No matter how interesting it can be to write for a living, at some moment the spin becomes insufferable. Sometimes it's just impossible to absorb yet another lament about the Florida vote, America's anti-terrorism policies, or blither about the "really really new" economy.

At such times I often turn to the stars. Despite the spoiling skyglow generated by our City of Lights, Los Angeles can often have surprisingly steady skies. Even a small telescope can reveal truly astounding celestial sights.

This December the planets are especially wonderful. Saturn is brighter than it has been for the last 30 years and its incredible rings are sharply tilted towards Earth for optimum visibility. On New Years' Eve, Jupiter will outshine everything else in the sky. Each night during the month, the Great Nebula in Orion is easily observable, a magnificent spectacle even in our washed-out urban skies.

It's hard to look at these or other astronomical wonders and be overly concerned with the bombast now too typical of our public discourse. Most of the Earthly world, it seems, has been co-opted by one political agenda or another. Surely the stars are safe from our rhetorical pollution.

But then there's Mars.

Earlier this year, amateur astronomers, not normally an excitable bunch, were giddy with anticipation over Mars' scheduled apparition in the summer skies. At that time, the Red Planet would pass unusually close to the Earth and be illuminated with near perfect sunlight. Telescopes everywhere were being readied for the once in a lifetime chance to finally, clearly see Mars' elusive ice caps, strange dark markings and vast red deserts.

As the planet steadily grew into a bright red dot in the Western summer sky, however, observers worldwide found they could see almost nothing of the surface. None of its magical features were anywhere apparent. If anything, the Red Planet looked like a fuzzy pink grapefruit, an indistinct glowing blob.

Like many amateur stargazers, when I first caught sight of the nondescript Martian landscape, I disparaged my telescope's manufacturer, and mindlessly tweaked some settings that I knew would make no possible improvement. After that I decided to find out if something bigger might be up. There was. A truly epic sandstorm, the experts explained, was completely obliterating any view of the planet's surface.

Piqued by the unusual doings on Mars, scientists began analyzing the planet's climate in more detail. The size of the storm, they found, was nearly unprecedented. It was also occurring at one of the least likely times in the planet's seasonal cycles, much like a late summer hurricane striking Boston in the middle of winter. What, they wondered, could be supplying the energy required to power such violent weather?

Researchers then announced that the Martian ice packs are melting, spewing mammoth amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Surface temperatures in some locations have risen by a reported 80 degrees in just a few weeks. The Red Planet's hostile, bleak climate is rapidly warming up. "You would go from having to wear a spacesuit to just wearing a coat and an oxygen atmosphere,'' said one climatologist, assuming present trends continue for but a few millennia.

All of this proved irresistible fodder for the warring factions in Earth's global warming debate. Skeptics immediately used the data to attack the activists who want to severely restrict how we drive cars, heat homes and cook food to avoid heating our planet. The sun, skeptics had long argued, has been burning slightly hotter of late and warming the entire solar system, not just Earth. Martian weather seemed to finally prove their point.

The notion that the sun's cyclical energy shifts could cause climate change on many planets certainly has some plausibility. The sun has been in an especially active phase over the past several years. It has been generating significantly more radiation, some of which has triggered spectacular aurora in northern latitudes. Studies show that the Earth has far more cloud cover during solar heating spells as greater volumes of water evaporate into the air. A hotter sun could at least partially account for any unusually strong storms or ice cap erosion on both Mars and Earth.

This, of course, is heresy to the global warming advocates. "It's pretty ignorant," huffed one in an on-line rebuttal of a skeptic, "to look at what's happening on Mars, a completely different planet with completely different properties than Earth," and say anything useful about climate change on our own planet.

Such retorts have some validity. Unlike Earth, Mars is devoid of oceans, has no apparent life, a vestigial magnetic field and atmosphere, and shows no evidence of current geologic activity like volcanoes or moving continental plates. It lacks many of the constantly changing global features that so profoundly affect the Earth's climate. So what if both planets may be warming at the same time? How could there possibly be any link between them?

Trouble is, it wasn't the skeptics who first argued that Mars offers crucial lessons about Earth's climate. Global warming alarmists have long tried to illustrate our peril with reference to the Red Planet.

Dead Mars, Dying Earth, for example, a ballyhooed new book about global warming that won the endorsement of a National Public Radio personality, suggests that, "Mars once had an ocean larger than the Pacific. . .. Mars once had life. They are all gone." The now lifeless planet is a grim example of the ghastly fate we tempt with fossil fuels. "We have had the warning about global warming," its authors implore, "but will we listen? Mars teaches us that we must."

Now I can't look at Mars' red gleam without thinking of the breathless hubris of those who would write the planet's entire history, and thus presume to control our lives, on the sheerest conjecture. I can't help but imagine gas-sucking SUV drivers excusing their consumptive waste simply because the Red Planet is apparently getting hotter.

And I marvel at the destructive power of our age of hyperbole. Our argumentative excess hardly pauses with the heavens. When it passes, I wonder, will we still have anything left to ponder that is greater than ourselves?