I seem to be coming back to clouds. Not a surprise, surely, for a photographer. I wrote about them, among others, in the context of poetry of exile, or metaphorically linking them to the insights modern genetics can bring us.
What approach shall we take today? Start with Aristophanes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land (nephelokokkȳgía (νεφελοκοκκυγία), a satire of a bird-built city in the clouds meant to ridicule Athenians for living in a fantasy world rather than facing reality? Now used as an insult for naive, slightly deranged people bent on conspiracies that the impossible might happen?
Or start with Anthony Doerr’s novel of the same name, which links multiple narrators across 600 years in a time-traveling puzzle celebrating the power of stories? A puzzle that provides the hope – or fantasy? – that some permanence of tales told echoes the permanence of our world, despite predictions to the contrary? (I am not a fan of his, I think I reviewed All the Light that we can see here earlier in not too friendly a way. But Cloud Cuckoo Land is beloved by many readers who cling to the bit of optimism it provides.)
Shall it be Shelley, the poet famous for his poem, among others, that personified a cloud as a sentient narrator? The Cloud is a long poem (thus linked, not posted here in full,) beautiful, wistful, complex and, as it turns out, not entirely true.
The fourth line in the last stanza of the poem is both true and false – it turns out certain kinds of clouds ARE changing (at least where they are operating), and not for the better, leaving dead zones behind. Functionally dead clouds, then, in a challenge to Shelley. (And yes, as you might have anticipated, we are ending up with science, after all these longwinded throat clearings.)
Here is a summary of findings as reported in a long read from the NYT last month.
Basically, different clouds have different roles in the regulation of our climate systems. Some have a cooling effect of land or water, some warm the earth’s surfaces.
Low clouds – puffy cumulus, stratocumulus and flat stratus layers – help with cooling by reflecting light back upwards from their white surfaces and casting shade onto the world below due their density. They absorb heat from the earth and also radiate it back into space in equal measure, because the water droplets they consist of are warm, thus not trapping warmth overall.
High clouds – cirrus and cirrocumulus – on the other hand, are warming our world, counterintuitively so, given that they are much colder, filled with ice crystals. The sun permeates them, because they are less dense. And they act like a blanket to earth, not sending the warmth back into space.
Until serious global warming began, the clouds protected us on net, with the lower ones outweighing the damage done by the higher ones. But now we have a feedback loop where global warming is making the low clouds steadily disappear where they are needed, while the high ones further heat up the planet. Climate change has shifted wind patterns and expanded the tropics, the storm systems with cumulus clouds are drifting towards the poles, and so leaving large stretches open to sunlight. With heat thus increasing, it feeds into drift patterns that expand vulnerable land areas even further.
Succinctly put: the delicate energy balance of sunlight coming in, some of it being reflected, and some of it being absorbed, no longer holds. When low cloud cover diminishes, the scales tip. More solar energy gets trapped in oceans and land surfaces, leading to higher temperatures, more intense heatwaves, and increasingly unpredictable weather. (Ref.)
What can be done, specifically regarding cloud covers? We could certainly try and reduce contrails, (short for condensation trails), which are formed when hot exhaust from an airplane’s engines meets the cold upper atmosphere, causing water vapor to condense into visible ice crystals.
“When the air at cruising altitude is cool enough and moist enough, these contrails spread into high, thin layers that contribute to atmospheric warming. It’s entirely possible for airlines to avoid flying at altitudes where the air is conducive to forming contrails. A 2020 study found that adjusting the cruising altitude of just 2 percent of flights could reduce contrail warming by nearly 60 percent, without using much more fuel.”
(Not to be mistaken for the conspiracy theorists’ assumption of “chemtrails,” the idea that these trails are composed of harmful chemicals intentionally sprayed into the atmosphere for nefarious purposes, spreading Covid or other viruses, poisoning our environment with other chemical or biological agents. Cloud Cuckoo Land….)
Contrails can clearly be harmful in terms of producing blanket clouds aggravating global warming. Flying less, overall, might be suggested as a solution, rather than simply wishing for flying at lower altitudes! But we keep our head in the clouds….
Images from a series – Fragility – currently in the works, that contextualizes environmental harm and protection.
Music matches the mood.
