For Heaven’s sake you dipsticks, it’s a Mars rover, to find out things about our neighboring planet. So what does The Guardian‘s James West feature?
“Nasa’s new rover will hunt for signs of martian climate change, and in doing so will shed light on what’s going on back home”
In one respect study of other planets’ climates can be very helpful, as in the seminal work of Sherwood B. Idso:
In CO2-induced global warming: a skeptic’s view of potential climate change, 1998, Idso describes no less than eight natural experiments from which he derived surface air temperature sensitivity factors ≈ 0.17 °C/(W/m2) inland and ≈ 0.09 °C/(W/m2) by the coast. For the polar regions he derives a figure of ≈ 0.2 °C/(W/m2) and for all other regions ≈ 0.09 °C/W/m2 for a global mean of ≈ 0.1 °C/(W/m2).
Significantly, Idso derived sensitivity figures in agreement for the world as we find it today at local, regional and planetary scales, over billions of years of the planet’s history and over our nearest celestial neighbors. Finding a relationship that holds over such physical and temporal scales to be mere coincidence is unlikely, to say the least, and thus inspires some confidence in the global mean value of ≈ 0.1 °C/(W/m2).
Climate models however do not use Idso’s cleverly derived sensitivity figures but rather the absurdly high 0.5 – 1.0 K/(W/m2) in accord with Hansen’s ridiculous guesstimation in Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb? naturalSCIENCE, August 1, 2003 (SciAm version here).
Can’t see a Mars rover changing that, can you?
Scientists have made great strides in predicting what will happen to Earth’s climate, but there is a fundamental problem: we only have one climate to test our hypotheses in. We can’t irreversibly hack Earth’s climate (by pumping it full of toxic gases, for example) to test whether our assumptions are right or wrong—that, obviously, would be disastrous for Earth’s inhabitants. That means climate models are loaded with historical and empirical data to make them function.
If only we could take the model to another planet to really test the underpinning physics.
Bingo. Curiosity, the car-sized mobile chemistry lab that dropped spectacularly onto the surface of Mars yesterday, will give scientists a rare chance to test their assumptions about how climate change works on Earth. It will hunt the surface of Mars for sediment to pick up and drop into its sophisticated onboard machinery, then send back critical insights into how the climate of Mars—once warmer, with rain, rivers, and deltas—has changed over billions of years, lashed by solar winds.
“You learn about how to understand an atmosphere by seeing different atmospheres,” said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist from Texas A&M University who is part of Curiosity’s climate team. “And the more we know about Mars’ atmosphere, the better we can really understand our own.”
Curiosity allows scientists to “break the model,” he said. “We find out much, much more about our place in the universe than we could know just by contemplating ourselves.”
All with the latest bells and whistles: “We can remotely look at a rock with a laser beam, vaporize it, and see what elements are in it,” Lemmon said in a telephone interview from Pasadena, the morning after the historic landing.
Mars atmosphere is totally alien to the Earth’s atmosphere and is a few million miles further away from the Sun than the Earth, lacks a magnetic field like the Earth’s, which scientists think is why Mars has little atmosphere, and scientists think there is something on Mars to provide clues to climate change on Earth?? WTF??
It would be funny if it was another part of NASA that finally put the last nail in the coffin of Hansen’s theories.
It is a sign of intellectual desperation to look for justification of one’s ideas at every turn. It betrays an unscientific aversion to the questioning of one’s own assumptions.
Since Mars’ atmosphere is 95% CO2 they should see a great deal of warming. Please don’t mention the low density I won’t here of it. Density has nothing to do with warming it is only the make up of the atmosphere that matters.
Saw that coming from a mile away. Considering Venus and Mars were Hansen’s inspiration for the climate change fantasy, why wouldn’t a Mars rover be his new pet to prove his theories?
Come on guys, if nothing else, it’s a simplified system to study. The relevance is limited, and the climate change link is obvious pandering, but I’m certain that we could gain some understanding about how atmospheres works by studying the Martian atmosphere.
Can someone explain to me how we know Mars once was “warmer, with rain, rivers, and deltas”? We had sent a few robots to run about the surface and suddenly we are painting Mars to look like Earth? What possible justification can there be for assuming whatever we think we find on Mars is somehow the same as earth, as noted by other commenters. As for learning about atmospheres, yes, we can learn about MARS atmosphere. We are going to need a lot more data before we can extrapolate beyond Mars to Earth or anywhere else. Most of this is just science fiction and SWAGS. We learn about Mars and that’s it.
If NASA finds out that Mars is warming up at this time, will they blame us?
From JPL’s Curiosity website’s “Mission” summary, “Curiosity was designed to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes,” and, “The rover will analyze samples scooped from the soil and drilled from rocks.” Nothing there about assessing climate change on Mars or anywhere else. Pity the “journalists” at The Guardian don’t read as much as they write.
Okay, you fellow cynics, look at the bright side. If a trip to Mars is billed as ‘studying climate change’ we might actually get our space program back. A permanent base on the Moon would be perfect for ‘observing CO2 in action’ and of course lots of other things. And of course someone might want to check out the asteroid belt just to see if it might have an effect on planetary temperatures (or other things like the supply of rare minerals). And the Oort cloud. Who knows what CO2 (and other things) do out there? All you have to do is move money from Point A to Point B (the distance of several electrons) and call it ‘climate research’. You can redirect wasted money into *real* research!
I’m for having a Mars base to study CO2 in action. I would go so far as to champion funding to send the consensus of scientists that state it is happening there. And they could also have the next global warming summit there. That’s tens of thousands of bodies and all that hot air out our atmosphere. A win-win!
Just as well that Curiosity is nuclear powered. If it had a big V8 like the Range Rover there would be a queue of warmists waiting to blame any Martian warming on man made emissions.
Wow, those little Martian rovers must be putting out a lot of CO2 to change the Martian climate.
Nat Geo will report, “This place is great; Man is messing it all up.”