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LIT-519: Nonequilibrium thermodynamics and maximum entropy production in the Earth system

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StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-423); worth reading as the clearest statement of the maximum-entropy-production (MEP) programme in Earth-system science by its main advocate: what MEP claims, how it differs from Prigogine's minimum principle (minimum entropy production describes relaxation toward a steady state; MEP selects among possible steady states), an order-of-magnitude entropy budget of the Earth, a survey of climate, ocean, mantle and biotic MEP applications, and the extension to life and Gaia. Read it as advocacy that is candid about its footing: the author calls MEP "proposed" and says "no one would argue that MEP is well established". Chosen over the Kleidon–Lorenz 2005 book, which has no lawful open text.
Tagsthermodynamics, natural-sciences, complex-systems
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-423 — Nonequilibrium thermodynamics and maximum entropy production in the Earth system
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-517 — Life raises the Earth's entropy production, chiefly by increasing the absorption of sunlight, and if the planet is held at maximum entropy production, the negative feedbacks of that state would give the homeostasis the Gaia hypothesis postulates, THEORY-671 — An open system with enough internal degrees of freedom settles, among its possible steady states, into the one of maximum entropy production; this selects among steady states, where Prigogine's minimum principle only describes relaxation toward one

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Axel Kleidon (2009), Naturwissenschaften 96(6), 653–677 (review, open access) — DOI-10.1007/s00114-009-0509-x

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-02 with the critics of Prigogine’s extremum principles and the maximum-entropy-production literature, at the owner’s request to fill out the record’s coverage of dissipative structures. The brief named Kleidon and Lorenz’s 2005 edited book, Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics and the Production of Entropy, or this review if the book was unreadable. The book has no lawful open text, so this review is filed instead, and the book is not.

NOTE-423 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work: Active. It is the record’s statement of the MEP programme as its advocates practise it, and of the distinction this literature draws against Prigogine:

  • Prigogine’s minimum principle concerns the approach to a steady state;
  • MEP chooses which of several possible steady states is realised.

It is also candid about MEP’s footing. It calls the principle “proposed”, says its foundation in Dewar’s work (LIT-521) is “still work in progress”, and lists the criticisms, Grinstein and Linsker (LIT-525) among them. Its account of that Comment omits the Comment’s main point, that the far-from-equilibrium derivation fails. It defers to Martyushev and Seleznev’s review (LIT-520) for MEP’s physical foundation; the record could not read that review.

Its second half is the bridge to the life-as-dissipation literature, which another reading on 2026-10-02 is filing. It argues that biotic activity raises planetary entropy production by enhancing the absorption of sunlight. On that view, homeostasis of the kind the Gaia hypothesis postulates would follow from MEP at the planetary scale. That puts living systems on the dissipative-structure side of the demarcation dispute Nahas and Sachs describe (LIT-192, NOTE-094), and treats life as the most effective of Earth’s dissipative processes, not as a different kind of system. The “Dissipative Self-Organizing Systems” cluster of definitions of life in LIT-211 is this view’s home among definitions. The review gives no criterion separating a living dissipative system from a convection cell, and does not try to.

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