Hot times in the Solar System

There is an interesting and entertaining column by Oliver Morton on Nature's news website about the continuing use by climate science contrarians of climate change on other bodies in the solar system. I have a couple of "Talk to a Sceptic" guide entries on that (see here for the newest version of the Mars and Pluto canard) as well as some artwork that takes its inspiration from on of the more obscure versions of this talking point.

Oliver Morton's article is full of great lines and clear rebuttals and methodically goes planetoid by planetoid showing the lack of substance "skeptics" so readily embrace. For example:

• Pluto is still warming from its ~80 year summer
• Triton's warming southern hemisphere is just in its hottest orbital position
• Mars is experiencing changing albedo, probably due to dust storms

He also make the very good point that given "climate is always changing", in any random look around our solar system you should expect to find a handful of warming climates.

For his conclusion he writes:

What's saddening is that people should miss what these various phenomena really have in common — their explicability. They show that our ideas of atmospheric physics are applicable and useful on bodies that range from the tiny (Pluto, the atmosphere of which is hardly worth mentioning) to the gigantic (Jupiter, the atmosphere of which outweighs a hundred solid Earths).

And computer models based on the ones used to study the climate on Earth provide results even when applied to the hugely different conditions on Mars. That is truly impressive.

So what these disparate observations actually tell us is that the scientific community — the scientific community that enjoys a firm consensus on the causes of Earthly climatic change — has a fairly impressive grasp of the fundamentals of how weather works elsewhere, as well. It's a rather inspiring insight. But it is not the lesson that climate sceptics want their readers to learn.

Word.