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Global Warming on Mars: A Mere Coincidence

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The planet Mars it seems has heated up a half degree since 1970 just like the Earth has. Its southern ice cap is melting just as the northern glaciers are melting on Earth. But it’s all just a big coincidence. Nothing to see here folks. It’s not the sun getting warmer heating both Earth and Mars alike to the same degree. Famed climatologist and inventor-of-the-internet Al Gore says it’s all your fault. Move along now.

Climate change hits Mars

Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.

Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker.

When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, eventually radiating that heat back to warm the thin Martian atmosphere: lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. The temperature differences between the two are thought to be stirring up more winds, and dust, creating a cycle that is warming the planet.

Comments
And now getting back to fun and games, we find that what D.Scott said is actually the case. Even IF Gore had conributed MASSIVE loads of money to the development and implementation of the Net (and he did not), it would mean no more than to say that being a funder of the NEA makes me an art professional or one who "brings art to the people." Come to think of it, the NEA dosen't bring art to "the people" either. But still... Call Gore's situation/statement an urban legend if you like, but he's ridden this horse for full effect. Now he rides global warming, on Earth and elsewhere, it seems.Wakefield Tolbert
May 3, 2007
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Not only on Mars! Global warming belongs to the most of solar system planets and moons: http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/05/global-warming-on-jupiter.htmlklauslange
May 2, 2007
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Getting back on topic *AHEM*, the part that we're all missing is that the Mars exploration missions (going all the way back to Viking) are the real cause of warming on the red planet. You'll recall that the first Mars missions we were told about happened in the 1970's, right around the time the warming started. Thus, the answer is simple. The scientists knew that the earth was warming and, pre-emptively sent equipment to Mars to artificially warm the planet so that, 30 years later, they would have a handy scapegoat to deflect criticism of global warming and allow the warming to continue. This way, they can continue to fund their budding carbon offsets business empire. The ScubaredneckThe Scubaredneck
May 1, 2007
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grendelkhan: the World Wide Web was developed in a Swiss lab, by a Brit, assisted by a Belgian.
I understood/interpreted PaV to be referring to the development of the World Wide Web by the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee (assisted by Belgian Robert Cailliau), which included the development (initially by Berners-Lee) of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (http) and the HyperText Markup Language (html). I realize that PaV may not have been remembering all the details exactly, but I strongly agree with PaV that the impact of the Web/http/html for the Internet was huge. Before then, most people would not have even known what an "Internet" was, even though it had existed for decades. Along with the contribution of Win95 (see post 7), the development of the web in the mid to later 90's lead to an explosion of attention, interest, and use. Apart from the web, the Internet would have remained largely a useful technical tool for a narrow audience with a much slower uptake by the society at large. Most people treat the Web and the Internet as being interchangeable terms, but that is only because the Internet was invisible until the Web came along.ericB
May 1, 2007
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Yes, PaV, because why should you bother looking it up yourself when it's so much more fun to make assumptions that fall in line with your beliefs.
And, from what I remember, what made the internet the internet, was the scientist in England that came up with a language so that, no matter the format, anything could be posted onto the “net” that existed at the time.
No. Just... no. I can't figure out what you're talking about, but (a) the internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was developed in the US, as part of ARPANET, and (b) the World Wide Web was developed in a Swiss lab, by a Brit, assisted by a Belgian. But neither of these things allowed "anything [to] be posted", "no matter the format"--you could host files in any format on FTP servers, for instance, before the web came around. What are you talking about?grendelkhan
May 1, 2007
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Call me a cynic, but I bet if you look around, you'll find that Al Gore pushed the expansion of fiber optics because it favored one of his campaign contributors. And, from what I remember, what made the internet the internet, was the scientist in England that came up with a language so that, no matter the format, anything could be posted onto the "net" that existed at the time.PaV
April 30, 2007
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ajl: We started sending our exploration vehicles up there. We have the original Pathfinder, and now the other two recent ones. Introduction of these three vehicles obviously correlate with the increase in temperature.
You may be onto something there. Earlier, someone else pointed out this article. Note that they also include an important alternate explanation at the end. Someone else also pointed out earlier that other parts of the solar system are warming as well, but of course there are alternate explanations given for every one. An amazing coincidence.ericB
April 30, 2007
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DaveScot: Gore didn’t take the initiative in creating the internet either.
Notice also that even in the supporting statements of Vint Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, they never claim he "took the initiative in creating the Internet". Rather, they say
"Gore’s initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet"
Without quantifying it, Gore may justifiably deserve some credit for making some sort of contribution to an Internet that already existed and was "still-evolving", but he has become the object of jokes due to attempting to inflate his role -- in this case to initiative on "creating the Internet". DaveScot is on target that the claim is an inflated one.ericB
April 30, 2007
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As for joking, y’might check out today’s Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder.Rude
April 30, 2007
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"Regardless of the validity of your other points, the “inventor-of-the-internet Al Gore” dig is unwarranted." It's just a joke man.shaner74
April 30, 2007
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It's rumored that Walmart already had a store on Mars before the Rovers landed. Walmart is always a popular scapegoat. Walmart caused global warming on Mars. Yeah, that's it. That's the ticket.DaveScot
April 30, 2007
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Gore didn't take the initiative in creating the internet either. It has been around since the 1960's as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency Network or later just called ARPANET. Mosaic wasn't the first web browser and before Mosaic was released the internet boom was already well underway with The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog being the seminal mass media book on it. As someone who was involved in the evolution of computer networking since the early 1980's I can tell you the single greatest advance in bringing the internet to the masses was Windows 95 which was the first O/S which had plug & play connectivity to the internet. Getting online before Win95 was something that was challenging even for computer experts and only the highest performance personal computers before that time had the power to handle the graphics and other overheads of web browsers. Gore was pretty late on the scene in December 1991 although he can take some credit for helping stimulate the buildout of U.S. fiber optic backbones which, while already well underway in 1992 by telephone and cable companies, was greatly accelerated during the second half of the 1990's after Win95 made it so easy to get connected that any idiot with a phone line and new personal computer could do it. I had broadband internet at work since 1993 and in 1997 had a cable modem in my home as a participant in Time-Warner's RoadRunner rollout. The "information superhighway" was first used in the popular press by Newsweek Magazine in 1983 long before Gore glommed onto it and tried to take credit for it. DaveScot
April 30, 2007
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"We need to stop driving our cars here on earth, and NASA needs to shut down the Mars rover before its too late for all of us." :-) that's precious! But seriously, the problem we face is one of communications with the public at large. The truth always wins in the end but it doesn't prosper in times like these without the help of lots of big $$$ advertising. ;-) All this climate change stuff is widely publicized by the "it's our fault" people. Q: Why do all the moron scientists get the best publicity? A: Because there are more morons than anything else in science just like in every other domain. ;-)Borne
April 30, 2007
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very interesting. Notice how the warming trend began in the 1970's. And what happened during the 1970's on Mars you ask? We started sending our exploration vehicles up there. We have the original Pathfinder, and now the other two recent ones. Introduction of these three vehicles obviously correlate with the increase in temperature. Therefore DaveScot, its not the sun that is causing the warming, but rather man-made vehicles, both on Mars and on Earth. We need to stop driving our cars here on earth, and NASA needs to shut down the Mars rover before its too late for all of us.ajl
April 30, 2007
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Regardless of the validity of your other points, the "inventor-of-the-internet Al Gore" dig is unwarranted. In a CNN interview on March 9, 1999 Gore stated "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet." He was misquoted in some media reports stating that Gore claimed he "invented the internet". In response to the misinformed controversy surrounding this incident, two of the people who really did invent the internet -- Vint Cerf and Robert E. Kahn -- issued the following statement:
As the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time. Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
Source: Wikipediasagebrush gardener
April 30, 2007
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I think it is interesting to note that naturalism presumes and expects all sorts of basic parameters for life, such as temperature, to vary wildly. Yet the anthropic hypothesis has been strongly validated in finding that temperature has "somehow" managed to stay within a surprisingly thin range, that makes life possible, throughout the history of the earth.bornagain77
April 30, 2007
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Our sin is so great it's affecting other planets!angryoldfatman
April 30, 2007
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I read this article the other day and had to laugh, "Mars is warming too! But relax folks, there's no connection here" It's some reporter's silly attempt at damage control. If Mars is warming by the same amount, I think it's safe to say man-made global warming is a joke. I've also always thought that if MMGW turns out to be bogus, it's going to devastate the scientific community, because the public is going to lose trust, and a lot of funding may go extinct. It also seems belief in global warming and Darwinism go hand in hand...hmm...shaner74
April 30, 2007
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