Reading through Juliet Eilperin's insightful front-pager on Rev. Joel Hunter and other evangelical Christians concerned about global warming, one of the push-back arguments that Hunter has encountered jumped out at us:
Even some of Hunter's own congregants remain skeptical: Glenda Martinet refers to his sermons when she's urging her kids to stop wasting electricity, but her husband, Gary, notes that NASA scientists have detected warming on Mars. "Obviously they must have a bunch of SUVs running around there we can't spot," he joked as he walked into one of Hunter's Saturday-night services.
Considering that this is an argument that we've started noticing with a bit more frequency from global warming skeptics looking to slow down government action at all levels, we decided to pull together a quick three-point guide to help throw some water on this argument. Debunking resources below the jump...
--As part of his useful "How to Talk To A Climate Sceptic" series, British scientist and author Coby Beck deflates the idea that Mars' warmer temperatures and lack of carbon dioxide combine to undermine scientific consensus about warming on Earth.
--The overall conclusion that Mars is experiencing a warming trend (as opposed to warmer temperatures) is based on rather limited information, as pointed out by Professor Steinn Sigurdsson:
Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes [on Mars]...are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth…
--And last, but certainly not least, a prominent Russian astronomer has emerged lately as one of the most influential proponents of the theory, resting partly on Martian data, that the sun's radiation is the main cause of warming for both planets. However, his reasoning has at least one rather gaping hole in it:
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.
He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth's climate and virtually no influence on Mars.
But "without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice," said [Amato] Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.