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Paltridge has recently hypothesized that the mean global climate operates near a state of maximum entropy production. In this paper an attempt is made to justify this hypothesis by parametrizing the eddy heat fluxes in terms of eddy diffusivities and using the local potential method of Glansdorff and Prigogine. With eddy diffusivities independent of the temperature and its gradient a principle of minimum entropy production is in fact found. However, by using a more realistic parametrization, a quantity closely related to entropy production is found to be maximized. The relevance of this to global climate models is discussed.
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Stephen Mobbs (1982) studied this question.
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