Department of Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences

Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper, co-author of a study that looks at how climate scientists communicate risk, told Utah Public Radio that it can be hard to describe scenarios in which the actual likelihood of something happening is difficult to quantify. Scientists, he said, frequently want a “big splash,” even before their work is peer-reviewed, in order to drive change — especially if the risk seems substantial. “You don’t want to do something that you don’t have to do, but you also don’t want to fail to do something when you really should,” Fox-Kemper said. “It’s a hard problem.”

A recent study in Nature Communications, co-authored by Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper, reveals that turbulence from ocean fronts—driven by submesoscale shear—significantly influences the transfer of heat, gases, and nutrients in the upper ocean layer, impacting climate and ocean productivity, especially in winter, which could improve climate model accuracy.

Co-authored by 21 international climate experts, including IBES Fellow and DEEPS Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper, a new article in Frontiers in Science offers the first comprehensive analysis of the diverse factors controlling global temperatures and provides a framework for improving warming predictions.

DEEPS Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper and EEOB Professor Stephen Porder have co-authored a piece in TIME about the Earth's rising temperatures. "As earth system scientists, we've learned it's sometimes more helpful to look at Earth as, well, a system. In this case, the system of the air and the oceans. Understanding how they interact is the key to understanding what is, and what isn’t, unusual about this very hot year."

Providence’s sewer systems are not prepared for the amount of rain falling on the city this year, according to Mayor Brett Smiley. And all that extra water is wreaking havoc and endangering lives. Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper commented saying it’s good that the city is taking action on upgrading its sewer infrastructure, given that we can only expect more rainfall and flooding as the climate continues to warm.

“The oceans do a lot of the work in reducing the level of warming,” DEEPS Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper told CNBC. “Over 90 percent of the excess energy on earth due to climate change is found in warmer oceans, some of it in surface oceans and some at depth.”