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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2338718" data-attributes="member: 10201">Actually, the weather wouldn't so much be absent, as more localized, and driven by geographic features.The primary drivers of Earth's weather patterns are thought to be, in no particular order: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">climate-zone temperature differences (hot air in the tropics rises and is displaced by cool air from the sub-tropical/temperate zone)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">geography (the Tibetan Plateau, the Rockies, the Mongolian highlands, and the distribution of land and water across the climactic zones may be why we have the specific weather/climate patterns we do, and not something else)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">ocean currents--which are driven by the prior two</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">varying daily sunlight intensity and duration (i.e., seasons), which acts primarily by altering the first point above seasonally. The direction of the Earth's rotation comes in here, too, and is why the jetstream blows in the direction it does.</li> </ul>It may be that the ultimate driver of weather patterns for the globe is<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">1. Water cools in the N Atlantic, becoming denser and sinking.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">2. This draws warmer waters north from the tropics, specifically the Gulf Stream (due perhaps just to accidents of geograph)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">3. the interesting part, and the part i don't understand, is that, for whatever reason (probably partly coriolis effects), this doesn't simply form a neat closed loop, but instead drives a series of massive ocean currents that travel across the S Atlantic, around the tip of Africa, and do a massive loop around the Indian and Pacific oceans. Now, which particular part is the chicken in this chicken-and-egg scenario is hard to know--and probably breaking any one of the links would break the whole system.</li> </ul>Another interesting data point: it may be that part of why the Earth was much warmer during the dinosaur period was because of no polar landmasses, and therefore much less polar ice, meaning both more water in circulation (i.e., higher humidity and therefore more greenhouse effect), and less albedo (ice is very reflective, so the more of the Earth is covered in ice, the more sun energy that gets reflected back into space rather than absorbed).</blockquote>

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