The climate on distant Pluto appears to be changing at a rate that some Earth-bound scientists find astonishing.
Recently released photos from the Hubble Space Telescope show the surface of Pluto got between 20 percent and 30 percent redder from 2000 to 2002, after changing practically none in the 46 preceding years. The varying color indicates temperature shifts, and parts of northern Pluto are rapidly cooling while areas of southern Pluto are quickly warming.
“It’s a little bit of a surprise to see these changes happening so big and so fast,” astronomer Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., told The Associated Press. “This is unprecedented.”
If Pluto’s climate changed so fast without the fossil fuel use that environmentalists blame for “global warming” on Earth, we wonder whether the environmentalists are willing to admit that Earth’s climate is also strongly affected by many powerful natural forces over which mankind has little control.