Granted, someone got a nice return on time and/or capital invested in the fossil fuel business, but how did that help your planet? On “Congames,” I heard that Mars was warming up, the latest and greatest “scientific” argument against anthropogenic contributions to global warming, here on earth. Taking a look at the weather on Mars as a whole planet is not difficult, the surface is generally visible, since the atmoshere is unobstructed by clouds. It is said that because Mars is warming and so is the earth the one thing they have in common is the Sun. Could our thermonuclear furnace 92 million miles away be changing? The very idea leads to the possibility of a hellish future, one that stellar physicists agree will happen in 5 billion years if we are around to witness it, or more correctly, any progeny. With that timeline, we should go and hug an ape as a sort of cousin, but that is another conversation. Back to Mars;

Mars has a very eccentric orbit, 3rd after Pluto (I do not accept Pluto’s demotion to a mere KBO; Kuiper Belt Object on temperature mass gradient objections) and Mercury. Every 687 of our earth days, Mars is much closer to the sun (aphelion) compared to the greatest distance from the sun (perihelion). The difference is more than 20%. Now why is that relevant to Martian weather, and is that relation relevant to earths weather? Solar radiation, like all uniformly distributed point source incoherent energy emanating from xyz axes in time is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. This means about 1.45 times as much “heat” during aphelion when compared to perihelion.

The MArtian atmosphere is one hundreth the density or “thickness” of our own atmosphere and retains very little heat. Heat cannot be effectively stored in the Martian atmosphere. The air is much thinner than at the top of Mt Everest, similar in pressure to the “ozone” layer, about 55,000 feet up — minus the ozone. This means the actual surface of the planet  regulates and dominates the temperature of the planet – without much moderation from the atmosphere.

If these conditions existed on earth, this would mean temperature differences ranging from 120F colder and 120F warmer based on the temperature we have now. 

Right now, Mars is getting closer to the sun and of course is warming. At aphelion, near the subsolar point, temperatures will reach more than 70F. Shortly after aphelion, the planet will experience a near planetary dust storm. That conservatives would try to delete the most critical variables in Martian warming, and attempt to apply the nonsense, to attack anthropogenic contributions to the earthly climate, should give one extreme caution when listening to the various speciosities, offered as “science” or ”facts,” when it comes to global warming and the phony War on Terror in the Iraqi theatre where people are nevertheless dying.

I don’t doubt that some Bush Republicans have money or a stake as shareholders or employees in the fossil fuel and military industrial complexes, and resultant power. Certainly there is a dearth of real science or anything resembling facts for either situation. Conservatives have through the centuries wanted to keep things the “same,” reactionaries wanted to roll things back and liberals wanted to evolve (don’t take my word for it, read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution). It took a couple of hundred years for the conservative orthodoxy in Western European culture to accept a round earth followed by a heliocentric solar system. Do we have that kind of time? That is why I am a liberal. Evolve