Abstract
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 climate-biosphere 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.
Highlights
Understanding of the mechanisms and scenarios of climate change as well its current and potential effects on ecosystems and biodiversity have been a focus of keen attention and intense research over the last few decades [1,2,3]
Let us consider a model planet where the surface significantly covered by ice [20] and the ice-albedo feedback is the main regulator of the planetary climate dynamics
There is growing evidence that the biosphere can have a variety of feedback loops to climate and a comprehensive understanding is only possible based on the analysis of the coupled climate-biosphere system
Summary
Understanding of the mechanisms and scenarios of climate change as well its current and potential effects on ecosystems and biodiversity have been a focus of keen attention and intense research over the last few decades [1,2,3]. The most popular model is a zero-dimensional model [14] based on the theory of blackbody radiation determining global temperature changes due to the difference in incoming and outgoing solar radiation. We introduce a planetary climate model with a biosphere component that arises from coupling between the conceptual zero-dimensional global energy balance model of climate dynamics and a generic ecosystem dynamics model (a multispecific population system living on multiple food sources). A discussion and conclusions can be found in the last section
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