Related papers: The Structural Case for the Eco-Civilization Parad…
The productivity of a planetary biosphere is limited by how its free-energy budget is partitioned between maintaining a habitable environment, driving metabolism, and processing heritable information. We derive an upper bound on net primary…
We develop a framework within which to conceptualize World-Earth System resilience. Our notion of World-Earth System resilience emphasizes the need to move beyond the basin of attraction notion of resilience as we are not in a basin we can…
The level of technological development of any civilization can be gaged in large part by the amount of energy they produce for their use, but also encompasses that civilization's stewardship of their home world. Following the Kardashev…
An essential facet of achieving climate neutrality by 2045 is the decarbonization of municipal energy systems. To accomplish this, it is necessary to establish implementation concepts that detail the timing, location, and specific measures…
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…
In the outer regions of the habitable zone, the risk of transitioning into a globally frozen "snowball" state poses a threat to the habitability of planets with the capacity to host water-based life. We use a one-dimensional energy balance…
Modeling environmental ecosystems is critical for the sustainability of our planet, but is extremely challenging due to the complex underlying processes driven by interactions amongst a large number of physical variables. As many variables…
While the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) is essential for decarbonizing the transportation system, the production and distribution of EVs entail substantial carbon costs. To ensure these emissions are accurately accounted for and…
The understanding of the fundamental properties of the climate system has long benefitted from the use of simple numerical models able to parsimoniously represent the essential ingredients of its processes. Here we introduce a new model for…
Ecological communities are composed of species interactions that respond to environmental fluctuations. Despite increasing evidence of temporal variation in these interactions, most theoretical frameworks remain rooted in static…
Energy has been propelling the development of human civilization for millennia, and technologies acquiring energy beyond human and animal power have been continuously advanced and transformed. In 1964, the Kardashev Scale was proposed to…
Foundation models have enormous potential in advancing Earth and climate sciences, however, current approaches may not be optimal as they focus on a few basic features of a desirable Earth and climate foundation model. Crafting the ideal…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
The development of robust Early Warning Signals (EWS) is necessary to quantify the risk of crossing tipping points in the present-day climate change. Classically, EWS are statistical measures based on time series of climate state variables,…
The current thermo-industrial civilization is critically dependent on fossil fuel energy sources. An intuitive model capturing the interplay between economic activity, physical power consumption, depletion and energy quality is presented.
We introduce energy-space quantum walks as a minimal framework to investigate equilibration, thermalization, and irreversibility from an effective-dynamics perspective. By mapping the configuration space of a walk onto a ladder of energy…
The hierarchical system of forest ecosystem models based on the theory of individual-based (structured) models of populations and communities is briefly described. New self-thinning models are integrated with tree stand models within a…
It is generally recognized that a distinguishing feature of life is its peculiar capability to avoid equilibration. The origin of this capability and its evolution along the timeline of abiogenesis is not yet understood. We propose to study…
The second law of thermodynamics implies a relationship between the net entropy export by the Earth and its internal irreversible entropy production. The application of this constraint for the purpose of understanding Earth's climate is…
Once carbon emission neutrality and other sustainability goals have been achieved, a widespread assumption is that economic growth at current rates can be sustained beyond the 21st century. However, even if we achieve these goals, this…