Related papers: A climatic thermostat making Earth habitable
Higher concentrations of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O) are expected to slightly warm Earth's surface because of increases in radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is the difference in the net upward thermal radiation flux from the Earth…
There is evidence that a natural control system influences global atmospheric surface temperature (Leggett and Ball, 2020). The present paper sets up and tests a hypothesis concerning the physical makeup of the sequential elements of the…
According to the standard liquid-water definition, the Earth is only partially habitable. We reconsider planetary habitability in the framework of energy-balance models, the simplest seasonal models in physical climatology, to assess the…
The growing concentrations of the greenhouse gases CO2, CH4 and N2O (GHG) in the atmosphere are often considered as the dominant cause for the global warming during the past decades. The reported temperature data however do not display a…
The influence of atmospheric composition on the climates of present-day and early Earth has been studied extensively, but the role of ocean composition has received less attention. We use the ROCKE-3D ocean-atmosphere general circulation…
A simple 3-parameter random walk model for monthly fluctuations $\triangle T$ of a temperature $T$ is introduced. Applied to a time range of 170 years, temperature fluctuations of the model produce for about 14\% of the runs warming that…
A balanced ratio of ocean to land is believed to be essential for an Earth-like biosphere and one may conjecture that plate-tectonics planets should be similar in geological properties. After all, the volume of continental crust evolves…
TRAPPIST-1 is an ultra-cool dwarf hosting a system consisting of seven planets. While orbital properties, radii and masses of the planets are nowadays well constrained, one of the open fascinating issues is the possibility that an…
Planetary rotation rate is a key parameter in determining atmospheric circulation and hence the spatial pattern of clouds. Since clouds can exert a dominant control on planetary radiation balance, rotation rate could be critical for…
We analyze the stability of a low-order coupled sea ice and climate model and extract the essential physics governing the time scales of response as a function of greenhouse gas forcing. Under present climate conditions the stability is…
We explore the effects of seasonal variability for the climate of Earth-like planets as determined by the two parameters polar obliquity and orbital eccentricity using a general circulation model of intermediate complexity. In the first…
The Earth has warmed in the last century with the most rapid warming occurring near the surface in the arctic. This enhanced surface warming in the Arctic is partly because the extra heat is trapped in a thin layer of air near the surface…
The general circulation of the atmosphere determines the long-term variability of weather processes. This circulation is driven by the temperature differences between the poles and the equator, causing air to move along the Earth's surface.…
Life is a planetary feature that depends on its environment, but it has also strongly shaped the physical conditions on Earth, having created conditions highly suitable for a productive biosphere. Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics…
As a contribution to the study of the habitability of extrasolar planets, we implemented a 1-D Energy Balance Model (EBM), the simplest seasonal model of planetary climate, with new prescriptions for most physical quantities. Here we apply…
Earth, Mars, and Venus, irradiated by an evolving Sun, have had fascinating but diverging histories of habitability. Although only Earth's surface is considered to be habitable today, all three planets might have simultaneously been…
The Sun is expected to increase its radiant output by about 10% per billion years. The rate at which the radius of the Earth's orbit would need to increase in order to keep the present value of the Sun's radiant flux at the Earth constant…
Observations suggest that the earth's surface has been warming relative to the troposphere for the last 25 years; this is not only difficult to explain but also contrary to the results of climate models. We provide new evidence that the…
We analyze global surface temperature data obtained at 13472 weather stations from the year 1702 to 1990. The mean annual temperature of a station fluctuates from year to year by typically +-0.6oC (one standard deviation). Superimposed on…
Earth's atmosphere has evolved as volatile species cycle between the atmosphere, ocean, biomass and the solid Earth. The geochemical, biological and astrophysical processes that control atmospheric evolution are reviewed from an "Earth…