SUVs on Mars!

Now SUVs are causing global warming on Mars!

From Pete Du Pont in yesterdays Opinion Journal:

Many things are contributing to such global temperature changes. Solar radiation is one. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that 'the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming.'

Statistics suggest that while there has indeed been a slight warming in the past century, much of it was neither human-induced nor geographically uniform. Half of the past century's warming occurred before 1940, when the human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now. And while global temperatures are now slightly up, in some areas they are dramatically down. According to 'Climate Change and Its Impacts,' a study published last spring by the National Center for Policy Analysis, the ice mass in Greenland has grown, and 'average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s.' British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton says that from 1993 through 2003 the Greenland ice sheet 'grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year,' and that in the past 30 years the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has grown as well.

Don't those SUV-driving Martians realize the damage they're causing their planet?