This Mars "warming up" is a red herring. The source of that idea is one man
but it has been seized upon by the GW deniers as the basis of the latest in
a series of last minute revelations that they have trotted out - designed to
protect the status quo and muddy the waters. Most planetary climate
scientists say the idea that Mars is warming because of increased solar
output is rubbish - they lay the real blame at the door of Martian orbital
variations (wobbles). Try this excellent website for a bit of realism to
counter the (possibly deliberate) misinformation that is fooling the
wishfully thinking.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192
Yes, there really were warnings about precipitating an ice age from legit
climate scientists (and environmentalists) in the 70's. This is often
dragged out as some sort of proof that climate scientists and
environmentalists got it wrong then and are now saying something completely
opposite. Nothing could be further from the truth. Before I make my point I
have to say that S.Fred Singer, one of the loudest and most "eminent" of the
GW deniers, originally denied that global warming was happening because he
claimed that measurements of temperature taken by other scientists were in
error because of the "urban heat island" effect (measurements were elevated
because of city development). Now that the evidence that GW is really
happening is virtually unassailable, he has published a book claiming that
OK, it is happening, but it's all down to natural causes and that it will be
good for us anyway. Remember what happened to the punk who felt lucky in
Dirty Harry?
Back to the ice age theory. This was that as the long term cycles suggest
that we are heading towards another natural ice age, the emission of acid
gases (which form nuclei that generate increased cloud cover) and
particulate matter (soot) in vehicle exhaust and smoke stack emissions would
cause a global cooling effect because of the reflection of solar radiation
before it got to Earth thus creating a runaway feedback effect of increased
albedo leading to more ice and snow etc. As far as I recall there was very
little consideration given to greenhouse gases at the time. One of the
ironies of all this is that the cooling effect of the acid gases and
particulates probably helped to mask the effect of global warming from the
same fossil fuels (particularly coal) that were contributing to the increase
in CO2 - potentially explaining why initial predictions of rising
temperature were somewhat out.
The "hockey stick" graph was mentioned as having been refuted - it's not as
simple as that. Current thinking is that the original graph had problems
with the methodolgy chosen and the error estimations but still the overall
graph shape remains the same.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
Nick Palmer
