The discovery of over three hundred new planets orbiting nearby stars has provided new impetus for thinking about novel forms of climate and climate evolution, which only a few years ago would have been treated only in the pages of science fiction novelists, and then only if the authors had been imaginative enough to outdo the astonishing things Nature has presented us with. At the same time, knowledge of the climates of Solar system planets has grown by leaps and bounds, as has understanding of the climate of the Young Earth and of the new planet we will be living on as Earth enters the Anthropocene era. In this lecture series, I will show how a toolkit of basic physics can be used to explore all these diverse climates.
The 2010 Noble Lectures
A Lecture Series on
New Worlds, New Climates