Jupiter "changes its spots"

[emad]

The Telegraph
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 22/04/2004)

<snip>
Global climate change on Jupiter could lead to the giant gas planet losing most of its large spots over the next decade, then sprouting some new ones.

Jupiter's atmosphere features about 80 swirling vortices, rather like long-lived hurricanes, the largest being the Great Red Spot that was first observed in 1665.

But this Jupiter's most famous spot would stay put, largely because of its location near the equator, said Prof Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley.

The changes, outlined today by Prof Marcus in the journal Nature, signal the end of Jupiter's current 70-year climate cycle, which began with the formation of three distinct spots, the White Ovals.
<snip>
More:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/22/wjup22.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/04/22/ixworld.html

[demnan]

1. Did we F***k up their climate too?

n/t

[emad]

3. Must have been that comet in '96, Halle-Bop?

Or was it Halle Berri....

The one shown crashing into Jupiter

[opihimoimoi]

2. Just wondering what the hell is causing a spot to stay in the same place

for 360 years. It seems there is an internal heat source upwelling to create a stationary "hurricane". Oh well, just a thought/

Come, beer thirty

[cspiguy]

4. They have SUV's on Jupiter?

:wtf:

[Dogmudgeon]

5. Another source for climate change

It's not just Jupiter -- climate change has been observed on Mars, Uranus, and Pluto, and possibly also Venus.

The working theory is that periodically, we (the Solar system) pass through clouds of tenuous gas and dust which increase the ability of the planets' atmospheres to retain heat; the dust density has increased in the last thirty years, but with so little data, it's still just an informed guess.

Also, this isn't an "excuse" to avoid the problem of terrestrial climate change. If anything, it ought to make us more cautious about making large-scale changes to our atmosphere.

--bkl

[pmbryant]

7. That's not true

No climate change has been observed on any of those planets.

The Mars report from a couple years ago was the result of a gullible press taking some ignorant comments from a camera engineer and running with them. It is complete junk.

The Pluto report, also from a couple years ago, was simply discussing seasonal changes. (Its "year" is over 240 Earth years long.)

I've not heard of any such reports for Uranus, but given that its "year" is approximately 80 Earth years long, I don't think we've had time to uncover any long-term, non-seasonal trends there.

And for Venus, I'm also not familiar with any such reports.

--Peter

[On the Road]

8. What BareKnuckledLiberal Might be Talking About

is not so much climate change in progress, but evidence of past climate changes which have been recently observed. There's some good stuff on it in Scientific American's special edition New Light on the Solar System.

With increased clarity of observations and the computer modeling being done today it's possible to tell what past conditions can account for the current state of the planets.

For example, Mars was warmer in the past when it was volcanically active. The cooling of the plant, and the reduction in greenhouse gases, caused the temperature to drop.

On the other hand, Venus has grown much hotter due to the huge amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, including water vapor, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. Without those gases, the surface would be 800 degrees (F) cooler.

What's amazing about Jupiter is how quickly the changes are taking place. We're not used to observing planetary changes are they're actually taking place.

[pmbryant]

9. You are more charitable than I

And I'll leave it at that.

--Peter

[Dogmudgeon]

10. A contribution to the charity

Planetary climate change is not some hare-brained idea that the editor of Fate magazine cooked up. It's the topic of a great deal of significant and productive scientific work. Here's what I found in about half an hour on Google:

Mars

Google search string

Climate Change on Mars (Feb 2002)
http://www.geotimes.org/feb02/NN_MarsCC.html
(American Geological Institute)

Evidence of icy region and recent climate change observed on Mars
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2001-02/01-006.html
Climate model for Earth also describes changes on Mars
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2002-03/02-019.html
Brown University -- geologist John Mustard

35th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
(Several papers; March 15-19, 2004)
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/pdf/sess51.pdf

Mars Ski Report: Snow is Hard, Dense and Disappearing (Space dot com)
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/mars_snow_011206-1.html

Geol/Metr 310 at SFSU: Planetary Climate Change (Fall 2000)
http://squall.sfsu.edu/courses/gm310/F00/syllabus/
Dave Dempsey, PhD (Prof. of Meteorology)
Lisa White, PhD (Assoc. Prof. of Geology)

Odyssey Studies Changing Weather and Climate on Mars (December 8, 2003)
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2003/165.cfm

William Feldman, PhD (Los Alamos National Laboratory):
"One explanation could be that Mars is just coming out of an ice age ..."

Jeffrey Plaut, PhD; JPL:
"Odyssey is giving us indications of recent global climate change in Mars ..."

Jupiter

Results were dominated by a single recent major story.

Google search string

Researcher predicts global climate change on Jupiter as giant planet's spots disappear
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/04/21_jupiter.shtml
Philip Marcus, UC Berkeley, Mechanical Engineering/ Fluid Dynamics (in Nature, 04-04-22)

Solar System
(Galactic dust model of climate change)

Google search string

Solar System's Path May Have Spurred Ice Ages (2002 July 22)
Nir Shaviv, University of Toronto, in Physical Review Letters 2002 July 29
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/iceage_cosmic_020725.html

Climate Change and Space Weather (IPS - (Australian) Radio and Space Services)
http://www.ips.gov.au/Main.php?CatID=8&SecID=1&SecName=Space%20Weather&SubSecID=3&SubSecName=Space%20Weather%20Effects&LinkName=Climate%20Change%20and%20Space%20Weather

Dust from Space May Have Contributed to Earth's Extinctions (Planetary Society, 1998)
http://www.planetary.org/html/news/articlearchive/headlines/1998/headln-051198.html

Galactic dust cooling Earth? (Nature, 8 July 2003)
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030707/030707-1.html

Please note that none of these sources are in any way associated with astrology, UFOs, David Ickes' reptoids, zero-point energy, Immanuel Velikovsky, the Cottingly Fairies, or Penn Jillette.

--bkl

[pmbryant]

11. It's the short time scale that I am extremely suspicious of, not...

longer-term climate change, which is a given.

The Mars reports of short-term (decades) climate change, including the first link you post above, are essentially junk. They take two measurements of something one Martian year apart (something that may not even be directly tied to global climate) and extrapolate rapid short-term global climate change as a result. This is obviously not a valid extrapolation. (Think of how much snowfall, rainfall, etc amounts vary at a particular location on Earth from year-to-year.) The same group (Malin Space Science Systems) has now been guilty of this at least twice, from what I've seen. These guys may be great engineers, but their scientific data analysis skills need some serious help.

This is the result that has been popularized in the press not that long ago and that I was refuting in my earlier post.

Most of the other reports you post appear to be more about much longer-term change (over tens of thousands of years up to billions of years) and, while many of them are highly preliminary results that have not been verified, at least do not appear to be based on invalid extrapolations.

In your first post, since the only timescale you mentioned was "thirty years", I inferred (not unreasonably, I think) that you were referring to change over decades, not this longer-term stuff.

Oh, and that last report about "Galactic dust cooling Earth?" appears to be put out by a fellow with a not-so-hidden agenda concerning the global warming on Earth issue. He apparently takes some extremely tenuous correlations (correlations that may not even exist) and tries to use them to discount the impact of greenhouse gases on our climate, ignoring the huge amount of science that supports conclusions contrary to this.

Yes, none of these reports appear to be tied to astrologers, UFO enthusiasts, or Velikovsky, but that does not mean they are all equally valid, and it certainly does not mean some of them aren't nonsense (e.g., the Malin group's analysis of the Martian climate).

EDIT: I want to add that you are quite right that long-term climate change on the various planets in our Solar System is well accepted. But that is not true for short-term change. Even this Jupiter result is based simply on the predictions of a model that is apparently not universally accepted. And Jupiter is a far different planet than most of the others, since the majority of its heat is self-generated, and does not come from the Sun.

--Peter

[soothsayer]

6. new blue band? becoming second sun?

It's also developed a cool blue band recently. Maybe this stuff started when we crashed that probe into it.

Some say Jupiter is becoming our second sun. We'll be a binary system! It's a big ol' gas bag anyway. (not to be mean---i LOVE jupiter!)