A path of trampled grass leads up the hill to St. Helen's, the only church ...
LUNDY ISLAND, England - A path of trampled grass leads up the hill to St. Helen’s, the only church on Lundy Island. Near its doors, a stray lamb nibbles on tufts of tall weeds. From a Gothic tower topped with the English flag, the coastline of Devon is faintly visible to the east, while the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean stretches west, the seas uninterrupted all the way to North America.
“Clouds remind us to be joyful,” Skinner starts again. “To pause and glory in nature, which is beautiful and good.” Fifteen years later, more than 47,000 members have signed up for a group that could have been dismissed as another example of quintessentially British eccentricity and the society offers merch, cloud-spotting apps and specially themed excursions, like the trip to Lundy in May.
“The society’s success has been to do with reawakening something that is already dormant in everyone,” he says. “It’s about not taking for granted something that is around you all the time.” One member from Denmark says he plans to devote his life after retirement to climate activism, while several American members say the society is a respite from the news cycle and want the organization to stay out of advocacy. For them, clouds provide an escape.
Tapio Schneider, a climate scientist at Caltech, decided to focus on Stratocumulus clouds in a small patch of subtropical oceans, running highly detailed calculations on supercomputers for several weeks. “It’s not enough to run a model of a little box and get some of the small scales correct; all of the intermediate factors have a strong influence on how the cloudiness evolves, and that’s what’s missing from that paper,” says Bjorn Stevens, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.
In May, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit 415 ppm at the Mauna Loa observatory 11,000 feet above sea level in Hawaii, the highest measurement taken at the site since daily observations began in the late 1950s. Carbon dioxide levels are now higher than they have been for millions of years. If emissions continue at their current pace, the scenario modeled by Schneider’s team in which the Stratocumulus go extinct could be met in a century.
The 45-year-old, who lives with her husband and their three young children and also has three adult stepchildren, had forgotten what it felt like to sit still and look up at the world above her. In her Manhattan neighborhood, she can see only slivers of the sky sandwiched between high-rises. On Lundy, the sky, and with it the world, has doubled in view.
She knows her spur-of-the-moment trip and her cloud-watching hobby might seem absurd to some of her colleagues. But in a life of constant activity and 24-hour connectivity, of TV shows looping story after story of calamity and division, disconnecting felt to her like the ultimate act of rebellion. The Cloud Appreciation Society’s “Cloud-a-Day” app calls the Cumulonimbus “the King or Queen of Clouds” and praises its impressive size and ability to form storms. When people claim that clouds are depressing, the app says, they’re usually talking about the Nimbostratus, which can arrive without warning to bring rain: “This is the cloud that gives all the others a bad name.”
Clouds are seen above St Helen's Church during the Cloud Appreciation Society's gathering in Lundy, Britain, May 18, 2019. Picture taken May 18, 2019. To match Special Report CLIMATE-CHANGE/BRITAIN-CLOUDS REUTERS/Phil Noble “He doesn’t paint Cumulonimbus or Cirrus or any of the others,” he says, adding that the overcast sky isn’t entirely colorless. “I feel he’s trying to tell us something about Coventry where he grew up.”“I’m sort of happy with these,” Playford says as he mixes watercolor paints on a white enamel palette. He spreads his brush over the cotton rag paper in front of him and squints in the sun. “You have to really capture the character of the clouds.
Clouds, ever fickle and unpredictable, play a crucial role in any future climate scenarios; scientists have previously reported that the tops of higher-altitude clouds were ascending higher into the atmosphere, potentially strengthening the greenhouse effect of clouds by trapping more heat, and others found evidence that clouds were moving toward the poles.
Twelve years ago, she heard Pretor-Pinney talking about his offbeat society on BBC Radio 4. Richard bought her a membership to the Cloud Appreciation Society for her birthday and framed the certificate to hang up on their wall. “Our generation spoiled everything, not with awareness, maybe, but we have also allowed the generation following us to face this,” Margaret says.
Lyons, who served for a time as the president of the American Meteorological Society, said his colleagues have been warning for decades about the unequivocal realities of climate change, to little effect. “Every time you turn around, there’s impact from warming. It’s exactly as climate modelers have predicted,” Lyons says.
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