Since we know there are no SUVs and coal-fired electric power plants on Mars, climate change on the Red Planet must be a natural phenomenon unrelated to man's buring of fossil fuels, argue Earth-bound global warming skeptics. But is Mars really in the grips of global warming?
You're looking at a synthetic image created using "Virtual Presence in Space" software developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Assembled from a mosaic of photographs taken by the Martian rover 'Spirit', JPL programmers placed a computer generated image of the solar-powered electric vehicle on the flank of "Husband Hill" on what would be the 454th Martian day.
Since both Spirit and Opportunity, the latter of which has completed its first full Martian year, are powered by electricity, recharged by the Sun some 227 million miles away, it should be pretty obvious that they aren't contributing to global climate change on the Red Planet.
So what is, asks terrestrial climate change skeptics?
One commentator on ChronWatch poked fun at the notion of global warming here on Earth by suggesting that since Mars is experiencing global warming without any human presence other than a handful of tiny space probes, there must be another explanation for it since it appears Martians aren't driving SUVs or burning coal as we are doing here on Earth.
He wrote, "When I read in a prominent scientific magazine that there is clear evidence of global warming on Mars, I became angry. This evidence proves that dry ice in the Martian south pole is retreating about 10 feet per year. Clearly, for decades, Martians have ignored the fact that the emission of fossil fuels on the planet has created a problem similar to that of their neighbors on Earth."
He then recommended sending Al Gore and all the other climate change scientists to Mars to study the problem.
Curious, I did a little checking up. Is Mars really experiencing global warming? Since it can't be coming from our twin solar-powered rovers, then what's causing it?
It turns out Mars is, in fact, cooling, not warming. Huh?
Yep. During the 1970's, Mars experienced hemispheric-scale dust storms which acted as a solar heat trapping blanket. As the storms gradually subsided, the planet begun to cool, though there are regional variations, especially at the poles.
Here's what RealClimate.Org reports:
"Recently, there have been some suggestions that 'global warming' has been observed on Mars. These are based on observations of regional change around the South Polar Cap, but seem to have been extended into a 'global' change, and used by some to infer an external common mechanism for global warming on Earth and Mars. But this is incorrect reasoning and based on faulty understanding of the data."
They explain that because of Mar's un-Earthlike properties from the length of its solar year (687 days) to its precession of 170,000 years to its tenuously thin atmosphere, the planet is much more susceptible to climatic variations than Earth.
"Since Mars has no oceans and a thin atmosphere, the thermal inertia is low, and Martian climate is easily perturbed by external influences, including solar variations. However, solar irradiance is now well measured by satellite and has been declining slightly over the last few years as it moves towards a solar minimum".
While the Martian South Pole may be experiencing some warming, expanding this to encompass the entire planet and then using that to justify the continued burning of fossil fuels on this planet is absurd in the extreme.
RealClimate warns that, "inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing".
Translation? Martian global warming and cooling are totally unrelated to the dynamics driving the phenomenon here on Earth. And isn't curious that the people who question global warming on Earth are so willing to believe it's happening on Mars?
RealClimate concludes, "There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth..."
Coming back to NASA's wonderful little electric vehicles -- Spirit and Opportunity -- they were only intended to operate for 90 days and yet these battery-powered wonders continue to perform spectacularly after two Earth years in one of the harshest environments imaginable. Think what that kind of technology could do here on planet Earth if only we'd stop playing the denial game.