Art of Interference
S2E3 Clouds
Transcript
ML: Maren Loveland
TS: Tomás Saraceno
JG: Jennifer Gutman
JDP: John Durham Peters
AS: Andrea Salazar
HL: Holly Loscavio
INTRODUCTION
ML:
When I was a kid, my mom used to play this song, Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now,” on guitar and we would sing it together—it’s one of my favorite songs ever. It’s a truly heartbreaking song about how our expectations of life and love often fall painfully short.
Interestingly, Mitchell uses clouds as the first metaphor of the song. “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now,” she writes, “From up and down and still somehow / It’s cloud illusions I recall / I really don’t know clouds at all.”
Even when we see clouds from every angle, they still, somehow, seem mysterious to us, unknowable. They capture our attention, even though we see them in some form almost every day. Rather than becoming mundane, they remain inexplicably magical.
This undefinable quality of clouds is part of what draws artists, writers, and scientists alike to them. But at the same time, the materiality of clouds inspires them to design cloud cities, think of them as elemental media, and try to understand their physical composition.
In today’s episode, we turn our attention to the larger-than-life cloud creations of Tomás Saraceno, an artist who creates cities in the clouds and flyable cloud sculptures as a way of imagining more peaceful, ecological futures. We’ll also hear from the media philosopher John Durham Peters, whose book The Marvelous Clouds revolutionizes the way we think about humans, nature, and art. Finally, we’ll hear from a cloud scientist, Andrea Salazar, about the importance of cloud feedback systems on a warming planet.
This episode won’t solve the mystery of clouds, but each of our guests will explore some part of them:
PART ONE
ML:
Tomás Saraceno is a Berlin-based Argentine artist whose imaginative work tests the boundaries of human thought and perception, taking a particular interest in clouds, air, and spiders. His work has been featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, the Grand Palais in Paris, and countless other international exhibitions. Saraceno’s two largest projects—Cloud Cities and the Aeroscene Foundation—are the focus of our conversation today.
Cloud Cities are Saraceno’s sculptural imaginings of what architecture based on cloud forms could look like in the future. They are on the one hand, larger-than-life artistic interpretations of clouds, and on the other, a political proposal for sustainable, non-extractive living.
Saraceno’s Cloud Cities draws inspiration from soap bubbles and spider webs. The sculptures are, essentially, a series of huge, translucent spheres, which hang from gallery ceilings, suspended among an intricate web of knots and strings. Each sphere holds its own organic world, with little green plants inside. It’s almost like a literalized visualization of an ecological web, or even a neural network.
In a similar vein, Saraceno’s Aeroscene Foundation is a nonprofit that seeks to bring attention to the increasingly polluted atmosphere, and through this foundation, Saraceno and his team have been working to build flying technologies dependent only on air and light. These machine-sculptures demonstrate the need for less invasive methods of flying, as well as the urgency with which the increasingly militarized atmosphere needs to be preserved for future generations.
Tomás cares deeply about the environment and finding new ways of developing togetherness in a world that often feels fragmented and disconnected. He also refuses to see himself as just an artist—he’s just as much of a scientist, engineer, biologist, and architect as he is a so-called artist.
TS:
My name is Tomás Saraceno and yeah, I’m an artist and maybe other things. I’m a spiral. I’m a spiral. Who knows who might be out there, but yeah, I. I, I always feel like the, the comfort zone of sometimes being in one discipline sometimes limit your ability maybe to mingle with things that we don’t know so much.
ML:
I think that’s something that’s really exciting about your work is how it’s so interdisciplinary. I was wondering if you could tell us about how clouds in general maybe inspire or inform you and your work.
TS:
There’s something which is called pareidolia, which is this very ancient way of trying to see things in the shapes of things. And, as a kid is always trying to interpret. What the shapes of the clouds it might mean. And it means there is a more probable say that he says in Italian. I know it is. Cielo a pecorelle, acqua a catinelle means With the clouds have the shape of sheep, the rain might come soon.
ML:
Saraceno’s approach to clouds recalls the awe and wonder of cloud-watching as a child, the experience of laying on the grass and seeing pictures in the sky.
TS:
First is very, maybe formal approach of seeing and imagining this this cloud being something which might be many things, because many things, when you watch the cloud you say, oh, look at this, looks away, or look another animal, or look at castle, look at her princess and dragon.
ML:
But Saraceno is also thinking deeply about the many implications of clouds in our modern world.
TS:
Then you start to understand that these clouds somehow are in some recent study by some articles and nature that the clouds are on running, on extinction that are disappearing slowly, more and more. Sometimes replace it by other type of cloud sometimes are. Clouds of pollution, sometimes digital clouds who sometime uncover somehow the, this this layer that somehow the earth, it needed to maintain this kind of thermodynamic equilibrium. Let’s put it that way.
ML:
And so, like his approach to art, Saraceno’s approach to clouds in particular is, as he puts it, a spiral.
TS:
This possibility is too, or many-folded now, is this ability to maybe to read something within the cloud, but or also to. To notice, this extension, this disappearance that are happening today.
ML:
I’ve just been thinking about how we often understand clouds through a two-dimensional perception in that we are often looking at clouds and reading the clouds, like you were saying, but we don’t often have very many interactions with them.
As I was doing research, I was just finding a lot of artists, who are depicting clouds, two-dimensionally, and there’s not a lot of people who are necessarily thinking about what a cloud feels like because it’s so hard to even fathom what that means. You’re helping us to think about clouds three-dimensionally.
I was curious if you had any challenges in trying to think about clouds this way? What inspired you to take that, that, that leap to think about clouds as a space?
TS:
As a kid also, I was fascinated by the ever-evolving change of these figures and these bodies. The other fascination was also about the cosmic clouds.
ML:
Saraceno told me he grew up with a friend whose father was an astronomer. That experience influenced his art.
TS:
Sometime we will spend nights watching outside and something, there are these nebulosas and all these kind of cloud formation, but it’s not terrestrial clouds. And then you kind a start to weave or start to think, that cloud not necessarily only belongs to this planet, but it might be something which, when you think about this planet of the ability, the capacity of life that maybe this planet hold, it bring you also to the capacity of thinking that well, there might be cloud somewhere else. It might be life somewhere else.
ML:
All of that, he says, puts our existence into context.
TS:
We are living on a speck of dust called planet Earth that become part of a larger clouds or larger constellation. Depending on the perspective that you take, you feel that everything becomes much more alive. And everything is a space which is full of life.
ML:
But he worries that context is in danger of disappearing.
TS:
A cloud who can bring rain, life, water, hold memories of ancestral knowledge and so forth. It’s really becoming something that being replaced by other type of clouds.
ML:
Saraceno’s interest in clouds is not only aesthetic or ancestral. It’s also political.
TS:
I was born in seventy-three in Argentina, and then in seventy-four, my family was forced to move from Argentina to Italy due to the dictatorship of the government. And then, in eighty-six, moved back, I was 13 years old, more or less. And it was all the time this idea also, where I belong?
ML:
As a young adult, Saraceno moved frequently over great distances—nothing, not even his identity, felt stable.
TS:
Kids like to be cruel. “You’re an Argentinian or you’re an Italian, you’re–”
ML:
But clouds were somehow able to elide the spatial and cultural boundaries of the ground.
TS:
And then somehow this, the meaning of the cloud, of being in transit being here, being something that you can breathe in and breathe out.
ML:
And this boundary-defying capability sparked Saraceno’s interest in clouds’ political and architectural potential.
TS:
It came slowly, the idea that maybe, which are the type of clouds today we could think together.
ML:
Could a city situated in the clouds lead to more peaceful, equitable living? How would our relationships with each other and the earth change if we lived in cloud cities, free from the arbitrary divisions of the ground? With these questions in mind, Saraceno set out to design such cities. His cloud city sculptures are just that—they are imaginings of what human futures could look like in the clouds.
TS:
Can we live in the clouds? Can we think about cities? You have to think that these are already existing. There is a kind of a statistic that says every time that you cross the Atlantic from Europe to the states or he other way, somebody around the planet will live two years less.
That impact that the type of journey that is, you know, and when you look at the at these digital clouds, sometimes you visualize the traffic of all the airplanes that move from one continent to the other one, which again, reassemble this cloud in motion. And how much are are detrimental to other form of lives.
ML:
So it’s transcending kind of divisions that are maybe more in the terrestrial world. We’re able to see how there can be other ways of living just through looking at clouds, which is really exciting.
TS:
And not only human but many other.
ML:
Cloud Cities are large, structural installations situated in outdoor and indoor spaces that visitors can walk through and interact with. Their re-imagining of life in the air offers radical insights into life on earth.
TS:
But it seems that we underestimated how things are entangled and it’s for, for science, it’s still, or for some certain cosmologies, it’s much unknown. While for others it’s very clear, right? Which is this type of relationality, that exists.
ML:
There are already examples of how we can change our own social formations and our own communities. Because these things already exist. It’s not necessarily something that we even have to imagine or come up with because it’s already here.
ML:
Saraceno’s work shows us how collaborative and sustainable social systems are not a stretch for the imagination. Rather, examples of these systems exist and are actively being practiced. One of the central ways Saraceno explores such systems, apart from his Cloud Cities, is his Aeroscene project. You may have already heard of the Anthropocene—the proposed geological epoch of the Earth which reflects the scale of human impact on it. Like the Anthropocene, the Aeroscene is an unofficial geological epoch which Saraceno has suggested to help us rethink our relationship with air.
TS:
You can think about a Capitaloscene, the Anthropocene maybe there, there is, there may be the Hydrocene, just a name of change or a name of attunement, or a name of something who might help us to shift.
ML:
Founded in 2015, Saraceno’s Aeroscene is an eco-justice nonprofit that brings attention to the many ways air is polluted and weaponized by finding ways of flying that don’t rely on emissions or extraction. Working at the intersection of art and engineering, Saraceno and his many collaborators have built giant flying balloons constructed from used plastic bags. They’re developing individual backpacks with flight capabilities, and in 2020, they broke the record for the longest sustainable flight in aviation history. The Aeroscene is less of an artistic endeavor than it is an open-source collective for learning how to fly.
ML:
I was really curious about where you see the Aeroscene going, like how do you understand the project right now and what developments do you want to see happen?
TS:
Yeah. We have been working, mostly one of the latest project was in Argentina, where we have Leticia Marquez, a balloon pilot in Argentina have managed to achieve thirty-two world records of the more sustainable flight in human history. We could maybe think about clouds and things about being in mode of a suspension or being able to float at the bottom of ocean of air.
ML:
Some of Saraceno’s work with the Aeroscene project takes its wisdom from the ancients: from Archimedes, for instance.
TS:
Archimedes always thought about floating on, on, on water and how elements float in the water, but some, somehow with the same principle, it applies also for the air.
ML:
But the project is using those ancient ideas to look forward.
TS:
Really understanding that we could also float in the atmosphere without the needs of burning fossil fuel, without the needs of using hydrogen helium with the same principles. Somehow maybe it is embedded in the idea of the airship is a ship who can float in the atmosphere.
INTERFERENCE ONE
JG:
Hey Maren
ML:
Hey Jen
JG:
How often would you say you use “the cloud?”
ML:
Which cloud?
JG:
You know, that cloud.
ML:
Oh every day, for sure.
JG:
Right? Me too. It’s like we’ve become totally dependent on it—more so than I probably even realize.
ML:
Kind of depressing, huh.
JG:
Yea, especially since the whole notion of the digital cloud is so painfully ironic—it sounds light and effortless and simple, like a cloud in the sky.
ML:
We’re meant to not even think about it.
JG:
But the reality is that “the cloud” is deeply entangled in earthly infrastructures and systems of labor. In his book The Prehistory of the Cloud, Tung-Hui Hu uses the framework of grafting to describe the physical geography of digital networks as well as the modes of power that they encode. Media infrastructures are like palimpsests, Hu suggests, “where the old has been displaced, and where new media, such as that of the Internet, are layered, adjacent, or even intertwined with far older mediums.” What he is referring too here is how that fiber-optic cables and ethernet wires become grafted atop highway systems, railways, and layers of earth.
ML:
Oh, I loved The Prehistory of the Cloud. I really loved what he said about the invisible labor systems of the cloud, so fascinating.
JG:
Here’s a quote on that from the book: “this idea of a virtual economy … masks the slow movement of electronics that power the cloud’s data centers, and the workers who must unload this equipment at the docks. It also covers up the Third World workers who invisibly moderate the websites and forums of Web 2.0, to produce the clean, well-tended communities that Western consumers expect to find.
ML:
If I understand things right, Hu’s book is part of a larger elemental turn in media studies that works to reveal the material roots of digital media ecologies.
JG:
Yea, and in addition to material infrastructure and labor issues, an extreme amount of energy is needed to cool the data centers where “the cloud” is stored. In fact, the digital cloud is so extractive that, according to Greenpeace, if it were a country, it would be the sixth largest consumer of electricity.
ML:
So the cloud isn’t a cloud at all—it’s very, very tactile—dangerously so.
JG:
Exactly, it’s an illusion. I guess I really don’t know clouds at all, huh? Haha…
ML:
This is from years ago, but I distinctly remember an ad for iCloud that you just reminded me of. The ad shows a guy who just became a dad, and so he has tons of pictures of his new baby on his phone. But then he leaves his phone in a cab–
JG:
Oh no!
ML:
–and as it drives away, he starts panicking, only to realize that all his pictures are safely stored on the cloud. So he didn’t lose his precious baby photos after all. Just his dumb old phone.
JG:
That’s wild—it makes you feel like if you’re not backing up to the cloud, you could lose everything. And it really plays with your emotions.
ML:
But it’s so messed up because the cloud isn’t any more safe than anything else. It’s just as risky. If not more so, because we’re putting our faith in companies that on the one hand, mine our personal data, and on the other, could dissolve at the drop of a hat.
JG:
You know, I think I want to go back to just doing everything by hand—everything looks cooler that way. Invitations, recipes, letters, my current book manuscript…
ML:
Totally get it, but I wouldn’t go quite that far.
PART TWO
ML:
Recently, I talked with media scholar and philosopher John Durham Peters about some of his thinking on clouds. In 2015, he published one of the most important books on media and the environment, titled The Marvelous Clouds, a stunning meditation on how our environments are media which affect us just as much as we affect them.
JDP:
My name is John Durham Peters. This is not my typical voice because I’ve got a cold. I teach at Yale University. I’m in two programs, one in the Department of English, one in the program Film and Media Studies. And I have lots of interests and different things. And I’ve dabbled in many fields, but I guess my central method is something like “encyclopedically informed philosophizing,” and I’m just trying to figure out how people live and what the earth is, what the earth is for, and the universe is for, and how to ask big questions through looking at particular kinds of facts and phenomena.
ML:
So with clouds on our minds, how do you think clouds have inspired you personally, but also your work, both thematically–obviously you talk about clouds and you do research on clouds themselves—maybe I’m just reading that into your work, but is there maybe a formal element there as well?
JDP:
Clouds are always moving. Clouds never stay in place. Clouds are ephemeral and they seem ethereal, but there’s a nice poem in which it’s pointed out that a big cloud can weigh more than a 747. So they’re also very material. If you have ever been in a thunderstorm or windstorm or being pelted by rain, the clouds are not just wifty cotton balls floating up in the air. So I guess it’s the, as you say, the formal qualities of clouds and maybe it’s the multi-formal quality or the contradictory form of clouds.
ML:
For John, clouds are a multi-faceted, amorphous form of media.
JDP:
I remember I was once giving a lecture and I said clouds don’t have edges and someone in the audience said, Yes, they do, they have too many edges. And I thought that was a kind of astute response because, a cloud can be like a, like a poison gas cloud for World War I, a cloud attack can be like the most ominous thing, but it can be fair weather clouds of fluffy cumulus, or it can be, the IT cloud, data farms, the so-called cloud storage. It can be the cloud of the Old Testament of the God of Israel leading the people through the wilderness by day, but by day and by night.
ML:
Depending on your definition of the word, clouds, he says, are their own form of media.
JDP:
Clouds represent the variety and creative instability and sort of dialectical music that is also a part of other kinds of medium. Fluid, solid material, ethereal, spiritual material.
ML:
Do you have a one maybe personal moment, maybe a memory, maybe one painting or novel or a poem or maybe one thing that inspired or spurred your thinking on clouds with this project specifically but maybe with other parts of your work?
JDP:
I can identify a couple of moments. One, it might be around 1978. When I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I was a young missionary in the Netherlands, and on our day off, we were able to go to this amazing museum full of Dutch art. And a painting I saw is by Jacob van Ruisdael, which is The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, which I’m still writing on and obsessed with almost 50 years later. Ruisdael is is the master of cloudscapes. Many Dutch artists are just amazing with clouds. But I hadn’t realized how important this painting was to me until I was helping my mom move. And I dug out letters that she’d accumulated from the late 1970s, and I realized that I’d sent her a postcard with that image on it. So there’s proof positive of my longstanding obsession.
And nature imitates art. That was one of Oscar Wilde’s wisecracks. He said, that sunset just looks like a knockoff of a Turner painting, jokes like this. But I do think that in some ways, painting has helped me see clouds better. So just last week when I was in Paris, there was a nighttime scene looking at the cobblestones. And I’ve seen that before. And then I realized I had seen it before in a painting. There’s this great Caillebotte painting, of the rainy day in Paris, in which the gleaming, freshly renovated streets, glisten with the cobblestones after the fresh rain.
ML:
John’s story exemplifies one of art’s main functions. By looking closely at art, we learn to better see the world around us. In a painting, we might notice the pink and purple and blue highlights across a cloud-streaked sky, the rendering of light and shadows on the ground beneath that sky – and in the next sunset we witness, we are called to notice nature’s many colors, the fine details of the landscape, precisely because of that painting we just saw.
JDP:
I lived for 30 years in Iowa, even though I was a Utah native. And anybody who ever lives in Utah tends to fall in love with mountains. Iowa doesn’t have mountains. Iowa’s got cornfields. And Iowa does have hills, but ask anyone whose tried to bike in Iowa, it’s definitely has hills, but I realized musing on the lack of mountains one summer day and looking up and seeing this cumulonimbus cloud that probably lifted up higher than the Mount Everest. And I realized that living in Iowa that we have this similar kind of surrounding vertical forms that pull our eyes majestically sublimely skyward through clouds. And in Iowa, I became a devout sky watcher, and I’ve noticed that every place I live, the sky is different. New Haven’s got a different sky than Iowa City, and Iowa City has a different sky than Amsterdam does, or wherever else that I’ve lived. It’s a long answer. The other short answer is the the movie Up has got the most amazing clouds.
ML:
Marvelous Clouds takes us on a long journey, from the discovery of fire to the creation of the calendar to modern meteorology and data storage. And after reading it, what I really wanted to know was this: why clouds? What was the central thematic that drove John to see something so ephemeral and, to me, so natural, as a central form of media?
ML:
I love your book and just your work in general because it covers such a broad range of topics. We learn so much about different things that maybe at first don’t seem relevant but you read them as kind of these media objects and as things that are deeply relevant to the arguments that you’re putting forth.
JDP:
At one point, this is in the fall of 2013, I was trying to decide whether this book should just be about elemental media, and I should write a short little book, like a 25,000 word book on on clouds. And it’s since you’re asking me personal questions, I’ll give you a personal answer.
I was living in Helsinki as a guest of the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki, just had a completely wonderful time which gave me a year to write. I really couldn’t decide this, so I took a trip to the Helsinki Temple and sat there and meditated for a couple hours and got a very clear answer that the book should be about clouds. So, it’s about clouds. I don’t know if I’ve shared that before.
ML:
That’s so special! Thank you for sharing that.
I feel like a big part of your book is how humans are affected by the world, how we are changed by the things that we use, the things that we read and experience as media objects. So how do clouds change us in that way, and how does that help us at this moment as the world is changing really rapidly and we don’t know what the future holds for us?
JDP:
We tend to think of clouds as the ultimate natural object, but what’s interesting about modern times is that there are all kinds of artifactual clouds, not just the cloud of computing. I mean, the great Victorian critic John Ruskin was just shocked to discover that clouds had histories, and maybe, this is crazed. It’s a pair of lectures that he gave on the storm cloud of the 19th century, which it’s like nuts, but he’s actually onto something that the nature of clouds changed historically. And of course, Virginia Woolf has a lot of fun with this idea to in her rollicking novel Orlando. The clouds are actually indexes of history. We often think about art as ineffectual, a bystander. Poetry makes nothing happen, says W. H. Auden. And that’s often celebrated, of course. It makes nothing happen and therefore it’s more exalted or more sublime or free from the grunt and pain and sawdust of everyday life.
But, I really don’t think that, that art and the world are ever disconnected. It’s the same argument, which you’re astute to have pointed out that, that book that I wrote is really an argument for interconnectedness. And so here’s this totally fascinating thing is that there’s a group of Greek atmospheric chemists who got interested in the paintings of the great British landscape painter, J. M.W. Turner, who died in 1851. And anyone whose seen Turner knows that his suns and sunsets are just spectacular. And so what they decided to do was to make measurements of the red to green ratio in his sunsets and correlate those with volcanic eruptions in the history of the 19th century because volcanic eruptions spew all kinds of particulate matter into the atmosphere, which then redden sunsets. And it turns out that you can empirically demonstrate a hypothesis that the French philosopher Michel Serres had recently, had earlier, that Turner actually is a kind of climate proxy. The paintings are indicators of climate change. Isn’t that freaky? You can actually measure the sunset, but taken as a whole, the body of work shows. That it’s a kind of weather vane, or a kind of index, a kind of prophet of a changing atmosphere.
ML:
And like Saraceno, John also sees art as a way to think about the future.
JPD:
Marshall McLuhan’s favorite example favorite metaphor, it’s not unique to him, it’s a kind of classic modernist one, is that artists are the early warning systems. And the example I gave you of Turner’s, he’s more of a historian or more of a documenter, but I think it’s easy to find ways that artists who help us think about being, embedment, catastrophe, apocalypse, are really great for helping us to think through climate change.
ML:
I said before that Tomas Saraceno’s cloud cities resemble a kind of web. John’s book does, too.
JDP:
When I was writing The Marvelous Clouds, Fred Turner, my friend and colleague at Stanford, read it, and he said he, he felt it read like a prose mandala. That is bits and pieces all at once, but without a kind of propelling throughline. The method of media theory is the discovery of unanticipated relevance. That’s our job is to show like McLuhan that a light bulb is actually something interesting to think about. So I love being a media scholar because it means that I never get bored. Everything’s potentially interesting and everything’s potentially relevant.
ML:
It’s interesting, and so beautiful to me, the dual image of John Durham Peters and Tomás Saraceno. Two men, worlds and seasons and countries apart, each working in different forms and traditions, and yet both coming to create these beautiful meditations on clouds. Both landing on the way clouds seem to symbolize the interconnectedness of life more broadly. And maybe, in some small, invisible way, connected to each other through that work.
JDP:
Cloud is related to the word clod. Isn’t that strange? So that’s, that originally a cloud was like a pile. Like cumulus, of course, means heap in Latin. And so we get the word cloud from an older, I guess it’s middle English, I can’t remember exactly, word for cloud, something which is piled piled up. We tend to think of clouds as up there, clouds are also in here. They’re in our heads. They’re in our lives, clouds feed us, we feed them. And I love this etymology because it suggests the deep interconnectedness of earth and air.
INTERFERENCE TWO
JG:
It’s not just Joni Mitchell who sees the mystery of clouds. Climate scientists do too. It may seem surprising, but one of the greatest areas of uncertainty that scientists face when making climate projections floats inconspicuously above our heads all day long.
I talked to Andrea Salazar about this. She is a PhD student in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. According to Andrea, clouds are traditionally thought to have a net cooling effect on the climate.
AS:
It is complicated because some clouds cool the planet, some clouds warm the planet, but the net effect of clouds on Earth is cooling.
JG:
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — or the IPCC — ’s Sixth Assessment report, which came out in August 2021, “the net effect of changes in clouds in response to global warming is to amplify human-induced warming.” We spoke more with Andrea to better understand what it is about clouds in particular that make them such a challenge to climate projections.
AS:
We know that clouds, they seem very innocuous. I mean, they’re made out of water droplets. We fly airplanes through them, but they actually control the earth’s climate in a very direct way.
The classic idea of clouds is that they’re very bright. They reflect a lot of sunlight coming in. So you would think, okay, if you have more clouds, this would reflect more sunlight. And so the earth’s surface would be colder. But I think something that isn’t thought about quite as much by people who don’t study clouds is that clouds are also made out of water and water is an extremely powerful greenhouse substance. So water droplets and water vapor are very good at trapping heat and keeping the earth warm, providing a blanketing effect. And so the competition between these two things that clouds do, they reflect sunlight, but they also provide this blanketing effect, really controls the surface temperature of the earth.
But what is confusing and what really troubles scientists when we’re modeling these things is that clouds affect earth’s surface temperature, but also earth’s surface temperature can affect what the clouds are doing. So for example, if the surface of the earth gets warmer, you can imagine you would have more evaporation. And so the air would just be more moist, which might provide more cloud cover. Or if you have a lot of CO2, the way that radiation moves in the atmosphere could affect where the clouds are forming. And that’s what I mean by cloud feedback, where the clouds affect Earth’s surface, but the surface also affects the clouds right back. So there’s like a feedback between these two things, and it can actually get quite complicated, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty in understanding, like exactly how those processes interact.
Planets are so dynamic and change so much, and there’s so much chaos involved in what keeps a planet like Earth stable in terms of like, it’s not freezing over all the time, it’s not boiling, it’s oceans… I started studying clouds because I was really interested in Earth’s climate past, and, this like, missing link between what the CO2 is doing and what the temperature of the planet is doing.
JG:
Even though the IPCC’s methods have reduced uncertainty by a wide margin, studying clouds remains an incredibly elusive and complex process, namely because of the extremity involved at the level of scale.
AS:
The biggest challenge for scientists who want to model clouds is that the scales that we’re thinking about, they span huge orders of magnitude. Clouds are very big. They can be kilometers wide, but also the droplets that are inside of the clouds can be, like micrometers. Really, really small. And the like very powerful models that we use, you couldn’t possibly model something as small as a nanometer micrometer.
JG:
This process may be complex, but it is of utmost importance.
AS:
Half of the earth is covered in cloud at any point in time. And so what is actually happening with the clouds is fundamentally important to understanding how the surface temperature of the earth is going to change. There’s tons of motivation to really understand what’s going on with the clouds.
JG:
Andrea gave a clarifying example of one specific type of cloud that has a major impact on climate feedbacks.
AS:
There’s a specific kind of cloud that I’ve studied recently. They’re called stratocumulus clouds. They occur, for example, off the coast of California. They’re these really low-level clouds, right on the ocean. And a lot of work that I’ve done has been showing that if you add a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere, then these clouds can’t form anymore. And so you lose this low cloud cover. These clouds cover like six percent of the surface of the earth. And so if they go away, that actually provides a lot more sunlight making it to the surface. And that can warm up the earth a lot.
JG:
This example informs Andrea’s study of how clouds have functioned in past epochs on Earth that also saw large concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. But connecting past patterns to the present-day must also contend with the types of pollutants that anthropogenic activity has released into the atmosphere, which directly influence where and how clouds form.
AS:
We often think of clouds as just a collection of water droplets, but really they’re water droplets that have condensed on like a tiny little grain of something. So it could be sand, it could be salt from the ocean, it could be pollutants that we as humans are actually emitting. These are like tiny, tiny little particles, but they really control where clouds form. It’s a little complicated actually because when you release more pollutants and you have more of these that we call them cloud condensation nuclei, but it’s just like the little grain that the cloud is forming on. If you have more of those in a cloud, actually, the cloud becomes brighter. It’s like it’s better able to reflect radiation. And so in some ways, it’s good to put more of these pollutants in the atmosphere because the clouds will get brighter. That’ll kind of combat the warming due to CO2.
I think it’s kind of a difficult thing to think about because, on one hand, the CO2 is warming the climate, but then maybe these cloud condensation nuclei are actually cooling the planet a little bit, and the competition between those two things is confusing.
JG:
While Andrea is not advocating for pollution here—
AS:
. . . we should not be putting pollutants into the atmosphere, I just want to be clear about that . . .
JG:
–she is making a strong case for how the complex feedback of clouds challenges the way we think about anthropogenic interferences to earth systems and the difficulty in categorizing such effects as unambiguously good or bad. This complexity makes clouds incredibly important to climate science and modeling, but it also throws what is often seen as an idyllic—or at least benign—facet of our environment into a whole new light.
AS:
I am very interested in this idea that people just feel like clouds are very harmless things that just float in the air. And convincing people that actually the clouds are providing some of the most uncertainty when we’re thinking about climate change. It’s almost like a betrayal, because you have these very peaceful things floating in the air, and yet they’re kind of holding our fate in their hands. And they’re so difficult to study.
I remember growing up looking at pictures in the clouds and, you know, chasing the shadow of clouds on the ground. And now I’m just trying to combat them and, uh, get them to tell me their secrets.
JG:
If Andrea is trying to get the clouds to tell their secrets, she appreciates how they remain a source of inspiration for artists for a different set of reasons entirely.
AS:
I joke that clouds are my enemy, but I think that they’re very inspiring, actually, they’re like a perfect representation of, the complexity of physics and the complexity of, like, how tiny, inconsequential scales have a huge effect on very large things.
So I’m just one little scientist, you know, plugging away at my computer, but there’s this larger, very beautiful thing that we as scientists are trying to do in understanding the universe and ourselves and how we got here. And, I think that that kind of idea is easy to forget when you’re just chugging away at your computer all the time. And so the fact that the artists remind us all the time how beautiful it is, what we’re doing, this, like, pursuit of knowledge is totally important.
PART THREE
ML:
As I mentioned in the beginning of the episode, hearing my mom play Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” is a core childhood memory for me. But I’ve never asked my mom how she started playing the song, or even how she feels about it. I decided to talk with her recently and it brought new insight to the song, and to clouds.
HL:
So when I first started learning guitar–I learned when I was about 17–is when I got my first guitar and I used that guitar for a while and didn’t really take real formal lessons, but somebody showed me some stuff and blah, blah, blah. But I ended up getting this really cool songbook with all these folky type songs and religious songs. And that song, Joni Mitchell’s, Both Sides Now was in there. And so I had heard it, ’cause I was really into kind of folk music and so I learned it when I was a teenager, that song. And so I, I’ve been playing that song really since almost I started playing the guitar.
As life happens and stuff, that, that song has always meant a lot to me. You learn about things and life changes and you don’t fully understand stuff, as you move on.
ML:
As life happens, things don’t necessarily become clearer—they just become different. Joni Mitchell herself has recorded “Both Sides Now” throughout her life, and it’s so interesting listening to how each recording is distinct, even though it’s still the same song. Somehow, life and time have transformed the song into something new. This holds true with my mom’s relationship with it, too.
HL:
That song is like part of my DNA, I’ve just I know it so and I’ve known it for so long. It’s just a part of. When my cells split, that information goes with the cells.
ML:
It’s interesting how some songs can become so deeply ingrained in our bodies that they just start to become a part of us. For my mom, and me, and many others, “Both Sides Now” is one such song that not only brings new meaning to how we approach life, but how we understand ourselves ecologically. “Both Sides Now” uses clouds as a metaphor, but the repetitive, cyclical nature of the song, as my mom pointed out to me, is reflective of how clouds change and transform.
HL:
It does make me think of like the cycle of water and how it does move through our system and changes through the earth and, we can, I guess metaphorically think about our own lives, that way, of us changing, the song is talking about both sides now, but how we ourselves as humans, as we, go through this life can change like the water cycle–we’re just a little water droplet moving through the earth and in a way and we change in our own life cycle, like water. We as humans move in these different ways throughout our lives and the different roles we play and life stages that we’re at. You can think about that too.
ML:
Scientists, artists, philosophers, and songwriters alike view clouds as unknowable, ever-changing beings. But the truth is, clouds and humans aren’t so different. Whether we’re talking about the clouds that float above or the mysterious cloud network, maybe we won’t ever fully understand clouds, like Joni Mitchell says, but maybe this doesn’t matter. As human agents living in a swiftly evolving world, we have the power to change how we view our planet: from something that is separate from us to something that we are a crucial part of something that we can communicate with, something that we can change for the better.
It reminds me of the last lines of Percy Shelley’s poem “The Cloud”:
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
What we learn from the continually changing clouds is this: to start over, to unbuild, is something we’re deeply familiar with—and a model, perhaps, for how to think about interference in the future.
