The Clouds Are Warning Us
Disappearing clouds could be making extreme weather events like the July 4 heat wave worse.
By Mike Tidwell
Six weeks after Donald Trump idiotically declared “GOOD RIDDANCE” to the climate crisis — totally misreading a new scientific study — that crisis helped turn the nation’s 250th birthday celebration on the National Mall into a tragicomic meltdown. Record-shattering temperatures and a massive, ill-timed thunderstorm sent spectators fleeing for air-conditioned cover or kept them home entirely, away from the sparse crowds.
Of course Trump lied in May when scientists with the United Nations released a new climate report. They announced that, given advances in clean energy worldwide, the Earth’s potential “worst case” scenario for warming — up to 5 degrees celsius (9 fahrenheit) by 2100 — is no longer plausible. That’s a temperature so high, by the way, we might as well be living on Venus by 2100. Instead, the scientists said, our “worst case outlook” is now something closer to just plain old hell on Earth, with a possible 2.5 to 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.
No matter how you slice it, this is not the good news Trump predictably proclaimed on Truth Social immediately afterward. Up to 3 degrees Celsius warming by 2100 would triple incidences of coastal flooding worldwide and put up to 25 percent of all land-based plants and animals at high risk of extinction.
Despite Trump, of course, the world is making great strides toward fossil fuel alternatives, installing a gigawatt of solar power every day and cranking out millions of electric cars annually. And yet the planet continues to warm because world governments started too late and are moving too slowly. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said about clean energy: We’re going in the right direction, but at the wrong speed.
So the heat goes on, spoiling events like Trump’s gaudy July 4th celebration. Indeed, since June 2023, the planet’s rate of warming has increased beyond what most climate models predicted, triggering speculation that — despite the clean energy gains — we may have crossed some sort of threshold toward really fast warming driven by feedback loops.
Those feedback loops include a startling reduction in the Earth’s reflectivity or “albedo.” Higher temperatures are melting vast expanses of ice virtually everywhere on the planet, leaving behind a darker surface that absorbs incoming sunlight instead of reflecting it back to space. Warming, in other words, leads to more warming.
But disappearing ice has been long understood as a warming enhancer. A newer and potentially more terrifying feedback loop — according to recent studies — may involve clouds, specifically the steady decline of them.
Low-lying ocean clouds play a huge role in cooling the planet. They shade the oceans while their white tops reflect incoming sunlight back to space. But, as revealed in a published study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in June 2025, satellite records going back to 2001 show that key bands of Atlantic and Pacific clouds are disappearing at a rate of 1.5 percent per decade. Study co-author Christian Jakob called it “a wake-up call for urgent climate action.”
Why are clouds disappearing? It turns out that a warmer atmosphere is also a drier atmosphere over much of the world’s oceans, which works to dissipate clouds. Heat from the warming ocean itself works to reduce cloud cover, too. The result is a worsening of the global albedo problem: There are fewer clouds each year to reflect sunlight back to space.
Greenhouse gases from the combustion of fossil fuels continue to be the main driver of global warming. But reduced reflectivity from disappearing ice and, now, alarmingly, clouds is compounding the problem and theoretically could eventually become the top driver of global warming through runaway positive feedback loops.
All of which has spawned a broader conversation worldwide around the controversial topic of geoengineering. Could human beings, using techniques ranging from terrestrial mirrors to sulfur aerosols sprayed by airplanes into the stratosphere, artificially cool the planet for a few decades until the clean energy revolution is complete? America’s most famous and unnervingly accurate climate prophet, Dr. James Hansen, formerly of NASA, believes strongly that “solar reflection methods” must be studied and taken seriously as a possible plan B for the planet. Highly reflective sulfur, after all, is spewed naturally during volcanic eruptions and has already proved it can temporarily cool the entire planet. The eruption of Mount Pinatuba in the Philippines in 1991 lowered the global temperature more than 1 degree Fahrenheit for over a year.
Could we become a human volcano? A growing number of super smart scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard and elsewhere think we should at least do the modeling and some limited testing now while the nations of the world simultaneously explore a deliberative framework for possible decisionmaking on geoengineering deployment in the years to come. The United Kingdom has already dispersed $75 million in research grants to projects worldwide focused on ideas for artificially cooling the planet.
Yes, it’s gotten that bad. Not only is Trump wrong in thinking we can bid adieu to climate change, it’s potentially getting much worse thanks to feedback loops that are setting off new alarm bells in the climate community. We could be heading for a world in which only by mimicking volcanic eruptions can we fend off hell on Earth — and have outdoor Independence Day celebrations on the National Mall.
Mike Tidwell is an author and director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. His latest book is “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street.”
I presume that development encroaching on forests has a similar effect. Trees sustain and help create wind patterns on a small scale, and the moisture they expire adds needed humidity. It's hard to believe that we would kill cool breezes in favor of sweeping housing developments rather than infilling existing residential areas. But everybody wants in on the new subdivision.