What Conditions Create a Warmer World?

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Guardsman Bass
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What Conditions Create a Warmer World?

Post by Guardsman Bass »

I'm thinking geologically and climatologically. I'm curious, because looking at the map of the continents during the Cretaceous, which was a warm period with significantly higher sea levels and worldwide average temperature (about 10 Celsius higher), there were significant shallow seas covering much of the former coastal lowlands, and no real polar continents (Antarctica was farther north). Are there any other conditions that help to create a 'hothouse' earth?

Other than that, I have a hypothetical scenario. Assuming you could make one major adjustment to ocean and land locations, what would you do? For the sake of the scenario, assume that there are no massive disruptions from the initial movement of the land or sea itself, but there will certainly be disruptions and changes to the climate afterwards. Do you make a change?
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Raw Shark
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Post by Raw Shark »

This is, as you're probably aware, a topic of considerable debate even among scientists, but in general a number of factors are highly likely to be involved, including proximity to the sun, atmospheric composition, and the presence or absence of reflective surfaces such as the polar ice caps.

For the what if scenario: No major changes.

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SyntaxVorlon
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Post by SyntaxVorlon »

Precession is a fairly well understood process, that comes back around every 64000 yrs or so. So most of the warming or cooling happens when the atmosphere is a certain way and how the continents are moving. Part of continental drift is subducting matter which either pulls carbon out of the cycle or puts it into the cycle, I can't remember which.
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