Please support your local climate scientist.

Bear with me here. 

As the lower atmosphere and Earth’s surface warms due to increased infrared heating from (“greenhouse”) gases, the atmosphere destabilizes, enhancing active energy exchange processes (physics) in the atmosphere through some conduction but mostly convection.

In summer and fall, when ocean heat content is greatest, very efficient heat engines known as tropical cyclones may form. These are not the only geophysical phenomena that transport excess heat away from the surface-atmosphere interface. More on that later.

Much debate and claims have been made to suggest that hurricanes will (or will not) become stronger, more numerous, larger, or rainier, as the climate system warms. Maybe all of these, and even faster/slower storms are among the realm of possibilities. And they may occur in new warming regions; physics tells us this.

Scientists don’t have all the answers, but progress is being made. We should not be fixated on a 1.75 m air temperature observation. It’s the entire climate system that matters; that is performing work (in a physics sense). More is happening, at different time and spatial scales, in the oceans and landlocked ice regions that impact sea level rise and ocean pH.

Then there are thunderstorms, extratropical cyclones, polar lows. These systems feed on different energetics, but they still transport energy vertically.

Tropical cyclones are not the only phenomena that matter. Hourly “surface” temperature is not the only marker. We need to work harder to tell a bigger story than what we’ve been doing. Our climate models are providing very useful projections that often foretell dangerous times ahead. And they validate reasonably well in retrospective runs. Can they predict the date of the next cat-5 hurricane to hit Florida? Of course not. But as a scientist who has built computer models, designed instrument systems and field experiments, and diagnosed and forecasted weather phenomena on multiple time and spatial scales, I trust these models more than the economic models that forecast (and never verify) trickle-down monetary flow, or the impacts of corporate and uber-income tax breaks on the average American worker.

Support your local climate scientist. Believe me, and from first-hand experience, we’re not in it for the money. By and large, we women and men are passionate about  using our scientific training to better understand  how the earth system operates, and raising alarm bells where and when it is appropriate, to compel action, if need be.

Paul Ruscher, Eugene, Oregon
24 July 2018