Geological Climates

Habitable Climates

The Earth is only partially habitable according to the standard liquid-water definition. We reconsider planetary habitability in the framework of energybalance models, the simplest seasonal models in physical climatology, to assess the spatial and temporal habitability of Earth-like planets. In order to quantify the degree of climatic habitability of our models, we define several metrics of fra...

Extreme climates

Effect of land albedo, CO2, orography, and oceanic heat transport on extreme climates V. Romanova, G. Lohmann, and K. Grosfeld Department of Physics, University of Bremen, Otto-Hahn-Allee, 33040 Bremen, Germany Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, 27515 Bremerhaven, Germany Received: 11 October 2005 – Accepted: 22 November 2005 – Published: 7 December 2005 Correspondence to: ...

“icehouse” (cold) Climates

“icehouse” (cold) Climates

Earth's climate has changed, within life-sustaining bounds, from warm to cool intervals, on scales from thousands to hundreds of millions of years. In the Phanerozoic Eon there have been three intervals of glaciation (Ordovician, Carboniferous and Cenozoic) lasting tens of millions of years, with ice down to sea level at mid-latitudes (Frakes et al., 1992; Crowell, 1999). These cool " ice-house...

Eocene equable climates revisited

Introduction Conclusions References