Clouds tend to have a niche audience as far as fans- most people love the sun and stick with the light and warmth it brings as their favorite weather, what they get excited about seeing in the sky, and how they define a “good” day or “good” weather. Clouds on the other hand get villanized, whether it be in movies where they symbolize problems or challenges coming in the movie or poetry and pop music where rain always seems to stand for problems or breakups.

But then there is the Global Warming situation, where clouds carry a sense of hope, or at least the sense that they are on the same team as those who are closely watching and trying to figure out how to stop the climate changes and warming effects of rising CO2 and dropping ozone from rapidly increasing. Right now the situation is like a snowball rolling down the side of a hill and getting exponentially bigger- like a crowd growing when it is just reaching that moment where it goes from adding one or two at a time to ten or twelve and you can’t imagine they will stop coming- or it’s like the budget deficits all around the United States, from California to the Federal. No end in sight. Only Growth.

Point being, clouds have been viewed as a buffer or at least an ally in the battle against global warming because they are believed to temper the temperature rises and were thought to have the power to slow climate change. But it seems that the clouds are going away. Research from over a century of data from everything from ships to satellites has been aggregated and collated and published in a new report, saying that the clouds over the oceans are thinning.

Many theories about the effect of rising temperatures had been fielded in recent years. Some thought that higher temperatures would create even more clouds, adding to the buffer and the bouncing back of the sun’s rays into space-not happening. What’s happening is that the clouds are thinning and shrinking (kind of like the fish):

"This is somewhat of a vicious cycle, potentially exacerbating global warming," said Amy Clement, a professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami.

It seems that scientists have had a difficult time seeing this pattern in the short-term because normal weather changes an fluctuations bring in many different types and sizes of clouds all the time so seeing long term, documentable changes takes close examination of a lot of data.

Dr. Mat Collins, climate scientist at the Met Office, says we have to take the results with a grain of salt (or a grain of salt water, perhaps):

"It is a good paper but we need to be cautious about the result as it is only based on data from the northeast Pacific Ocean. It is hard to extrapolate and say that this is the final answer of how low-level clouds behave."

Understood. Much of climate science is still trying to figure out how to make sweeping statements that are meaningful from small pieces of data- kind of like us bloggers- we’ll all get there.