Introduction to the Special Issue on the Statistical Mechanics of Climate

Lucarini, Valerio

doi:10.1007/s10955-020-02605-0

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References 127 publications

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“…These interesting and important questions are highlighted in detail in a recent review [21] (see also Ref. [22]). An alternative approach to "realistic" models is given by the so-called conceptual climate models.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Stability of a planetary climate system with the biosphere species competing for resources

et al. 2021

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With the growing number of discovered exoplanets, the Gaia concept finds its second wind. The Gaia concept defines that the biosphere of an inhabited planet regulates a planetary climate through feedback loops such that the planet remains habitable. Crunching the "Gaia" puzzle has been a focus of intense empirical research. Much less attention has been paid to the mathematical realization of this concept. In this paper, we consider the stability of a planetary climate system with the dynamic biosphere by linking a conceptual climate model to a generic population dynamics model with random parameters. We first show that the dynamics of the corresponding coupled system possesses multiple timescales and hence falls into the class of slow-fast dynamics. We then investigate the properties of a general dynamical system to which our model belongs and prove that the feedbacks from the biosphere dynamics cannot break the system's stability as long as the biodiversity is sufficiently high. That may explain why the climate is apparently stable over long time intervals. Interestingly, our coupled climatebiosphere system can lose its stability if biodiversity decreases; in this case, the evolution of the biosphere under the effect of random factors can lead to a global climate change.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%