Climate catastrophes in the Solar System

A bit of a silly article... Calling it a "catastrophe" infers that something went wrong... So these two planets weren't at the right distance from the sun to sustain water in a liquid form...what makes this a catastrophe any more than pluto or any other chunk of rock unlucky enough to not orbit at the right distance...

I can see that modeling earths climate (especially with the computing power we have now days) is definately something to look into. I don't believe we can truly change or reverse something like climate in any short period of time (i.e. "short" meaning without our lifetimes) so this sort of modelling would be very important in helping us predict and adapt to the climate changes before thing get ugly...and while we wait for everyone to roll up their recycleable sleeves and try to do what's right for the planet.

That being said, studying dead planets (which are in that state for a pretty obvious reason) doesn't strike me as a useful way to throw our resources around. Kind of strikes a funny chord with me like a rocket scientist got some funding for "climate study" and wasn't sure how to get a rocket involved.

Let pick our battles. Studying Mars? Okay, since my grandkids will probably go there but VENUS?!? Why not Jupiter too while we're throwing money at planets we can't actually stay on long enough to study. Jupiter has more potential as far as I'm concerned...maybe we can drop large dirgibles onto the top of the atmosphere that would be pulled about by large fishing-lure-like wind turbines that would pull them about, generating power and being useful for something at least...

Can anyone enlighten me with what the heck they really plan on learning about earths climate by going to VENUS?!? Lets save our atmosphere one rocket launch and just drop $$$ into a large beaker of acid and then state something obvious about the relation between climate and our distance from the sun.

EDIT: Oooh! Forgot to say how much I liked the "water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas" statement. Now it's the clouds' fault. I'm not even going to start talking about this one.