Global Warming... on Jupiter!

Here's a glorious Hubble Telescope picture of two new red spots on Jupiter.



And here's the accompanying Astronomy Picture of the Day article describing how the image was created.

The red spots are storms. The enhanced storm activity could be correlated with warming on Jupiter. Now, Jupiter is not as quiescent as the other gas giant planets in the Solar System. It's bigger than all of the other planets put together, and it generates just a bit more heat internally through Kelvin-Helmholtz adiabatic contraction than it receives from the sun.

Nevertheless, the upper layers of the Jovian atmosphere may well be affected by the radiation Jupiter receives from the sun. Could these new storms be indicators of a change in the Sun? It's an interesting though open question. There have been reports of increased temperatures on Mars (as detected by the Mars Global Surveyor) as well as on Pluto.

I think it's interesting that ideologues on the "humans don't cause global warming" side of the debate seize upon these reports as if it conclusively proves that the Sun is responsible for whatever warming the Earth has experienced. All it really does is provide some evidence that there are other mechanisms for warming besides human activity. Yet these reports can't simply be dismissed by the environmentalist fanatics. The question of how much human activity really affects the temperature of the earth is clearly still an open one.

It's a mistake to look at science through ideological glasses, regardless of one's side of that argument. The natural world is not especially sensitive to political arguments. The debate remains open, and only the careful and open scientific investigation of the phenomena associated with global warming will yield useful results.