Posted on 03/08/2008 12:09:05 PM PST by Exton1
If CO2 is such a powerful greenhouse gas, why has Mars, with an atmosphere of 95% CO2 not warmed any more than earth, with it's .3% CO2? With the Martian polar ice caps melting, that should pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere, resulting in even more warming. That it's not happening says to me that CO2 ain't all it's cracked up to be as a global greenhouse gas.
Without energy from the sun, the temperature of earth would be a few degrees north of absolute zero, so to say the sun has no influence over global warming is absurd.
"The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth." Well, duh! The two planets are totally different. What they do have in common is the warming energy from the sun.
I think the fact that both planets are showing basically the same temperature increase in spite of their huge climatic and atmospheric differences points to the sun as the major culprit here.
Measurements made in 1976 by the Viking landers established the exact composition of the atmosphere on Mars as 95.3% carbon dioxide, 2.7% nitrogen, and 1.6% argon, with smaller amounts of oxygen (0.15%) and water vapor (0.03%).
(Excerpt) Read more at daviddarling.info ...
Sorry to burst your 2010 fantasy.;-)
Definition of a planet according to the INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL UNION
I’d let work itself out.
Water and CO2 share similar properties in terms of thermal capacities.
Too many opinions and not much in the way of genuine evidence in this whole climate change ‘industry’. The truth is that a person will believe whatever suits their preconceptions unless they are genuinely willing to change - and that is indeed a rare thing for a creature as arrogant as a human being. Water and CO2 share similar properties in terms of thermal capacities. They are each tri-atomic molecules with similar ‘triangular’ structures and the same number of degrees of freedom in terms of storing energy quanta. However, there is about 100 times as much water in the atmosphere as there is CO2 so a 1% drop in atmospheric water would have a similar thermal effect to completely removing ALL CO2 from the air, and likewise a 1% increase in atmospheric water would have a similar effect to doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere. Puts it into perspective, huh? Yes there is climate change but be damned if CO2 is doing it.
Water Vapor at that same temp has a specific heat capacity of 1.864 kJ/kgK.
So the specific heat capacity of water vapor is more than double that of CO2, and WV absorbs more of the energy from the Solar spectrum than CO2.
When you boil it all down, WV is 95% of the total of all greenhouse gases(natural and manmade), CO2 is around 3.62%.
After you separate out the natural sources of both you're looking at around .001% of WV, and .117% of CO2 are manmade with the grand total of all manmade greenhouse gases coming to .28%. Less than the natural variation of the system.
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Where’s Al Gore when you need him to clean up a carbon footprint?
He won’t do it himself, but he will sell you a carbon credit, which comes with a free broom — dustpan is extra.
Tourism.
"Come join the fifty million mile high club"...
Yeah, I know, out of phase with earth, orbit is elliptical, but what the hell, it's marketing.
Full Disclosure: see Asimov's Buy Jupiter!.
Cheers!
The presence of methane must mean there are cows on Mars!
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