Tag
#climate
6 articles
The Greenhouse Effect
Sunlight comes in as visible light and leaves as infrared, and a handful of molecules are transparent to one and opaque to the other. That asymmetry sets the temperature of the planet.
El Niño: When the Pacific Flips
El Niño is not a single storm but one warm phase of ENSO — a recurring ocean-atmosphere oscillation that redistributes the tropical Pacific's heat and rain worldwide.
The Carbon Cycle
Photosynthesis and ocean exchange dwarf human emissions, yet the atmospheric stock is rising. The resolution is the difference between a balanced two-way flux and a small one-way one — and it is the whole story of the carbon cycle.
Hurricanes: Nature's Heat Engines
Why a hurricane is a heat engine, not a wind machine: warm-ocean evaporation and latent heat are the fuel, the Coriolis effect only organises the spin, and a warming ocean tilts the odds toward the most intense storms.
Ocean Circulation
Why the Gulf Stream is narrow and fast, what the Coriolis effect actually does (and does not do), and what oceanographers really think about an AMOC collapse.
The Water Cycle
Water is conserved and endlessly recycled through a handful of reservoirs of wildly different sizes. Residence time — reservoir divided by flux — explains why a molecule spends nine days in the air but three thousand years in the deep sea, and why a warming atmosphere runs the whole cycle faster.