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To: Maelstorm
Premise #1: Climate of Venus suffered catastrophe millions of years ago, and the planet lost it's water. Using advanced computer models, scientists are discovering that climates are much more complicated than they had thought.

Premise #2: Climate of Mars suffered catastrophe millions of years ago, and the planet lost it's atmosphere. Using advanced computer models, scientists are discovering that climates are much more complicated than they had thought.

Premise #3: The Earth has seen temperatures go up a degree or two over the last hundred years or so.

Conclusion: Mankind is destroying our planet through industrialization and we need to dismantle our economy and live in harmony with nature.

5 posted on 04/30/2007 8:06:05 AM PDT by ClearCase_guy (Enoch Powell was right.)
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To: ClearCase_guy
I have always wondered if the atmosphere of Mars does not lay mainly underground these days. Since the planet did not develop life to keep the cycle of evaporation and rainfall going...things just wound down to what you see today.

This does emphasis the importance of learning about our neighbors though.
11 posted on 04/30/2007 8:16:18 AM PDT by P-40 (Al Qaeda was working in Iraq. They were just undocumented.)
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To: ClearCase_guy
"When volcanos stopped on Mars the atmosphere stopped renewing itself."

This is almost right. Since Mars is so much smaller than the Earth, its iron core has cooled and hardened. That killed the volcanoes but more importantly, it killed the magnetic field, which is what protected Mars from most of the solar wind streaming constantly from the Sun. That solar wind slowly blew away the Mars atmosphere into space.

The Sun's heat varies by less than .5 degrees over the last million years. But the Sun's magnetic field, which stretches to all the inner planets, is quite variable. When the Sun is more active, during the height of the sunspot cycle, it's magnetic field shields the Earth from slightly more cosmic rays.

On the quiet side of the Sun's magnetic cycle--no sunspots = less magnetic field--more cosmic rays get to the Earth's atmosphere, which are powerful seeds for cloud formation. More average cloudcover acts to cool the Earth, even to the point of a mini ice age like we had 200-300 years ago when sunspot activity virtually ceased.

As we've said, this climatology stuff is quite complex; much deeper than the simplistic "global warming" hypothesis that beguiled me and everyone else thirty years ago.

18 posted on 04/30/2007 8:52:51 AM PDT by DJtex
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