Steampunk Weather - The giant engines of the atmosphere - Part 1

 I'm not getting anywhere with basic physics, so I am invoking my favourite reading material - steampunk.

These fictional people would understand my concept of weather mechanics.  Unfortunately, they don't exist, driven out by oil engines, and the fact that magic doesn't exist, except in the popular media.  Steampunk is an era stuck with steam engines, but a magic source of energy, because coal just doesn't cut it.  They also have magic lifting gas for the dirigibles. 

But it doesn't have to be a total fabrication.  We don't know anything about the giant steam engines of the atmosphere and ocean.  If you read some of the ideas of the mechanics, you realize they are using steampunk magic.  Looking at this, I found some physics sites that have 10 times the hits than I do, and I don't agree with any of them.  That's why we will never make any progress, unless we embrace the Scientific Method, but you won't find that with blogs, because everybody wants to be an influencer, and make money from ads.

All these available illustrations appear to be 'hand waving' and don't care about the laws of physics.  Basically, we have the warm air of the ocean plumes meeting a cold feed from the North, and they come in with a curl.  That is, there is an offset of how they collide.  The cold comes in on the left side, and curves in.  The hot is curling from the south and the right side.  They swirl in like the ying-yang symbol.  Nobody pushing clange looks at the cold side.

Cold white, hot black.  That's about as far as conventional thinking goes.  But what is the real mechanics that makes a hurricane a giant engine?

-to be continued