![]() ![]() Satellite technology allows scientists to localize clouds in 3-D and associate different cloud types with their amount of solar reflection.Īnd although researchers are still far from certain whether an anticipated increase in cloudiness will further heat up the planet or offset the warming a bit, a growing consensus among climate modelers is that clouds will increase, rather than hold back, the warming triggered by greenhouse gases. No variable has more confounded climate scientists than how clouds will react to - and influence - a warming world. Except, that is, when it comes to clouds. Over decades, improvements in observations of the present climate, reconstructions of ancient climate, and computer models that simulate past, current, and future climate have reduced some of the uncertainty in forecasting how rising temperatures will ripple through the climate system. If you push on a lever by pumping extra CO2 into the air, it sets off a cascade of events - warming air warming oceans melting ice changes in evaporation, vegetation, ocean currents, wind patterns and more - which themselves push on the system in various ways, leading to more changes, which further alter the system, and so on. ![]() Earth’s climate is a complex, interrelated system involving the land, atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans. It’s no surprise, therefore, that when scientists began to wrestle with the potential impact of human-generated greenhouse gases, they often used Goldberg’s machines as an analogy. The lever might drop a ball into a chute, where it would roll to the bottom and knock a wheel into motion, which in turn would activate a scissors that would cut a rope… You get the idea. Back in the 1920’s, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg became a household name by drawing a seemingly endless series of fanciful and absurd contraptions in which a simple action, such as pushing a lever, would lead to an unfolding mechanical drama.
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