Rescope Radio

Clouds, soil moisture, and plant life are doing more climate work than most of us were ever taught and ignoring them leaves a huge gap in how we respond to warming. Here's the keynote from Dr. Katie Ross, at the recent Australian Water Association conference, that connects climate science to the living landscape, making the case that the climate “stands on two legs”: the familiar atmospheric story of greenhouse gases and a bottom-up ecological story driven by water, biology, and energy flows.We dig into radiative forcing using a simple Earth energy budget, then follow what happens when solar energy meets healthy country: diverse plants photosynthesise and transpire, shifting heat into latent form, while microbes and plant compounds act as cloud condensation nuclei that help water vapor form thicker, lower, more reflective clouds. That cloud cover matters for cooling, for gentle local rain, and for clearer nighttime re-radiation windows that let heat escape. We also zoom out to the blue planet, where phyt