World Climates

Digest: Old world climates give rise to "young" lizard skulls.

Shared environmental pressures often give rise to the convergence of morphological characters in unrelated and geographically distinct species. Darwin (1859) wrote that “analogous variation” of traits in different organisms could be explained by similar influences or challenges in their environment. Convergence of traits can be driven by adaptive radiation when animals invade similar ecological...

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: ...

The Climates of the World, in Reference to Their Effects on Man's General Welfare and Destiny.

It the race of man, then, in all its varieties, affords general expression of the existing climates of the world, in reference to the circumstances which contribute to healthy organization; if one climate maintains, while another modifies more or less the characteristics of human beings, as is undoubtedly the case, it cannot be out of season to make this investigation: With what result to his o...

“icehouse” (cold) Climates