Mars Is Coming Out Of An Ice Age (reuters.com) 166
Taco Cowboy quotes a report from Reuters: An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age that is part of an ongoing cycle of climate change, scientists said on Thursday. Using images taken by satellites orbiting Mars, the researchers determined that about 20,872 cubic miles (87,000 cubic km) of ice has accumulated at its poles since the end of the ice age, mostly in the northern polar cap. Scientists are keenly interested in piecing together the climate history of Mars, which contains strong evidence that oceans and lakes once pooled on its surface, bolstering the prospects for life. From the perspective of an Earthling, every day on Mars may feel like an ice age. According to NASA, temperatures on Mars may hit a high at noon at the equator in the summer of roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), or a low of about minus-225 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-153 degrees Celsius) at the poles. The Martian ice began its retreat about 370,000 years ago, marking the end of the last ice age, according to the research published in the journal Science
I know who to blame (Score:1, Insightful)
It was Volkswagen and their inefficient diesel cars, shame.
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Re: I know who to blame (Score:2)
Roughly 25%-35% of warming due to solar changes (Score:5, Interesting)
I did some looking into the effects of solar changes on global and solar-system temperatures, because I wondered how much of an effect it might have, if any.
I know most people are already fans of a certain "team" when it comes to global warming / climate change, so they are more interested in bulstering their original guess than learning more information, but those those who are curious here's what I found out. Temperatures on the other planets have, on average, risen less than on earth, but they have risen some. It's hard to be certain, but a reasonable estimate is that changes in the sun might account for 25%-35% of the warming we've seen on earth.
Digging through all the propaganda and distorted data on AGW is difficult, but there seems to be pretty good evidence to support the notion that 25%-35% is caused by increased CO2, caused both by fossil fuel use and deforestation. Deforestation also increases average daily high temperatures more directly by reducing evaporative cooling during the hottest part of the day (and corresponding rain).
That leaves about 40%-50% of the increase that can't be clearly attributed to any specific cause. Objective research by people not funded by political entities would be helpful.
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[citation needed]
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It's complicated. Take forests, trees are usually darker then grasslands and for sure darker then ice and snow while conifers (what we usually plant) are darker then deciduous trees which increases the albedo. How does the increase in albedo relate to the changes in evaporative effects?
As for solar effects, I also understand that it may drive about a 1/3rd of climate change, varying with the sunspot cycle so actually slowing down the warming during low sunspots such as the beginning of the 21st century.
We c
Solar output is dropping - causing cooling. (Score:5, Informative)
I did some looking into the effects of solar changes on global and solar-system temperatures, because I wondered how much of an effect it might have, if any.
Solar output has been dropping over the last several decades. The sun does (obviously) affect the surface temperature, but to the extent that it does it has been driving temperatures DOWN: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/s... [woodfortrees.org]
That means something else has been not only counteracting the cooling effect of the sun but also warming the planet at a rate unprecedented in the last 10,000 or so years.
Meanwhile Mars has been coming out of an ice age for the last 370,000 years (according to TFS). There are other factors at play here than just the sun.
Some interesting information on that topic (Score:2)
Here's somen interesting information on that topic:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g... [gsu.edu]
As you mentioned, there are a lot of different factors. As mentioned on the site you linked to, woodfortress.org, it's very noisy data - reliably identifying trends is difficult. Further, it's so political - 96% of the studies do things like start their time series at a time of record-low temperatures, guaranteeing an increase relative to that time, or conversely start a graph at a warm time, meaning the trend will be coolin
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Here's the long view. Something peculiar happened on Earth about 150 years ago: http://phosphorus.github.io/ap... [github.io] (red is CO2, green is temp).
That cannot be related to what has been happening on Mars over the last 370,000 years.
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Here's the long view. Something peculiar happened on Earth about 150 years ago.
Yes. We started measuring global temperatures accurately, with thermometers, instead of using ice core and other proxies. We know that the proxies have much lower resolution than the actual measurements and are not comparable at all, but AGW proponents still plot them on the same graph as thermometer measurements, which makes for this big, scary spike since 1870.
Incidentally, I've read (although I can't remember where, but I'll have to put the effort into finding it sometime) that if you use ice core prox
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Incidentally, I've read (although I can't remember where, but I'll have to put the effort into finding it sometime) that if you use ice core proxy data for the last 150 years, this spike is completely gone. Meaning, of course, these kind of "unprecedented, rapid" fluctuations could have been happening the entire time, and we'd never know, because we don't have anything other than low resolution proxy data for that time period.
That's a great argument style - blatantly lie and claim you'll look up the source of the lie later. Oh look, a graph with proxy data extending into the most recent 150 years, and showing a spike. https://www.ipcc.ch/publicatio... [www.ipcc.ch]
Even paleo reconstructions show spike at the end (Score:2)
We know that the proxies have much lower resolution than the actual measurements and are not comparable at all
Nonsense. Many paleo data sets have an annual resolution [noaa.gov]. There is only so far global mean surface temperature can stray in 1 year.
The reconstruction I used overlaps the instrumental record (with remarkable agreement) and shows (you guessed it) a sudden spike at the end! [github.io]
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I've replicated the work in your link but included data from the last few decades. Temps continue to diverge from solar output since the 80's: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/s... [woodfortrees.org]
On top of the observed warming, something has been compensating for the falling solar output over the last few decades. Since solar output is cyclical, we should expect temperatures to warm even faster once the sun recovers.
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Thanks for that. In your link I see number of sunspots, what I found interesting was the cycle length, shown here:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g... [gsu.edu]
Is there a direct correlation between the two?
Of course, all of these charts may or may not mean much. After all:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker... [kinja-img.com]
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I would like to see someone with a bigger brain than mine estimate the heat generated by anthropogenic friction forces. Walking, running, biking, motorcycle tires, car tires, truck tires, machine conveyor belts, train wheels, elevators, fucking pant suits...All of it. It has to have some erg value. What is is?
Also, what is the value of heat generated by all of the combustion engines in the world? Electric engines? Etc.
Could any of those items be part of the 40-50%?
An interesting question. Quite low, by my calculat (Score:2)
That's an interesting question. I did a very rough approximation years ago, just to get an idea of whether it might be significant or not. All of the heat from machines comes from a fuel or power plant, of course. And all fuel energy eventually turns to heat. So we can look at the total energy use to get the amount of energy used by machines, which is equal to the heat the generate.
Each year, we use, globally, 15,000 Twh of energy.
Each year, about 1,000,000 Twh of sunshine hits Texas. So the heat from the
Energy Sources (Score:2)
The extra warming has been compared to 400,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions per day, or 2.5 x 10^14 Joules per second, [skepticalscience.com] or 250 TW [wolframalpha.com]. This is a very large number, but total solar energy intercepted by the Earth is around seven hundred times greater. World power consumption in 2013 was 18 TW. [wikipedia.org] Power consumption is a term in the energy balance equation; we are eventually going to have to rein in energy use purely because of climate considerations [ucsd.edu], but not soon.
This is the kind of question that belies a compl
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CO2 likely caused 100% of recent warming. (Score:5, Informative)
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I did some looking into the effects of solar changes on global and solar-system temperatures, because I wondered how much of an effect it might have, if any...
You didn't do shit. Your conclusions are garbage, and contradict basic solar observations (solar output has been dropping, not increasing). You provide no sources or citations. You provide no verifiable evidence. You provide no methodology, error analysis, or pretty much anything else you'd expect to find in any sort of research.
There are plenty of real scientists providing real research on the topic. Start there, then try again.
Yeah it sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Look, if you can't even do the match correctly on this, you have no business giving your input on this.
I hate when this happens to me. Just yesterday I didn't do the match correctly and I ended up wearing a brown belt with my black shoes, I looked stupid all day.
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"If changes in the sun causes 25-35% of the warming, and the increased CO2 is causing another 25-35%, that should leave about 30-50% that you haven't accounted for. "
It's much easier for us to detect causes of warming than it is to isolate the effect of any isolated cause.
Not quite. Less than 0.2% variance (Score:3)
Total solar radiation has varied less than 0.2%, comparing the average across the roughly 11-year cycle. It has neither increased nor decreased. What has changed over time os the length of cycle, and the variance in length correlates very closely with global temperature. See the chart here:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g... [gsu.edu]
You may have noticed that of you fill a bathtub with hot water in the evening, it's still warm the next morning. Water is very good at holding on to heat. (Compare the air in your ho
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"So if you graph the temperature-raise on mars with the temperature-raise on earth do you get a corralation?"
This would tell us a lot, but we would need to be able to drill ice cores to show ancient temperatures, as we do on Earth.
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The Earth should be cooling, yet it is warming. Human activity is responsible for all of that warming, including countering the expected natural cooling.
And YOU know this HOW?
Re: I know who to blame (Score:4, Informative)
One of the drivers of climate change, on the scale of 10's to 100's of thousands of years are the regular changes in a planets orbit, eccentricity, axial tilt, whether summer in a hemisphere happens at perihelion etc. This will drive climate change on both the Earth and especially Mars as its orbit is so eccentric. They're named Milankovitch cycles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Because when you add up all the known natural forcings the general trend is a slight reduction in total radiative forcing since about 8,000 years ago*. More recently the trend in TSI has been dropping since the 1960s.
*This is expected since the forcing of Milankovitch Cycles hit their peak 8,000 years ago and the drop into the next glacial cycle commenced then. Of course the anthropogenic rise in CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) to a level not seen in over a million years has short circuited that process
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Still gets me how many people still confuse "know" with "believe".
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The word "know" is usually associated with some level of empirical evidence to back it up, like the fact that all known sources of natural climate change when taken together would indicate that we should be on a slight cooling trend.
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If we did see a nice correlation, it should extend to the rest of the planets. Earth receives far more energy from the sun than Mars. Venus receives far more than Earth. Mercury receives far more than Venus. Yet as far as I know, evidence doesn't show warming on the two inner bodies in the solar system
And interesting factoid, despite being nearly to twice as far from the Sun as Mercury the average surface temperature on Venus higher than it is on Mercury because of the 95% CO2 atmosphere of Venus.
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The Mars Rover should have been hybrid. I told them, but they didn't listen. See where it got us.
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Bush. It was Bush.
'Republicans must exist there!' is an easy first conclusion, but so far we haven't imaged any golf courses.
Re: I know who to blame (Score:2)
Not bad (Score:2)
> temperatures on Mars may hit a high at noon at the equator in the summer of roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius)
So, the Martian equator is like living in the UK?
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The difference is that on mars, you have no atmosphere. In the UK its usually cloudy, and it often rains. This keeps the temperature, even during the night. On mars its like in a desert (just way more worse): if the sun goes down, it gets cold immediately.
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No atmosphere? It most definitely has an atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Not bad (Score:1)
At 0.6% pressure of Earth's at the surface, it doesn't have much of an atmosphere. The Martian was a movie, remember. Oh wait, I forgot, we base policy decisions on movies now. Never mind; yes, Mars has a robust atmosphere! With plenty of Oxygen!
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The Martian was a movie, remember. Oh wait, I forgot, we base policy decisions on movies now. Never mind; yes, Mars has a robust atmosphere! With plenty of Oxygen!
The Martian did not portray a robust atmosphere.
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The winds on Mars would never be enough to cause the rocket to topple over, because the atmospheric pressure is so low. Yes, the atmospheric gases move at hundreds of miles per hour in a storm - but the most they seem to be capable of is kicking up dust.
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But, the writers can't come up with a relate-able peril scene to set the emotional stage for abandoning the crew member without a powerful storm that put the ship in jeopardy.
The Martian was a great movie, as long as you didn't think about it.
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Yes, the atmospheric gases move at hundreds of miles per hour in a storm
You do realize that the load from wind is the square of the wind speed times density? And the density would be increased by the dust that was picked up? At the height of summer, effective density of 0.01 atm and 175 kph wind speed (sited by the book and film, but could be higher during gusts), that would be 15 newtons per square meter [engineeringtoolbox.com]. A fragile high surface area rocket which is not well secured would have a significant side force which could indeed push it over.
I haven't watched the movie so I don't kno
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15 N/m2. wow, that's the equivalent of an 11mph breeze here on earth. clearly more than enough to knock a rocket right over.
Yes. If NASA could transport and land a whole several hundred ton Earth-style rocket pad on Mars, then they wouldn't have to worry about leaving people on Mars. That rocket pad either has to be built with local Mars materials or launched from Earth with as much mass shaved away as possible.
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For Earthlings, the Martian atmosphere is a fairly good vacuum.
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If the UK gets down to hundreds below at night and has practically no air, then yes.
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Ah. Talking about far northern Canada. That's what happens when you bottle it up and sell it to the Chinese.
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Looking at Vancouver and Toronto, I thought the Chinese were already buying up Canada even without the bottling.
Only the buildings, but the jokes on them. They're just made out of sheet rock and used pinball machine parts.
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Yes 4 feet from the ground. at 6 feet it's 40 degrees and drops off rapidly from there.
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> temperatures on Mars may hit a high at noon at the equator in the summer of roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius)
So, the Martian equator is like living in the UK?
I wish we could get 20 degrees.
I don't get it (Score:2)
Ice spread from the poles on Earth because water which vaporized in the tropics condensed at the poles when the planet was cool. But Mars doesn't have free water in the tropics. There is probably permafrost there but its locked away, immobile.
What A Coincidence! (Score:1, Troll)
An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age
Golly gee, so is Earth!
Except in Earth's case, Earthlings and their civilization are somehow to blame for the temperature rising and not the natural cycles the planet has gone through in the past, long before humans were a gleam in Darwin's eye.
Silly Earthlings!
No wonder star-faring civilizations have avoided direct contact!
Strat
Re:What A Coincidence! (Score:5, Informative)
TFA:
Since we've already accounted for the effect of Earth's orbit and tilt (which run on 100,000 and 20,000 year cycles), unless you have a bitchin' theory for how Mars' orbit and tilt afffect the climate of the Earth, we're still pretty damn confident that it's the humans.
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Strawman. I never claimed Earth's climate changes were the result of the same orbital variations as those affecting Mars' climate.
... we're still pretty damn confident that it's the humans
So, humans are to blame for all the previous warming periods in Earth's long climate change history, and long before humans existed and created an industrial s
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You are making an unwarranted assumption that because humans weren't responsible for previous climate changes they can't be responsible for them now.
But you know, the whole point of being a climatologist is to study the things that affect the climate and how it changes. You must think they're pretty stupid if they're missing the natural changes that are changing the climate now at a rate that is practically unprecedented compared to historical climate changes. You'd have a good chance of winning a Nobel P
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You must think they're pretty stupid if they're missing the natural changes that are changing the climate now at a rate that is practically unprecedented compared to historical climate changes. You'd have a good chance of winning a Nobel Prize if you can show them the error of their ways.
I don't think they're stupid at all. They're simply doing what they get paid to do. Finding more reason to pin climate change on human activity pays well, gets you fame and fortune. I think they're being honest about it too but that's the thing with incentive programs, you get what you pay for out of people. That's why we had things like ClimateGate 1 & 2 where it was shown how they manipulate data, skew research and publishing, and intimidate people with contradictory conclusions.
And the Nobel Prize,
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Hah! ClimateGate was much ado about nothing. There have been like a dozen investigations of the CG emails by different agencies and organizations and none of them found any scientific malfeasance, just a few nits about being more open.
You don't think the fact that CO2 levels have increased to levels that haven't been seen for over a million years and the year to year increase in atmospheric CO2 is a bit less than half of human emissions has something to do with it? The basic physics of the radiative prop
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You are making an unwarranted assumption that because humans weren't responsible for previous climate changes they can't be responsible for them now.
But you know, the whole point of being a climatologist is to study the things that affect the climate and how it changes. You must think they're pretty stupid if they're missing the natural changes that are changing the climate now at a rate that is practically unprecedented compared to historical climate changes
There are political/ideological forces with great political power and monetary resources, completely unrelated to science or climatology, at work here that are hellbent on using AGW as a club to force the political/ideological changes and wealth-transfers they desire down everyone's throat which you are ignoring.
You'd have a good chance of winning a Nobel Prize if you can show them the error of their ways.
No. There are trillions of dollars of wealth and tremendous amounts of political power at stake. If I had absolute proof that AGW was a scam I'd be much more likely to end up in a "black facility" i
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Wow, do you seriously believe that thousands of climate scientists from around the world are willing to be part of a conspiracy that's been going on for at least 30 years (and maybe back to Arrhenius in 1896) to pervert the science just for the sake political ideology? There are a few scientists like that but the vast majority of them are smart enough to know that if they push science they know to be wrong they will be found out and their reputations destroyed. I think most of them have far too much integ
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Strawman. I never claimed that you did. You instead claimed that the warming that has occured over the last, let's be generous, 200 years, was due to the same phenomenon.
The problem being, the scientists already thought of that. Duh.
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Because if something happens in two different places, there must be a common cause.
If a baby bird falls out of a nest and someone trips and falls headlong down the stairs, there is a common cause: gravity. Forget all the "experts" who say staircases should have handrails, because people have always fallen down stairs. People will always continue to fall down stairs. There's nothing we can do about it, because it's gravity that makes them fall.
Fuck global warming (Score:2, Funny)
Why deal with petty things, this is INTERPLANETARY warming!
Water boiling, low atmospheric pressure (Score:2)
In Mars’s current atmosphere, water boils away quickly. If there pools of liquid water, logically, that would imply a denser and heavier atmosphere in the past. Can we do any math to predict bounds on what the atmosphere on Mars (given its gravity, etc.) would have had to contain in terms of content and total mass?
Common Sense Climate Dictats (Score:2)
Mars' Ice age happened when it was warmer. (Score:2)
According to the article, the ice age on Mars occurred when the planet was warmer. Ice was able to form in a stable state at lower latitudes when the climate was warmer.
Unlike Earth, ice ages on Mars occur when its poles are warmer than average and frozen water is more stable at lower latitudes. Transitions between lengthy climate phases can leave telltale features in the ice, the research showed.
Damn Cold (Score:2)
That -225ÂF night time low is interesting. I have a super freezer with a double compressor that goes down to -121ÂF which is colder than dry ice. I use this for shipping meat from our on-farm butcher shop. It's so cold that if you touch anything inside the freezer with your bare hands you'll stick to it and get instant frost bite. When you first open the chest freezer there is a mist undulating of CO2 vapor that hasn't quite frozen yet. Very cool to play with. Night time on Mars is far colder. Ouc
Who wants 26%? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not many people tbh. 26% is above the level where spontanious fires can occur. You think forest fires in todays 21% is bad? You REALLY wouldn't want to go for a walk in the woods in summer if it was 26%. Not only that , high O2 levels = hugh insects and arthropods.
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Not only that , high O2 levels = hugh insects and arthropods.
So cleaning out the bugs in my back yard would be like a real life version of Fallout? Sign me up. I've got my hunting rifle and shotgun ready, bring on the giant ants and radroaches!
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Cool people kill radroaches with mininukes.
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You must be amazingly strong!
Re: The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% (Score:2, Insightful)
The warmunists don't say warming is bad for life. They say the rapidity of the warming is gonna be bad for humans.
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And that is only a "guess". My guess, is humans, at least the smarter ones, will survive by migrating to the more temperate zones. The rich with their Miami Beachfront homes will try everything to save their lifestyles. Meanwhile, all those liberals fleeing to Canada when Trump gets elected will suddenly have nice weather in winter. So, in a funky way, Liberals should be all for AWG! ;)
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Re:The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% (Score:5, Informative)
Very true. Well, if you are a poikilothermic animal, that is. Or if you're an insect and would like to grow larger. Because that's pretty much not possible with petty oxygen levels of about 20%. You should also not be living near a shore, unless you're an aquatic animal (but if you are, life's going to be great... provided you're not too dependent on, you know, a shore).
So yeah, life would be a lot better if conditions were again as they used to be back then. If you're a lizard. Or a dragonfly. Or a fish.
Huh? You're a human? Boy, sucks to be you!
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OK, apparently the answer is "yes", so I'll spell out why the notion is stupid. First, let's be clear what AC is implying: that the fact life thrived under high CO2 Jurassic conditions means that a rapid shift of climate in that direction will be good for the environment. Or at least harmless.
The Jurassic period was over 200 million years ago. Not only did the continents we're familiar not exist, neither did any of the species that currently populate the Earth. In fact major classes and orders of species
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Re:The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% (Score:5, Informative)
I considered the "living fossil" argument, but in general the "living fossil" thing is a bit misleading. When organisms are discovered living that are known from the fossil record (or vice versa), initially the public news is that a "living fossil" has been discovered, but then the systematics geeks get to work and the modern and fossil versions end up classified differently. They continue to be promoted as "living fossils" to a public that needs every encouragement to care about science and the environment, but researchers generally have a more nuanced view than the simple but romantic picture of a population that has remained totally unchanged for millions of years. That just doesn't happen.
The "living fossil" par excellence is of course the Coelecanth. However in the 80 years since the first living example was discovered, living Coelacanths have been placed in a separate genus (Latimeria) from any example in the fossil record. The anatomical resemblances between Latimeria and fossil genera are striking, amazing even. The differences perhaps may be too subtle for a layman to discern, but to a taxonomist they're there. Same goes for horseshoe crabs, ginkgos, etc.
If you think about how genetics works, the idea that a species could be a stable construct over millions of years is extremely implausible. Even if you can't see an anatomical distinction, if you had a time machine and brought back a DNA sample it's bound to put the ancient population in a different taxon just by genetic drift alone. That doesn't count selective advantage for mutations that adapt an individual for changing environmental conditions such as heat and gas composition and, for marine organisms, pH.
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So, if you're one of those species, climate change is a big win!
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Well, let's dispense with one argument at a time. The GP was arguing that more CO2 would not be a problem per se, even if we were to go to Jurassic levels of CO2. I dispensed with that.
You and I both agree that the Jurassic levels of CO2 aren't in the cards anytime soon. We also agree that the world isn't going to turn into a "lifeless cinder", although nobody brought that up so it's a straw man. But can climate change enough in the lifetime of people now allive that it represents a disaster?
Even under n
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even the "polar icecaps are melting" crowd admit that it will takes hundreds to thousands of years.
Look at the trajectory of summer sea ice area in the arctic: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/n... [woodfortrees.org] . We have about 1/2 of what we had just 30 years ago and the loss appears to be accelerating.
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The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times!
What you fail to note is that the Sun was several percent cooler than it is today, the topology of the continents and therefore ocean currents were completely different than today. You can't try to compare then and now without taking all of that into account.
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Listen buddy, I hate snow much more than dislike dinosaurs and toxic levels of O2
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Could anyone genuinely be this much of a moron?
I wasn't sure about the scientific value of his argument, but thanks to your in-depth analysis I am now a born-again anti-denier.
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See my other post. I thought it went without saying that what was good for Mesozoic ecosystems isn't good for Cenozoic ones, but apparently people need this spelled out.
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How can that be? If you are the equator, there are no seasons.
... I'm going to assume that's a joke I didn't get.
The alternative is too sad.
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Ummm... yes there are. They are less pronounced and they work differently than further away from the equator, granted, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
To get an idea why, picture a planet like, say, Neptune, that is tilted at an angle of about 90 degrees. Could you see how this planet has insane seasons at its equator as it circles the sun?
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I know. But can't you see what bad joke this is begging for?
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Yes of course, we're all slaves to the corrupt and powerful environmentalist cartel.
As opposed to the poor, impoverished oil and gas industry, which is clean as a whistle and barely getting by.
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Actually, it's not the environmentalist cartel - it's the Government cartel that uses the environmentalist clique to push it's own power. For example, the EPA regulating essentially anything that may have flowing water [heritage.org] at sometime in the past, or future 100 years. With such broad scope of regulations, the power of the Government extends to the point where you literally cannot do anything without prior Government approval. We go from a limited Government to an all-seeing/all-controlling Government. And th
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What will you do when you finally figure out that AGW is a real thing with actual consequences?
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I agree with you in principle, but you can't pretend that the environmentalist lobby has won... or is even winning, by any means. I mean you want to talk about a Government Cartel, what is OPEC if not exactly that? What's the environmentalist balance to the most profitable industry in human history? The tide is beginning to turn, but I'm not saying we should push so far as to create imbalance in the other direction.
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Just because similar things happen on two planets doesn't mean that the reason for this cannot be two different things.
In other words, just because there's volcanoes on Io and on Earth doesn't mean Earth in in the gravitational stranglehold of a huge mass nearby.
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The Sun waves hello from a mere 93 million miles away...
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Sure, just like summer in the northern hemisphere on Earth is the one day we call the summer solstice.
A bit more useful definition might be some period of time surrounding the equinoxes. Say from equinox to solstice, like we do it on Earth.