People send me stuff. Alan Siddons writes in an email:
Researching for a paper that Martin Hertzberg, Hans Schreuder and I are writing, I chanced upon a chart that might intrigue or amuse you.
After temperature sensors were planted on the moon, you see, they reported an upward trend year after year. Too much CO2 up there?
Source: http://www.diviner.ucla.edu/docs/2650.pdf
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Interesting find Alan.
Of course this is old data. Apollo 15 landed in summer 1971, so this graph extends to summer 1975. Curious though, what could be the cause? Solar? Sensor Drift? LEM and remnants providing a local energy absorbing MHI of some sorts? Disturbed soil making an albedo change? Or maybe it was the SUV they abandoned on the moon? We’ll probably never know for sure.
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But there’s other extraterrestrial places that have hints of warming as well.
The Blog Prof writes:
Apparently, man-made global warming has gotten so out of hand because of SUVs and coal-chugging global warming skeptics that even the biggest planet in our solar system – Jupiter – is being affected by our addiction to carbon pollution. And that follows the other solar effects of our dependence on fossil fuels, including Mars losing its polar ice cap (what will Martian polar bears do now?), Neptune changing its reflectivity, Neptune’s moon Triton increasing in temperature by a whopping 5% due to the American energy-intensive lifestyle, and Pluto’s atmospheric pressure tripling due to higher temperatures because of Bushitler. From Yahoo! News via American Thinker: Jupiter Has Lost a Cloud Stripe, New Photos Reveal
This story was updated at 8:10 a.m. ET. A giant cloud belt in the southern half of Jupiter has apparently disappeared according to new photos of the planet taken by amateur astronomers.
The new Jupiter photos, taken May 9 by Australian astronomer Anthony Wesley, reveal that the huge reddish band of clouds that make up the planet’s Southern Equatorial Belt has faded from view.
Here’s the relevant pic:
Jupiter’s trademark Great Red Spot, a massive storm that could fit two Earths inside, is typically found along the edges of the planet’s Southern Equatorial Belt (SEB). When the southern cloud belt fades from view, the Great Red Spot stands out along with Jupiter’s Northern Equatorial Belt of clouds in telescope views.
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Change is in the air (or in space if you prefer).
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I blame Flash Gordon and his primitive, smoky old space ship.
A (possibly important) addition to the Jupiter “southern belt” changes:
This from the APL about the recent (last 4-5 years) significant increases in Jupiter’s atmospheric stroms: a SECOND Red Spot formed just a few years ago (2006) after three small storms merged together. That second Great Red Spot is now larger than the Great Red Spot first reported by Gallilelo, and has been joined by a third.
“The Little Red Spot, as it was named upon discovery in 2006, shows both size and speed in threatening to knock the former champion off its perch, with Junior’s maximum winds reaching 384 mph (172 meters per second).
“In terms of maximum wind speed, the Little Red Spot as measured in 2007 and the Great Red Spot when last measured in 2000 are just about the same,” said Andrew Cheng, physicist and lead study author at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland
Those winds far outstrip the 156 mph threshold that defines a Category 5 hurricane on Earth, and the Little Red Spot itself appears nearly as big as our whole planet.
Seeing spots
A third red spot on Jupiter was also announced last week by a different team, joining its larger super-storm cousins. The Great Red Spot has raged on for at least two centuries and perhaps as much as 350 years, ancient observations suggest.
Cheng’s team used image maps made by the New Horizons spacecraft to gauge wind speed and direction.
The Hubble Space Telescope provided visible-light images of the storms, while the Very Large Telescope in Chile used mid-infrared to glimpse the thermal structure of the storms below the visible cloud tops.
The thermal heat images showed that the Little Red Spot may already match the Great Red Spot for size, although the latter still appears almost twice as large on the surface of Jupiter’s atmosphere when examined in visible light.”
NASA JPL reports similar information:
“The official name of this storm is “Oval BA,” but “Red Jr.” might be better. It’s about half the size of the famous Great Red Spot and almost exactly the same color.
Oval BA first appeared in the year 2000 when three smaller spots collided and merged. Using Hubble and other telescopes, astronomers watched with great interest. A similar merger centuries ago may have created the original Great Red Spot, a storm twice as wide as our planet and at least 300 years old.
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At first, Oval BA remained white—the same color as the storms that combined to create it. But in recent months, things began to change:
“The oval was white in November 2005, it slowly turned brown in December 2005, and red a few weeks ago,” reports Go. “Now it is the same color as the Great Red Spot!”
“Wow!” says Dr. Glenn Orton, an astronomer at JPL who specializes in studies of storms on Jupiter and other giant planets. “
jorgekafkazar says:
May 16, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Typical Climate Scientist says: : “… the vast majority of scientits (was that a spelling error?) agree that Man is the cause.”
Yeah, you spelled ‘scientwits’ wrong.”
—…—…—
Spelled Mann wrong too.
AGW extremism IS a Mann-made problem.
kwik,
One quick thing with regard to Uranus – IIRC unlike all of the other large solar system bodies, it rotates at a sidelong angle relative to the plane of the Solar System. I wonder how this affects its climate relative to other planets?
and Sleepalot,
Over that period, Uranus was moving away from the Sun at over 9 million
miles per year.
So for a cooling Uranus we look at properties particular to that planet, but for those that are warming, we ignore specific characteristics and posit a single-source influence?
Of course, neither of you are necessarily buying into that position, but you help illustrate that we need to look a lot harder at details before arriving at conclusions. Pluto, for example, was orbitally heading into its ‘summer’ when climate change was reckoned on that planet. Mars’ warming was not necessarily planet-wide, and the fraction of the surface with ice receding was reckoned to be a result of internal dynamics. As was quoted just above, the paper on the Lunar warming was reckoned to be an artifact of surface characteristics, and not likely solar influence.
And yet some people seem determined to possible extraterrestrial warming on solar activity, in defiance of what the experts observing such phenomena say. Weird, isn’t it?
kwik,
Me – “It would be great to see planetary climatic time series matched up with the solar cycle. Unfortunately, the extraterrestrial climate changes have been observed over very short periods…”
You – Barry, we have one source on long time influence….food for thaught;
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/Ice-ages/GSAToday.pdf
That paper doesn’t discuss extraterrestrial climates at all. There are plenty of terrestrial hypotheses. Some of them survive scrutiny.
Ray says:
May 16, 2010 at 8:07 am
“Where is the Stenvenson screen on the moon picture? Where is it… I don’t see it.
It’s next to the barbecue grill on the blacktop patio just past the air conditioner. That funny looking SUV is blocking the view in this particular photo.
I wonder if Al Fin has some insight (oddly enough a re-reference to WUWT)…
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2009/12/solar-system-battling-hot-6000-c-cosmic.html
And more importantly, what would ram pressure have on a climate of a sphere of gas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_pressure
The Apollo 15 and 17 geothermal heat flow data was recently analyzed in a 2010 paper by Nagihara, Taylor, Williams, and Saito. These authors concluded that the limited period of theses recordings showed a warming trend consistent with warming energy coming from the surface. While an increase in solar luminosity or energy reflected from the Earth could not be discounted, the surface temperature was almost certainly influenced by the 18.6 year lunar precession. Further, since the astronauts’ tracks in the vicinity of these sensors were likely to change the albedo of the lunar surface, the authors recommend some energy balance modeling to determine if this mechanism could source the warming.
Since you solely suggest a change in solar luminosity as the cause of the lunar warming, I can only hope that your paper will conclusively eliminate these other possibilities as suggested by the above authors. If all consideration leaves only solar irradiance, then I would hope you would confirm this by correlating solar changes during this period with data taken from other sources.
I blame it all on Daylight Savings Time. They took away an hour from the cool mornings and added an hour to the hot afternoons. This had to have some warming effect when applied to the earth over an extended period. I’m not too sure about the moon and other planets, since I’m not sure if DST also applies to them. Will be applying for a grant for further studies.
Leif Svalgaard says:
May 16, 2010 at 7:57 am
The record is only four years long so could be anything.
“Weather is not climate”.
Webster’s Dictionary says:
Main Entry: cli·mate
Pronunciation: \klī-mət\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English climat, from Middle French,
from Late Latin climat-, clima, from Greek klimat-klima
inclination, latitude, climate, from klinein – to lean
Definition #2 : the average course or condition of the weather at a place
usually over a period of years as exhibited by temperature,
wind velocity, and precipitation
—
It seems that whereas “Weather is not climate”,
climate is “weather at a place” “over a period of years”.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin ?
For the moon, global, I mean: earthly dimming apparently was the cause.
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/A_Climate_Monitoring_Station_On_The_Moon_999.html
I would think this would prove that electric vehicles aren’t the answer. If NASA’s electric buggy caused the moon to warm that much that quickly, how hot will it get on earth when millions of us get our UN mandated electric cars?
Charlie K
The solar System was designed to last a couple more years. People were designed to never know everything. But it sure looks like we’ve foud all the missing heat the Earth was supposed to have and somehow lost. Who would have thunk it, it’s on the Moon. Bet the Dark Side has been heating up too.
Obviously they left the rover running.
Way too many comments to read through, so forgive me if someone has commented similarly to mine. What crossed my mind is the contention of the solar plasma guys and gals that the Sun is the prime warmer/cooler of all our solar system bodies (I guess that is pretty much obvious on one level) and that even as far out as Pluto the Sun is responsible, so they say, for rising or falling apparent temperatures. Hence, the idea that here on Earth we have a special situation with man made inputs that have or will tilt our planet into such a runaway effect that we’ll turn ourselves more into Venus….etc. Does make you wonder….I vote for the Sun as the main driver, end of all stories. Ice and Warm ages are triggered by the sun, not possibly by us. Not now and not ever.
When I look at that graph, I see 12 cycles per year: the full moon – new moon
– full moon cycle. So how come the temperature only varies by 6 degrees?
Obviously, we need a moon tax to go along with the carbon tax. Better have Saturn and Mars taxes too, and since humans are apparently effecting the sun we better have a sun tax. Then we can declare ‘War on the Solar System.’
BTW, did you know that the earth´s thermosphere temperature is 2500°K?
fred houpt says: (May 17, 2010 at 10:58 am)
“I vote for the Sun as the main driver, end of all stories. Ice and Warm ages are triggered by the sun …”
The Sun doesn’t change enough to trigger glacial and interglacial periods. What does change is the the amount of energy received by the Earth due to conditions of the Earth including orbital changes, changes in obliquity, precession, cloud cover and maybe a some stuff in space we haven’t figured out yet. Throughout it all, the Sun remains pretty stable.
…”not possibly by us. Not now and not ever.”
Ditto on that.
What would happen if that plot of temperature on the moon were plotted from ZERO.
Perfect set of units. My professors though kept chastising me for not starting from an applicable zero point. Why is it that no one else seems to have been provided this tutelage?
Yes, it makes for really boring presentations. We might not be in this mess if we had really boring presentations. Al Gore wouldn’t have been able to take a lift up to the top.
“Leif Svalgaard says:
May 16, 2010 at 7:57 am
The record is only four years long so could be anything.
“Weather is not climate”.
———————————————————————————
Been seeing this understandable comment coming up for months on blogs. Time to nail it to the wall.? Suggestion:
In respect of the period in which we have measuring devices:
“Climate” is the sum from time 1 to n of “Weather” at points 1 to x.
“Weather” is defined as measurement at a certain place and time of values of temperature , pressure, etc. “Weather” is physical observation and “real” .
“Climate” is defined as condensed and processed data and has no objective physical existence, it is a mental abstraction. Without weather data, there is no climate data.
To discuss in the same framework, first agree on n, the length of time, and x, the number of places/geographic area. Then define the condensation of data. (And dont invent data for points when the data doesnt exist!.)
On the other hand we could just continue to make the assertion that climate is not weather.
what a country of idiots, they all believe to the moon landings and to all the BS they watch on TV……hahahah… 🙂
Here’s some terrestrial “global warming”:
Gettin’ rich off of “global warming”:
“How green is Al Gore’s $9 million Montecito oceanfront villa?”
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/05/how-green-is-al-gores-9-million-montecito-ocean-front-villa/1
The reason the lunar ground temperature records are limited to a duration of three years or so is because the data was analyzed only for this time period. The temperatures sensors were working until 1977 when they failed, and the data was collected, however nothing was done with it apparently. Nagihara and others (2010) http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lunargeo2010/pdf/3008.pdf reported that they are trying to recover the data all the way to 1977 from archived tapes.
They also found scant evidence that the long-term temperature increase was due to the 18.6 year lunar precession, but this was weak and does not rule out sensor drift or increased solar energy. If they can reconstruct the data until 1977, this will shed light.