Environmental intelligence, basic thermodynamics, and extreme weather Free

Jane Lubchenco and Thomas Karl’s article impressively describes the meteorological consequences of climate change. Thermodynamics may help us appreciate the causal connection between climate change and extreme weather. The atmosphere is, among other things, a heat engine—or an ensemble of engines—that utilizes temperature differences to produce work. That work manifests itself as weather: the movement of air and the evaporation and transport of water. We humans even extract some of that work through sails, wind turbines, and hydropower. Adding more heat to the high-temperature reservoir (for example, the boiler) of an engine makes it work that much harder. Clearly, this is an oversimplification for a system as complex as the atmosphere, but it might serve as a starting point in understanding the atmosphere and climate change from a thermodynamic perspective.