| For most of us, the word "climate" immediately generates thoughts of melting ice, rising seas, wildfires and gathering storms. However, in the course of working to understand this pressing challenge, scientists have revealed so much more: A fundamental understanding of how Earth's climate works.
Climate scientists — physicists, biologists, geologists, chemists and others — are regularly advancing our knowledge of how rocks, atmosphere, oceans and biosphere together spin up Earth's climate: the planetary system, encompassing weather, seasons and, yes, average global temperatures, that forms the backdrop to our lives and increasingly interferes with them.
I find this understanding of how our planet fundamentally works interesting and even wondrous. But such discoveries often get passed over in news reports about climate change. This makes sense: When a wildfire is advancing on people's homes, it is insensitive to describe how the quantum mechanics of carbon dioxide molecules contributes to the drought conditions that cause such fires to blaze more intensely. When we're explaining the economics of solar power or carbon capture, it may feel like a tangent to also describe how Earth's systems capture energy from the sun or store carbon deep in the bowels of the planet. And when we're announcing the latest predictions from the United Nations' climate models, there isn't often space to explore the underlying math that can offer predictions that are both apocalyptic and uncertain.
Climate scientists constantly have such insights about how Earth works, from the scale of a molecule or cell all the way up to an entire planet and across epochal time. And yet we have so little opportunity to appreciate them. That is one goal of our new special issue on climate science — to step back from the dread-inducing impacts of climate change and take a moment to appreciate the insights that emerge from its study.
The fundamental science of our climate isn't just interesting; it is the context in which we can make sense of the changes now occurring. If you understand how climate models were developed and how they work, you are armed with the knowledge to unpack political attacks on their predictions. If you understand the deep-time processes of our carbon cycle, and all the versions of Earth that have come before ours, you can better appreciate the climate we get to live in today — and understand its sensitivity to greenhouse gases. If you understand how a molecule can trap heat, then you can grasp the importance of reducing the number of those molecules in the atmosphere.
We hope you enjoy the special issue. And this will not be the end of Quanta's articles on this subject. We will continue to cover basic climate science to complement the work of our media peers who cover its politics, impacts and solutions. We want to reveal to you the fundamental processes that underlie the world we're all stepping into.
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