Ok. Let’s do some basic weather physics. I had this stuff explained to me by a senior BOM meteorologist as part of a CFA bushfire course and found it fascinating. This was supplemented with a talk by one of the leading climate scientists, but I’m not a specialist in this so by all means cross check what I say here.
Hot regions are areas of high pressure. Cold regions are areas of low pressure. Air spirals out of the high pressure zones and then circles in to fill the low pressure zones, following the contours of a weather map. The bigger difference between high and low and/ or the closer the two extremes are to each other, the closer the contours, the faster the wind.
Areas of low pressure take energy to produce, in the same way that areas of high pressure require energy. If the system didn’t have any energy, you wouldn’t have air moving away from high pressure areas into low pressure areas. The flip side of that is that if you have more energy, you’re going to create more of everything, more highs, more lows, more wind.
So what’s the point of this? Well with the global AVERAGE increasing in temperature, there’s going to be more energy in the system. That means we are going to have hotter, longer and more intense heatwaves. But it also means we will be getting more extremes to the colder end, so more intense cold snaps and in places longer cold waves. The danger of global warming isn’t just a slide of the weather we are used to, it’s hotter AND more extreme in every way.
The Highs and Lows of Air Pressure | Center for Science Education