Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming

National Geographic News ^

[WBL 1952]

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human- induced—cause.

Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

[GATOR NAVY]

The editor who selected this headline just can't quite let it go, can he?

I'm suprised to even see this coming from National Geographic considering they're on the front line of the "man is destroying the earth" argument. I've subscribed for years, but every issue now is battle between the articles that require a barf alert due to lefty politics of any kind and the truly informative politically neutral articles. The letters section keeps me going. For every moonbat that writes, there's usually a sanity check from someone else.

[rustbucket]

I looked at some NASA global temperature anomaly data I had archived back in 2002 from the site NASA data. Surprisingly, the data were fairly different than the current NASA data set at the same web site.

Here's how the old and new yearly average anomalies compare:

Jan-Dec global average anomalies reported in 2002 followed by average anomalies currently reported for same years.
1990 49 38
1991 44 35
1992 16 13
1993 19 14
1994 31 24
1995 45 38
1996 34 30
1997 38 40
1998 69 57
1999 41 33
2000 39 33
2001 52 48

All of a sudden 1998 is not the warmest year on record in the NASA data. Though I didn't show it above, 2005 is the warmest year in the current data set with an anomaly value of 63. Somebody has been adjusting the data to give different average values.

The NASA data table says that the data since 1981 have had outliers eliminated and the data made "homogeneous."

[secretagent]

Thanks. I will have to learn some terms and concepts, including outliers and the reasons for adjustment.

[rustbucket]

Without details of how the adjustment was made, I'm a bit skeptical of the change in the yearly averages.

There can be justifiable reasons for discarding or adjusting data. I just don't know how reasonable throwing out points at one extreme or the other (i.e., outliers) or massaging the data (i.e., making them more "homogeneous") was in this case.

Given the potential political and economic impact of global temperature data, I'd want to check into the justification for the changes before I gave the adjusted data a lot of credence.

[secretagent]

Yes.

[secretagent]

To this layman it sure seems dodgy after reading this:

The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature (SAT) Q. What exactly do we mean by SAT ? A. I doubt that there is a general agreement how to answer this question. Even at the same location, the temperature near the ground may be very different from the temperature 5 ft above the ground and different again from 10 ft or 50 ft above the ground. Particularly in the presence of vegetation (say in a rain forest), the temperature above the vegetation may be very different from the temperature below the top of the vegetation. A reasonable suggestion might be to use the average temperature of the first 50 ft of air either above ground or above the top of the vegetation. To measure SAT we have to agree on what it is and, as far as I know, no such standard has been suggested or generally adopted. Even if the 50 ft standard were adopted, I cannot imagine that a weather station would build a 50 ft stack of thermometers to be able to find the true SAT at its location.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html

Too bad we don't have a simple satellite measurement of heat emitted by the Earth.

[dirtbiker]

Well Manbearpig is half-man, half-bear, and half-pig. Al Gore is totally serial about stopping Manbearpig.

I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I come up with 3 halves!

But then again, Algore is getting bigger....

[secretagent]

Of interest? Over my head...

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1217#comments

[rustbucket]

Wow! Your link contained a link to an extended discussion about the manipulation of the data. See http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1142

I had archieved the data back in 2002 to try some Fourier analysis on it. I handn't noticed the difference in the old and new data until now. It seems from the discussion at the link above that it is quite a matter of concern. Many thanks for the link.

[secretagent]

Great!