Department of Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences

Improving water systems is a key way we can better adapt to climate change, according to Brown oceanographer Baylor Fox-Kemper.

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.”

Brown’s Equitable Climate Futures initiative is looking to bridge the gap between research and community action by bringing together interdisciplinary teams of researchers and community members. Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper, a faculty director of ECF said the initiative is “science meets social sciences meets outlooks for climate change.”

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.