global warming, or solar system warming?

i was listening to a "best of" Art Bell this morning and the guest he had on was discussing that across the solar system there has been a warming trend amongst the planets. it was an interesting interview that regrettably i wasn't able to completely catch.
one of his justifications of this phenomenon was just a little suspect in my humble opinion though.
he was using pluto as his initial example citing a recent observation from ground based astonomers(can you even see pluto with any detail from earth?!) passing in front of a star and from this the atmosphere of the planet was backlit and one could measure it's heat content or whatnot and it's increased from the last time it's tempertature was noted.
possible, plausible?
another one of his points, was using computer models for earth's atmosphere and adapting them for the other planets, especially mars. apparently the ice caps on mars will be dissapearing around the same time our north pole completely breaks up.
when i tuned out the guest was telling Art that it's possible the sun may be responsible and it was some kind of cyclic process.
we have thousands of years of direct observation of the climate on this planet, can we tenativley extrapolate this knowledge to the rest of our neighborhood?
thoughts/opinions?

hmmm. Perhaps it is cyclic and it could mark the end of the ice ages and return to temperatures we seen before. However the placement of continents is a more likely reason why there are ice ages currently.

Just a thought, but how about Milky Way Galaxy spiral arm warming?

I'll try to explain -pardon my generalizations and shoddy science

The earth spins on a tilted axis. Our orbit of the sun is also tilted. Likewise, the spiral arms of our galaxy are tilted. Like a warped record (for those of us old enough to remember leaving our vinyl records in the sun) everything wavers up and down from the central core.

Right now, the spiral arm our solar system occupies is more in line with the center of the galaxy than it has been in a long, long time. Could radiation from the galaxy's core result in a warmer planet, the same way radiation from the sun causes summer and winter? I think it's possible.

The sun does go through cycles where more and less solar energy is put out. One of these cycles is the sun-spot cycles, where there are patterns of activity of formation of sunspots, and yes, this does directly affect the earth's climate, we can see changes in earth's climate that co-relate with those sunspot cycles.

However, thats not whats going on now.