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Climate Catastrophes In The Solar System
www.sciencedaily.com ^ | April 30, 2007 | European Space Agency

Posted on 04/30/2007 7:57:26 AM PDT by Maelstorm

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Here it comes again. Raising the specter of Venus and Mars. Venus and Mars both are significantly different than Earth. Venus appears to have went through a period of intense volcanism and it has completely been resurfaced. It is not known what caused this but whatever did it most surely could not be attributed to a minuscule increase in CO2. Something truly disastrous happened to Venus and it wasn't the simpleton's view of a race of Venusians cooking their planet with CO2.

Mars on the other hand is much smaller than Earth and has a much thiner atmosphere. More sunlight gets through but it is farther away from the sun so receives less than half the sunlight that Earth does at the surface and it has less clouds to trap the energy which makes it very cold.

Mars currently is going through a Global Warming of its own and it would be interesting to see if Venus has also had an increase in temperature. If all the planets are showing an up tick there may be a reason to believe that an outside factor namely the sun is responsible for much of the warming. (It was hard to keep a straight face writing that) No, the sun responsible for warming? Now get the hell out of here! lol

The one thing that we do know is that the Earth has been significantly warmer in the past. So much so that no ice caps existed at the poles and we did not face a run away green house effect. Earth has also underwent extreme levels of volcanism and that didn't do it either. Earth has been hit by extinction level impacts from space and that didn't trigger a run away green house effect. If those things didn't do it we certainly aren't going to. We may wipe ourselves out and even most of the life on the planet (though I doubt that) but Earth will recover and survive as if we never existed at all.

1 posted on 04/30/2007 7:57:27 AM PDT by Maelstorm
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To: Maelstorm

All that manufacturing on Venus and Mars sure f***ed them up!


2 posted on 04/30/2007 7:59:14 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
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To: Maelstorm

I guess those Martian and Venusian SUVs were very active 5 billion years ago...


3 posted on 04/30/2007 7:59:27 AM PDT by JRios1968 (This tagline brought to you by courtesy of Happygrl)
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To: Maelstorm

It is still President Bush’s fault!


4 posted on 04/30/2007 8:01:42 AM PDT by BillT
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To: Maelstorm
Premise #1: Climate of Venus suffered catastrophe millions of years ago, and the planet lost it's water. Using advanced computer models, scientists are discovering that climates are much more complicated than they had thought.

Premise #2: Climate of Mars suffered catastrophe millions of years ago, and the planet lost it's atmosphere. Using advanced computer models, scientists are discovering that climates are much more complicated than they had thought.

Premise #3: The Earth has seen temperatures go up a degree or two over the last hundred years or so.

Conclusion: Mankind is destroying our planet through industrialization and we need to dismantle our economy and live in harmony with nature.

5 posted on 04/30/2007 8:06:05 AM PDT by ClearCase_guy (Enoch Powell was right.)
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To: Maelstorm
From what scientists know now, it is possible that Venus and Mars started out a lot like Earth.

Simply a lie. We do not know how either Venus or Mars started. Just another GW pantload.

6 posted on 04/30/2007 8:06:13 AM PDT by pabianice
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To: Maelstorm
I don't get it.

Were there SUVs on Mars and Venus?

7 posted on 04/30/2007 8:10:36 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Islam is a religion of peace, and Muslims reserve the right to kill anyone who says otherwise.)
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To: pabianice

Just more hyping of the BIG SCAM...create the chaos then the Dems are here to fix it...of course at taxpayer expense....(do we know these clown carpetbaggers, or what?)


8 posted on 04/30/2007 8:11:24 AM PDT by EagleUSA
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To: Maelstorm

People who don’t believe in “martian-made” and “venetian-made” global warming are no different than Holocrust deniers.


9 posted on 04/30/2007 8:14:24 AM PDT by almcbean
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To: Maelstorm
First the authors say that the planets heated up becuase of the sun.

Then they say:

"As Earth warms in response to manmade pollution, it risks the same fate."

If the warming before was caused by the sun - why is it such a stretch to think that it may be this time also?

10 posted on 04/30/2007 8:14:27 AM PDT by Tokra (I think I'll retire to Bedlam.)
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To: ClearCase_guy
I have always wondered if the atmosphere of Mars does not lay mainly underground these days. Since the planet did not develop life to keep the cycle of evaporation and rainfall going...things just wound down to what you see today.

This does emphasis the importance of learning about our neighbors though.
11 posted on 04/30/2007 8:16:18 AM PDT by P-40 (Al Qaeda was working in Iraq. They were just undocumented.)
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To: pabianice

Note the weasel word “possible”.


12 posted on 04/30/2007 8:17:14 AM PDT by randog (What the...?!)
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To: Crow
It's the 'tissue', stupid!

13 posted on 04/30/2007 8:19:00 AM PDT by beeber (stuned)
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To: Chi-townChief

Where I’m sitting was under hundreds of feet of ice about 10,000 years ago (the Columbian Glacier)and in looking out the window I see no glacier. Obviously there was very significant global warming 10,000 years ago that melted all these glaciers. There was also significant global cooling to have caused them in the first place. All of this global warming and cooling without any possible human intervention. Apparently there is some other climate change mechanism other than that espoused by St. Algore.


14 posted on 04/30/2007 8:26:40 AM PDT by The Great RJ ("Mir we bleiwen wat mir sin" or "We want to remain what we are." ..Luxembourg motto)
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To: Maelstorm

This isn’t so complicated.

Venus is too close to the sun.

Mars is too far from the sun.


15 posted on 04/30/2007 8:42:56 AM PDT by OK
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To: Maelstorm

“Water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas and it caused the planet to heat-up even more. This is turn caused more water to evaporate and led to a powerful positive feedback response known as the runaway greenhouse effect”

OK. So how in the world did the Earth recover from the balmy days of the dinosaurs, when there were no icecaps and the oceans were apparently well over 100 deg. F in places? There was absolutely a LOT more H20 in the atmosphere then...

(Possible hint: There is no such thing as 101% humidity.)


16 posted on 04/30/2007 8:45:21 AM PDT by PreciousLiberty
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To: Maelstorm
What now?

Conservative Capitalist Christian Republicans are responsible for Galactic and Universal Warming?

17 posted on 04/30/2007 8:48:30 AM PDT by TexasCajun
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To: ClearCase_guy
"When volcanos stopped on Mars the atmosphere stopped renewing itself."

This is almost right. Since Mars is so much smaller than the Earth, its iron core has cooled and hardened. That killed the volcanoes but more importantly, it killed the magnetic field, which is what protected Mars from most of the solar wind streaming constantly from the Sun. That solar wind slowly blew away the Mars atmosphere into space.

The Sun's heat varies by less than .5 degrees over the last million years. But the Sun's magnetic field, which stretches to all the inner planets, is quite variable. When the Sun is more active, during the height of the sunspot cycle, it's magnetic field shields the Earth from slightly more cosmic rays.

On the quiet side of the Sun's magnetic cycle--no sunspots = less magnetic field--more cosmic rays get to the Earth's atmosphere, which are powerful seeds for cloud formation. More average cloudcover acts to cool the Earth, even to the point of a mini ice age like we had 200-300 years ago when sunspot activity virtually ceased.

As we've said, this climatology stuff is quite complex; much deeper than the simplistic "global warming" hypothesis that beguiled me and everyone else thirty years ago.

18 posted on 04/30/2007 8:52:51 AM PDT by DJtex
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To: The Great RJ

Not only that, but there much geologic evidence that the glaciers melted quite rapidly. We have many high hills in Utah that have large, rounded boulders scattered on hilltops, rocks that were deposited there when glaciers on nearby mountains quickly melted and caused great floods that carried the boulders along for miles and left them stranded atop the hills. So what caused the fast temperature rise and glacier meltdown? The sun did it all by itself. I’m convinced that the Anasazi indians did not drive SUVs at the time.


19 posted on 04/30/2007 8:54:16 AM PDT by Paulus Invictus
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To: Maelstorm
What happened on these two worlds is very different but either would be equally disastrous for Earth.

Arguably all three planets are equally subject to the effects of a single cause, solar heating. So why, in the case of Earth, do we insist that human activity is the principle cause of climate change? Jeepers, it appears that Jupiter and even Pluto have heated up in fairly recent times -- that is, at a time when solar activity has been off the scales....

Of course, there's not much science can do about solar activity: We just have to grin and bear it.

Of course, to acknowledge that fact doesn't provide much of a rationale for applying for a research grant geared to "fixing" global warming!

It seems we need to be doing more research on the sun....

Thanks for posting this, Maelstrom!

20 posted on 04/30/2007 8:58:07 AM PDT by betty boop ("Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." -- A. Einstein.)
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