Climate Progress

Yes, the next person poised to enter the presidential race has bought the disinformation campaign hook, line, and sinker. From the Paul Harvey radio show (audio here):

Plutonic Warming

By Fred Thompson

Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto.

NASA says the Martian South Pole’s “ice cap” has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto.

This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle.

Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder. Nah, I guess we shouldn’t even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There’s a consensus.

Ask Galileo.

Stunning. I have previously debunked this bit of denyer disinformation and will repeat the key facts below. What is most sad to me is the ease with this otherwise intelligent man believes the entire scientific community somehow failed to examine the contribution of the sun to recent global warming.

His Law and Order alter ego D.A. Arthur Branch would not be so easily duped. He would demand evidence. Here it is:

Mars does appear to be experiencing short-term regional warming, not long-term global warming, as the climate scientists of Realclimate.org have explained.

Jupiter is not experiencing global warming, but it is poised to experience regional climate change, “getting warmer near the equator and cooler at the poles,” as a U.C. Berkeley scientist noted last year.

As for Pluto, an MIT article explains “Pluto’s orbit is much more elliptical than that of the other planets, and its rotational axis is tipped by a large angle relative to its orbit. Both factors could contribute to drastic seasonal changes.” One of the scientists involved in the research explained, Pluto’s warming was “likely not connected with that of the Earth. The major way they could be connected is if the warming was caused by a large increase in sunlight. But the solar constant–the amount of sunlight received each second–is carefully monitored by spacecraft, and we know the sun’s output is much too steady to be changing the temperature of Pluto“– or of the Earth, for that matter: “The sunspot record and neutron monitor data,” as Realclimate.org explains, “show that solar activity has not increased since the 1950s and is therefore unlikely to be able to explain the recent warming.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 7:41 pmand is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.