Related papers: A climatic thermostat making Earth habitable
The carbon-silicate cycle regulates the atmospheric $CO_2$ content of terrestrial planets on geological timescales through a balance between the rates of $CO_2$ volcanic outgassing and planetary intake from rock weathering. It is thought to…
Global climate change is one of main concern of modern society. To estimate this change usually one estimates the global mean temperature. Measuring and calculating the Earth's average temperature are multi-steps complex processes which…
Conventionally, a habitable planet is one that can support liquid water on its surface. Habitability depends on temperature, which is set by insolation and the greenhouse effect, due mainly to CO2 and water vapor. The CO2 level is increased…
The present earth warming up is often explained by the atmosphere gas greenhouse effect. This explanation is in contradiction with the thermodynamics second law. The warming up by greenhouse effect is quite improbable. It is cloud…
A recently advanced argument against the atmospheric greenhouse effect is refuted. A planet without an infrared absorbing atmosphere is mathematically constrained to have an average temperature less than or equal to the effective radiating…
The Sun encompasses planet Earth, supplies the heat that warms it, and even shakes it. The United Nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assumed that solar influence on our climate is limited to changes in solar irradiance…
Conventional definitions of habitability require abundant liquid surface water to exist continuously over geologic timescales. Water in each of its thermodynamic phases interacts with solar and thermal radiation and is the cause for strong…
Habitable planets are commonly imagined to be temperate planets like Earth, with areas of open ocean and warm land. In contrast, planets in snowball states, where oceans are entirely ice-covered, are believed to be inhospitable. However, we…
A simple phenomenological account for planetary climate instabilities is presented. The description is based on the standard model where the balance of incoming stellar radiation and outward thermal radiation is described by the effective…
Climate change is an important current issue and there is much debate about the causes and effects. This article examines the changes in our climate, comparing the recent changes with those in the past. There have been changes in…
In this report, a simple experimental system is shown, by which the temperature rise of global warming due to greenhouse gases can be demonstrated quantitatively. The system configuration is similar to that of the earth-atmosphere-space…
Understanding when global glaciations occur on Earth-like planets is a major challenge in climate evolution research. Most models of how greenhouse gases like CO2 evolve with time on terrestrial planets are deterministic, but the complex,…
Using an intermediate complexity climate model (Planet Simulator), we investigate the so-called Snowball Earth transition. For certain values of the solar constant, the climate system allows two different stable states: one of them is the…
The stability of Earth's climate on geological timescales is enabled by the carbon-silicate cycle that acts as a negative feedback mechanism stabilizing surface temperatures via the intake and outgas of atmospheric carbon. On Earth, this…
Water-rich planets such as Earth are expected to become eventually uninhabitable, because liquid water does not remain stable at the surface as surface temperatures increase with the solar luminosity over time. Whether a large increase of…
We propose a non-steady state model of the global temperature change. The model describes Earth's surface temperature dynamics under main climate forcing. The equations were derived from basic physical relationships and detailed assessment…
Atmospheric ozone plays an important role on the temperature structure of the atmosphere. However, it has not been included in previous studies on the effect of an increasing solar radiation on the Earth's climate. Here we study the climate…
We explore the potential multistability of the climate for a planet around the habitable zone. We focus on conditions reminiscent to those of the Earth system, but our investigation aims at presenting a general methodology for dealing with…
We discuss how greenhouse gases affect radiation transfer in Earth's atmosphere. We explain how greenhouse gases like water vapor or carbon dioxide, differ from non-greenhouse gases like nitrogen or oxygen. Using simple thermodynamics and…
The climate system's nonlinear dynamics is influenced by various external forcings and internal feedbacks that can give rise to regional and even global tipping points that may lead to significant and potentially irreversible changes.…