Introduction: Strategy and Outline of the Primer
1. Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 25.
1. Why Does Earth Have the Climate It Does?
1. “Vertical” means at 90° to the plane of the ecliptic in which Earth revolves around the Sun.
2. Named for the nineteenth-century German physicist Heinrich Hertz.
3. Note that sound is an acoustic wave, not an electromagnetic wave, but it has similar wave characteristics.
4. Rays are commonly used to describe the propagation of seismic energy associated with earthquakes.
2. Precipitation, Winds, Atmospheric Pressure, and the Origin of Climate Zones
1. This is the most common story of the origin of the term horse latitudes, but there are at least two other stories dating from the sailing era.
2. The Coriolis effect was first noticed in the flight of cannon balls and in the way objects fell when dropped from very tall structures.
3. Evapotranspiration is water lost to the atmosphere from the ground surface and the transpiration of groundwater by plants whose roots tap the capillary fringe of the groundwater table. See U.S. Geological Survey, “Evapotranspiration and the Water Cycle,” https://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleevapotranspiration.html.
3. Climate Dynamics: Natural Variations
1. Oxygen has two isotopes, O16 and O18. With a temperature increase in water (H2O), the lighter isotope preferentially evaporates, so the ratio of the two isotopes is a robust measure of water temperature at present and well into the past.
2. Earth’s shape is an oblate spheroid, having a diameter at the equator 43 kilometers greater than the diameter measured pole to pole. This small asymmetry is enough to allow the moon’s gravitational attraction to have a stabilizing effect on Earth’s orbital motions.
3. In some branches of science, especially electrical engineering, this may be called “feed-forward.”
4. There is also an effect caused by the surface roughness of the ocean; CO2 gas exchange is promoted in rougher ocean conditions.
5. Normal conditions are sometimes referred to as “neutral conditions.”
6. The thermocline may be absent at very high latitudes.
7. Bjerknes also established the notion of a weather front based on observations of troop movements during battle in World War I.
4. Climate in the Future
1. The use of the term fat tail to describe this distribution does not originate with the author.
5. Earth’s Responses to Climate Change
1. The graphs in figure 5.1 are from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth assessment report UNEP 2017 and have had that correction made.
2. A knot is 1 nautical mile per hour or 1 minute of latitude per hour. A nautical mile is 1.15 miles, or 1.852 kilometers.
3. A few other conditions are also needed, one of which is that the vertical temperature gradient needs to be such that the atmosphere can support convective motion.
4. Thomas R. Knutson, John Mcbride, Johnny C. L. Chan, Kerry Andrew Emanuel, Greg Holland, Christopher W. Landsea, Isaac Held, James P. Kossin, A. K. Srivastava, and Masato Sugi, “Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change,” Nature Geoscience 3, no. 3 (2010): 157–63.
6. Knutson et al., “Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change.”
7. Knutson et al., “Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change.”
6. Climate and Sustainable Development
1. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).