any models that have been developed so far. Still got a looooong way to go before we understand that Red World, and given past experience, whatever understanding is agreed on will be wrong.

It's just the way things are.

It really doesn't work to make direct comparisons between surface conditions on the Earth and Mars. No one makes such comparisons between conditions on Venus and Earth, and the differences between Earth and Mars are almost as radical as those between Venus and Earth.

Yet "scientific" mythologies about Mars abound, and it is partly because of those mythologies -- for example, that "liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars" -- that consideration gets so bolloxed and confused.

More and more, it's looking like it doesn't matter whether liquid water can exist on the surface of Mars, because water may not be the primary surface solvent, it may be sulfuric acid instead, or maybe something else.

Who has even begun to probe what sort of history and what sort of current regime Mars might experience without "water" as such at the surface at all?

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Wm Shakespeare, Hamlet