Making a case for physicists to join climate research

In 2015, Dr. Morgan O’Neill was a graduate student at a traditional physics department, certain she would study spinning galaxies and black holes. Then she realized that the physics she was learning in class—the same complex, non-linear, beautiful physics—could make real progress in climate science. “It turned out I could do both at the same time,” she says. Now an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and chair of the American Physical Society’s group on the physics of climate, O’Neill is on a mission to recruit more traditional physicists into climate research. But the timing, she warns, could hardly be more difficult.

Why climate science is physics—and why physics departments skip it

O’Neill argues that climate change is, at its core, a physics problem. The same equations that govern the spin of a hurricane or the motion of air masses also describe the behavior of planetary atmospheres, whether on Earth or an exoplanet. Yet most undergraduate physics departments in the United States do not train students in fluid mechanics—the language of how gases and liquids respond to forces. That training is typically left to engineers. “I think that fluid dynamics should also be embraced by physics departments at the undergraduate level,” O’Neill says, “not least because the interest in climate physics among physics students is exploding.”