[Image: A cloudless day in the Alabama Hills of California; photo by BLDGBLOG].
The Earth could lose all its clouds according to a feasible runaway greenhouse scenario, modeled by scientists at Caltech.
“Clouds currently cover about two-thirds of the planet at any moment,” Natalie Wolchover writes for Quanta. “But computer simulations of clouds have begun to suggest that as the Earth warms, clouds become scarcer. With fewer white surfaces reflecting sunlight back to space, the Earth gets even warmer, leading to more cloud loss. This feedback loop causes warming to spiral out of control.”
Or, she warns, as if channeling J. G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World, “think of crocodiles swimming in the Arctic.”
Hello,
I’m hoping this reaches the right person.
Tom Mahood, if you’re reading this, I was hoping you can help me out. I was reading your incredible summary of the Death Valley missing Germans. I was so hooked on that article, marking pins in google maps every time you referenced a location in the article.
About half way through, the website suddenly became password protected.
Would you possibly be able to make this article available to me again to finish reading?
Thank you for any help you could provide.
Your RSS feed stopped updating as soon as 2019 happened. It seems to be stalled out and no new posts are registering on it, see: https://bldgblog.com/feed/
I’ll also take this chance to say thanks for all the fascinating articles over the years.
Post apocalyptically ironic perhaps that the graphic symbol for ideas and thinking is also the cloud.