. The darker, more absorbent subsurface soil, revealed after a windstorm or dust devil passes through on Mars, retains more heat, just as wearing dark clothes will on that same hot summer's day here on earth. The result of more exposed dark soil is that the temperature of Mars has gone up between one and two degrees over the last two decades.
Such a change is very intriguing and has never before been seen on any planet. The martian atmosphere is significantly thinner than that on earth. It's similar to what is found on our home planet at about 100,000 feet. Even so, the winds that result from the movement of even such a thin atmosphere are clearly strong enough to have a profound impact on the planet. Comparative planetologists and climate modelers will be monitoring Mars closely for the next 20 years and beyond, trying to discern if there is some sort of pattern to the changes and if the trend seems to be continuing. The truth is, we have only begun to monitor and record such data and are just beginning to track changes as they unfold.
Mars dust devils have been in space news before now. In fact, the Mars Rover twins, Spirit and Opportunity, owe their lives to the quixotic martian winds. Gusts of wind and dust devils pass over the solar arrays on the intrepid robotic explorers just often enough to scour away the ubiquitous martian dust from the surface of their mission prolonging solar arrays and sweep away the dust build-up, allowing the 4 year old batteries to recharge. This helpful process was completely unforeseen.
With new high resolution instruments on Mars, thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and advanced landers and rovers in the pipeline with Phoenix Scout and Mars Science Laboratory due to launch in the next few years, we will continue to get information on martian winds and weather and discover just what else is gone with the wind.
Global warming, where no man has gone before.
It wonder how you are supposed to buy a carbon offset for that ???
Just another way to deny the solar effects on our own planet.
Is Algore aware of this? Someone must tell him … he needs to get on this universal problem right away!
Save us Algore! Only you can save us! I genuflect to your god like ability to save mankind from all environmental evils.
Send $99.95 to my paypal account, and I will sell you one of my Martian Carbon Offsets.
.....Bob
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OK so a change in albedo is causing Martian warming. Now what has happened in the last two decades to cause the increase in wind that is changing the albedo? Maybe an increase in solar output?
:)
I’ll bet this is a married chicom operative propagandizing so the US will bear the brundt of chinas polution and energy inefficiency. Make Unk pay... he’s got plenty of money!
Let’s see the dims turn down the thermosat on the Sun! Since everything the left promotes is a lie, we are all probably facing a very frozen future... They may want to hold off on that turning the thermostat down. We may actually need the heat to survive the coming ice age.
BTW, NASA has released a study showing that our entire Solar Sysytem is warming due to increased solar Activity. Neptune was even mentioned... Like I said... chicom operative working for a US agency... not out of the question.
LLS
Any day now Al will be offering acres on Mars as an “offset”.
So do people grasp what they trying to set up here the stat of a new line... The man made global warming crowd has a problem .. Mars is also warming up... that points not to man made, but to a common source of warming for both.. the Sun...causing any warming and showing man made global warming is a lie
So now the "Correct Thinking" scientist must add an extra party line to the dogma.... sure Mars is also warming... but is just a total coincidence.. totally unrelated...nothing to see her ... move along... don't allow any questing of new eco-religion dogma it's MAN MADE global warming on earth
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.
In fact it’s cold as hell...
Elton John, 1972
so... Mars has been in the state it is in now for roughly 3 billion years but this process is only now making it warm? Earlier articles mention how a warmer Mars means more storms (and more exposed dark surface) in a vicious cycle. They want us to believe that a dramatic rise in temperature on Mars has nothing to do a simultaneous rise here? It’s due solely to dust devils? Seems to me that such a cycle could only have its equilibrium upset enough to result in a dramatic temperature rise by some large new input, like a change the sun’s output...
Bingo. What is causing the dust storms? Odd they should start now.
“Just another way to deny the solar effects on our own planet.”
You got it. You got to wonder where these folks thought process started. We know global warming is manmade = some cause on the planet, find cause on Mars, what could it be......
Ping!
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