Related papers: Environmental thresholds for mass-extinction event…
We explore some of the ramifications arising from superflares on the evolutionary history of Earth, other planets in the Solar system, and exoplanets. We propose that the most powerful superflares can serve as plausible drivers of…
Recent extreme value theory literature has seen significant emphasis on the modelling of spatial extremes, with comparatively little consideration of spatio-temporal extensions. This neglects an important feature of extreme events: their…
Global warming due to human-made gases, mainly CO2, is already 0.8{\deg}C and deleterious climate impacts are growing worldwide. More warming is 'in the pipeline' because Earth is out of energy balance, with absorbed solar energy exceeding…
Extreme sea level estimates are fundamental for mitigating against coastal flooding as they provide insight for defence engineering. As the global climate changes, rising sea levels combined with increases in storm intensity and frequency…
We seek to model the coupled evolution of a planet and a civilization through the era when energy harvesting by the civilization drives the planet into new and adverse climate states. In this way we ask if triggering "anthropocenes" of the…
The Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology (METE) is a unified theory of biodiversity that predicts a large number of macroecological patterns using only information on the species richness, total abundance, and total metabolic rate of the…
We propose a variation of the GMS model of evolution of species. In this version, as in the GMS model, at each birth, the new species in the system is labeled with a random fitness mark, but in our variation, to each extinction event is…
Upcoming missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope, will soon characterize the atmospheres of terrestrial-type exoplanets in habitable zones around cool K- and M-type stars searching for atmospheric biosignatures. Recent…
The current progress in the detection of terrestrial type exoplanets has opened a new avenue in the characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres and in the search for biosignatures of life with the upcoming ground-based and space missions.…
While the warming trends of the Earth's mean temperature are evident at climatological scales, the local temperature at shorter timescales are highly fluctuating. In this letter we show that the probabilities of such fluctuations are…
There is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether the present global warming is increasing local and global temperature variability. The central methodological issues of this debate relate to the proper treatment of normalised…
Survival models capture the relationship between an accumulating hazard and the occurrence of a singular event stimulated by that accumulation. When the model for the hazard is sufficiently flexible survival models can accommodate a wide…
What kind of environment may exist on terrestrial planets around other stars? In spite of the lack of direct observations, it may not be premature to speculate on exoplanetary climates, for instance to optimize future telescopic…
An attempt is made to estimate and forecast the trend of the global annual and monthly mean temperatures. The results of a conventional statistical analysis suggest that in the absence of unforeseeable events such as a sudden acceleration…
Exoplanets are now being discovered in profusion. However, to understand their character requires spectral models and data. These elements of remote sensing can yield temperatures, compositions, and even weather patterns, but only if…
With rising global temperatures Earth's tipping elements are becoming increasingly more vulnerable to crossing their critical thresholds. The reaching of such tipping points does not only impact other tipping elements through their…
Standard definitions of habitability assume that life requires the presence of planetary gravity wells to stabilize liquid water and regulate surface temperature. Here the consequences of relaxing this assumption are evaluated. Temperature,…
We present numerical results based on a simplified ecological system in evolution, showing features of extinction similar to that claimed for the biosystem on Earth. In the model each species consists of a population in interaction with the…
Context. To date, more than 5000 exoplanets have been discovered. The large majority of these planets have a mass between 1 and 17 {M_\oplus}, making them so-called super-Earths and mini-Neptunes. The exact formation process for this…
We theoretically study long-term trends in the statistics of record-breaking daily temperatures and validate these predictions using Monte Carlo simulations and data from the city of Philadelphia, for which 126 years of daily temperature…