I'm Kerry Emanuel.
I'm a Professor of Atmospheric Science here at MIT.
I've been at MIT for 36 years.
Before that, I was at UCLA for three years.
And I've been interested in the atmosphere
since I was a young child and dreamed
that I might make a profession of it someday, and I have.
Over my professional career, my interest
has shifted a little bit more in the direction
of tropical meteorology and climate.
When I think about what I'm doing, and what I'm doing--
it's very important to understand
that the pursuit of climate science,
like any other science, is driven fundamentally
by curiosity about the natural world.
It's tempting to think that climate science is
all about solving the global warming problem.
But climate science has been around for well over 100 years,
and it's dealt with interesting aspects of the climate system
long before global warming became an issue,
and certainly before it became a politicized issue.
What we understand about the climate
is based mostly on just basic physics,
and in some cases, chemistry, and biology, and basic theory--
which, of course, is much harder to describe
to a layman than a big climate model.
One of the most exciting scientific discoveries
that we have come across in the last decade or so
is the recognition that in the tropics,
the clustering of convection serves
to dry out the atmosphere.
And that actually serves to cool it back down.
So we think that we may have stumbled
upon a kind of a tropical thermostat that
keeps the tropical climate stable, relatively stable.
And we know from geological evidence
that it's been stable over many, many hundreds of millions
of years, more stable than models tend to like it to be.
Unfortunately, that doesn't save us
from the risk of climate change in middle and high latitudes.
And there are effects in the tropics that aren't necessarily
to do with temperature, but rainfall that
accrue from climate change.
But scientifically, this is a really interesting discovery.
I'm extremely interested in what controls
the distribution of the most important greenhouse
gas in the atmosphere, which is actually water vapor.
Water vapor isn't talked about very much,
because it's a feedback in the climate system.
It has a very complex distribution in space and time.
And one of the things that controls it
is convection thunderstorms in the tropics,
including aggregates of convection, which sometimes
take the form of hurricanes.
I'm always trying to encourage undergraduates to get
interested in climate science.
We require students who have very good training
in math and physics, and increasingly
also in biology and chemistry.
There's a huge subdiscipline of atmospheric chemistry
which investigates problems like what controls ozone, what
controls the long-term carbon dioxide
content of the atmosphere.
These are issues that have to do, also,
with chemistry and biology.
We need talent, and this is a very interesting undertaking,
and right now, I think under-populated.
So come and see us.