Captain Future's Log

Both Sides Now

We're so smart. But as much as science can tell us about how things work---at least on the level of allowing us to make and do things with that knowlege--we could still use some realistic humility about how much we really understand about, well, everything that's most basic and vital. Like water. Like clouds.

Since we haven't cared to try doing much to clouds, we haven't paid a lot of attention to them, even though we live in societies structured pretty much based on the idea that a single ruler has a direct line to the gods, as evidenced by his ability to bring rain for the crops. Besides which, clouds are very complicated, and our science has dealt with making simple things work for particular purposes. Until chaos theory, for example, the behavior of clouds was conceptually beyond us.

Now we're faced with a complex problem with complex causes, and time lag effects. With uncertainties and possibly with tipping points, unlike any humans have used science to confront before. It started out with the benign name of the Greenhouse Effect (interesting that we used a metaphor based on a human construction for a natural process, being set in motion or deformed by human activities.) Now even Wired magazine is calling it the Climate Crisis.

Today two satellites were launched from California to study the clouds: Cloudsat and Calypso. According to BBC News, "The Cloudsat and Calipso missions will study how clouds and aerosols (fine particles) form, evolve and affect our climate, the weather and air quality. Scientists say knowledge gaps in such areas severely hamper their ability to forecast future climate change."

This article is a good quick summary of the specific problems these satellites will address, but apart from advancing our knowledge about the specific effects of greenhouse gases and the likely outcomes for the climate, it also reminds us of how little we really know about what keeps us alive, and makes life possible on this incredible planet:

The new understanding obtained through the spacecraft will be fed into computer models, to improve their predictions. This should lead not just to better weather and air quality forecasts, but to reduced uncertainties in our expectations of future climate change.

"A tiny, tiny fraction of the water on our planet is in clouds and yet that tiny, tiny fraction is what provides the fresh water on which humans depend," Dr Stephens said.