SUVs, Humans Cause Weather Change on Jupiter?

Explanation: For about 300 years Jupiter's banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue. Now, Jupiter has a third red spot, again produced from a smaller whitish storm. All three are seen in this image made from data recorded on May 9 and 10 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The spots extend above the surrounding clouds and their red color may be due to deeper material dredged up by the storms and exposed to ultraviolet light, but the exact chemical process is still unknown. For scale, the Great Red Spot has almost twice the diameter of planet Earth, making both new spots less than one Earth-diameter across. The newest red spot is on the far left (west), along the same band of clouds as the Great Red Spot and is drifting toward it. If the motion continues, the new spot will encounter the much larger storm system in August. Jupiter's recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator.

A new sensor on a NASA Earth-orbiting satellite has for the first time observed a global-scale die off of vegetation, a new article in Science magazine reports this week.

"We were amazed at the continental scale that this die off occupied", said Dr. John Jorgenson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The relatively rapid change in vegetation characteristics was observed from late summer through the fall, when the multi-million dollar NASA instrument recorded a distinct change in vegetation color from green to various shades of yellow, brown, orange, and red.

"While there have been anecdotal reports for many years of this die-off phenomenon, those reports have been restricted to local regions. We have, for the first time, documented the global scale of the event, which covers much of the Northern Hemisphere during the months of September and October", said Dr. Jorgenson.

While the exact mechanism for the phenomenon is unclear, the researchers believe that it is related to increasing fossil fuel use, especially home heating oil, during the fall when temperatures turn cooler. "We know that particulate pollution from the burning of fuel oil can have a negative effect on healthy vegetation, and so the correlation between heating fuel use and vegetation die-off constitutes 'smoking gun' evidence for this association", Jorgenson said.

Bolstering this theory, Jorgenson claimed, is the observed return of vegetation health in the spring as temperatures warm and heating oil use drops to near zero.