UEA: Oceans moderate the climate
Story submitted by Eric Worrall
h/t The Register – University of East Anglia researchers have challenged the view that any planet in the Goldilocks zone (the right distance from a star so water is likely to be liquid) is likely to be habitable.
New research shows that without an ocean, and the right rate of rotation, a planet is likely to experience extremes of temperature which make it unlikely to harbour life.
From the Abstract; http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2014.1171
“The climate and, hence, potential habitability of a planet crucially depends on how its atmospheric and ocean circulation transports heat from warmer to cooler regions. However, previous studies of planetary climate have concentrated on modeling the dynamics of atmospheres, while dramatically simplifying the treatment of oceans, which neglects or misrepresents the effect of the ocean in the total heat transport. Even the majority of studies with a dynamic ocean have used a simple so-called aquaplanet that has no continental barriers, which is a configuration that dramatically changes the ocean dynamics.
Here, the significance of the response of poleward ocean heat transport to planetary rotation period is shown with a simple meridional barrier—the simplest representation of any continental configuration. The poleward ocean heat transport increases significantly as the planetary rotation period is increased. The peak heat transport more than doubles when the rotation period is increased by a factor of ten. There are also significant changes to ocean temperature at depth, with implications for the carbon cycle. There is strong agreement between the model results and a scale analysis of the governing equations. This result highlights the importance of both planetary rotation period and the ocean circulation when considering planetary habitability.”
According to Dr. David Stevens, from UEA school of mathematics;
“Mars for example is in the sun’s habitable zone, but it has no oceans – causing air temperatures to swing over a range of 100°C. Oceans help to make a planet’s climate more stable, so factoring them into climate models is vital for knowing whether the planet could develop and sustain life,”
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How about an ocean drying competition for the next earth hour?
Has anyone cosidered searching for signs of intelligent life at the University of East Anglia?
“Mars for example is in the sun’s habitable zone, but it has no oceans – causing air temperatures to swing over a range of 100°C.”
Russians live in Siberia where temperatures can swing over 90 C. Mars air temperature swing is not too bad if only it had air. Mars has virtually no atmosphere with atmospheric pressure less than 1% of earth. If you can’t even breathe, no use complaining about being too hot or too cold.
Scientific box mentality. Next they will be saying “we were amazed to find”.
Cant have water without atmospheric pressure which presumably is related to the gravity/mass of the planet.
I think I learnt that in high school. Anyone disagree?
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
This all presumes that life can only exist as it does on earth. Life adapts to it’s environment. Who’s to say the extent of life’s adaptability? Here on earth we find life at all extremes, from steaming pools of water, to deep ocean hydrothermal vents, to freezing arctic conditions.
I think the point about Mars is that temperatures swing through 100°C in the course of a day. Also, without oceans, one presumes that life would have difficulty “starting off” since almost all land animals and plants on this planet can trace their ancestry to aquatic forebears. While there are places on Earth, as noted, that swing through 90°C, that’s annually, not daily, and life towards the polar zones evolved elsewhere, moving into the polar niches because they were available and there was no competition. The polar bear is a good example of this.
“Mars for example is in the sun’s habitable zone, but it has no oceans – causing air temperatures to swing over a range of 100°C. ”
But that’s great. Martian atmosphere is over 95% carbon dioxide. And better still, NASA has about 30-folded their previous Martian CO2 ice mass estimations http://spaceref.com/onorbit/nasa-spacecraft-reveals-dramatic-changes-in-mars-atmosphere.html.
Surely the Martian temperature there swings, but when will the peak kick off the positive feedback to sublime all that CO2 into the Martian atmosphere permanently? Mars is claimed to have enough water to cover the planet at an average depth of 35 meters.
Now when CACA physics is settled and all, what’s stopping Obama’s favorite shrink to run his best models to forecast the birth of Martian oceans?
Jaakko Kateenkorva says at July 22, 2014 at 1:16 am
95% of not a lot is still not a lot.
Looking at other planets is interesting in its own right. There is really no need to look for practical applications at home.
It’s literally on another planet.
Is there any uncertainty in this?
Those great diurnal swings on Mars despite the atmosphere actually having more CO2 than Earth are due to the virtual absence of H2O, the really important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, as well as the absence of oceans with their massive heat capacity.
That said I’ve experienced diurnal swings of about 40 degrees Celsius in inland Australia where the air is very dry and the ocean far away. Probably even greater figures occur in e. g. Central Asia.
I agree that the configuration of continents and oceans and the resulting pattern of poleward heat transport is extremely important for global climate. So much is obvious from the geologic record, but it is rather odd to hear it from UEA, since it is not in accord with CAGW orthodoxy where CO2 is the one and only permitted control knob for climate.
So many systems within our environment, all interlocked and reacting with each other in such complex ways that even the experts (climate scientists) don’t fully understand all of it. But I’m damn sure they know a lot more than the collective minds of a cave full of “deniers” ; politicians, big biz, and the fruit loops.
Our climate has always varied within acceptable ranges, but the trends away from these figures is alarming.
A cartoon on the habitat of those who have trouble understanding reality . . . . . .
http://cartoonmick.wordpress.com/editorial-political/#jp-carousel-891
Cheers
Mick
cartoonmick says:
July 22, 2014 at 1:54 am
Oh we’re “flat earthers” again? Very nice. Very tolerant of opposing viewpoints there, mick. Did you spend all night thinking that one up?
One interesting fact about Mars, its atmosphere, which is mostly CO2, contains (by my calculation) more CO2 than Earth’s atmosphere.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
… Mars’s atmospheric mass of 25 teratonnes compares to Earth’s 5148 teratonnes with a scale height of about 11 kilometres (6.8 mi) versus Earth’s 7 kilometres (4.3 mi). …
Given that CO2 on Earth is around 400ppm, a rough estimate of the mass of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere = 400 / 1000000 * 5148 = 2 teratonnes of CO2 – vs Mars’ 25 teratonnes of (mostly) CO2.
In addition, since the height of the Martian atmosphere is a lot less than Earth, all that Martian CO2 is more concentrated close to the surface, forming a much denser CO2 blanket than Earth enjoys.
I would imagine that one of the necessary requirements for life on a planet is the existence of a magnetic field.
@ur momisugly Dr. David Stevens, from UEA school: “….Oceans help to make a planet’s climate more stable…”
Dr. Stevens and colleagues will presumably need nother 100 years to understand that
“climate is the continuation of the ocean by other means”, http://www.whatisclimate.com/ ;
or in the words of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) “Water is the driver of nature”, of which on this planet the oceans hold 1000 times more than the atmosphere, but have only a mean temperature of about + 4°C.
“Looking at other planets is interesting in its own right.”
How about cAGW favourite planet Venus? The temperature there is claimed to be pretty stable. Supposedly 460 °C day or night, at the poles or at the equator. Whether Venusian 0.002% water vapor is enough to theoretically make up an ocean there or not, it’s negligible enough to justify a request for best CACA hypothesis and models to be tested with Martian parameters.
Since cAGW seems to rely on laboratory experiments over observations at planetary scale, it would be interesting to see if/how e.g. the ideal gas law pV = nRT applies in their best models.
Without a large moon, a planet will not have a stable axis of rotation OR a strong magnetic field (assuming a partially liquid iron core). Without a strong magnetic field, solar radiation will gradually crack atmospheric water molecules and whisk the hydrogen away, eventually depleting the oceans. (Alternatively, the world would be a “waterball” with oceans hundreds of miles deep, with nutrient-deprived sterile surface layers.)
In short, a world similar to Earth will be vanishingly rare, because it will need a moon similar to ours, and those are formed by a very precisely-angled collision with a La Grange point sister planet. (The impact is also necessary to eject superdeep oceans and silicate mantels into orbit, leaving a basalt ball with a thin ocean suitable for plate tectonics.)
Without a reasonable rate of rotation the planet would not generate enough of a magnetosphere to ward off the devastating effects of the solar wind and most of it’s atmosphere would be driven off in very short order. The lowering of atmospheric pressure would then cause the oceans to evaporate so whether it’s in the right zone or not, it still needs to rotate and have a liquid mantle with a solid core.
Equally without the balancing effect of a moon similar to ours the spin that would be needed would generate such a wobble that the environment would be highly unpredictable.
Of course there might be some form of life that we don’t yet understand that could tolerate all of this.
I see that importance is laid on consistency of models–or at least lack of crippling discrepancies. Have the researchers compared their findings with actual data?
Anyone who doesn’t know yet that it is the mass of the atmosphere (and the distance from the Sun) that governs the global mean temperature on a planet, is part of the problem (and that includes WUWT, for seriously presenting this article, without acknowledging that larger context)–the problem being an insane breakdown of competence in science, as shown by the fragmented, fractious public “debate”. Venus has no ocean, but a hundred times the atmosphere of Earth, and a Venus/Earth temperature ratio (at points of equal pressure, over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures) that precisely reflects their relative distances from the Sun and nothing else (although Venus too–like Mars–has a 96.5% carbon dioxide atmosphere, compared to Earth’s 0.04%).
The problem now is, no one among the alarmists and lukewarmers wants to admit they are wrong, and that we are faced with no valid climate science and no competent climate scientists.
Life started in the oceans so having large areas of water is probably important. Also there needs to be CO2 in the atmosphere because that is where the carbon came from for the carbon based life. I don’t think the mentioned this salient fact.
# Eric Warrell
CO2 is labeled a GHG but that adsorption is accompanied by rapid radiation. So CO2 looses heat rapidly (a point lost on the alarmists) so any surface heat on Mars would rapidly radiate away. One reason why Mars is cold.
For centuries folks have debated what “animates” life asn in mixing stuff together and you have an organism which is “smart” enough to reproduce. Aristotle, Plato to Aquinas. Some seem to think that finding a planet simple show “animation” exists. Which, of course, avoids the original issue regarding how or creating the animation via experimentation. After all, no need to look when all the tools are at hand here and you likely don’t need lots and lots of very expensive astronomy hardware.
And why spend public funds on these pursuits? Wouldn’t it be better to simple have the government conduct things that can actually be useful to the, well, the public? Like Muslim outreach, for example? At least have a plebiscite.
Liquid Oceans are probably essential for some sort of life, but believe it or not multi-cell life needs “Plate Tectonics”. see Oxygen – provider of life