How are clouds affecting the battle against climate change?

Clouds that look so fluffy and delicate, fill the sky with their cheerful personalities. Their amazing abilities could come in handy to help us drop temperatures helping our issue of climate change. Although sadly they are also creating distance between us and themselves by migrating away to apparently better lands, why though?

How are clouds formed?

To start off just so we get to know them a little, most people think that clouds are water vapour but actually they either stand in a liquid form or ice form. We are surrounded by invisible water vapour mostly all around – emitted by plants through transpiration or water that wasn’t infiltrated into the ground for instance, but clouds only get made and become visible once this water vapour cools and evaporates to water droplets or in ice form forming a cloud. When the weather is more humid, and temperature increases then particles have/get more energy (thermal energy) to escape and rise above the surface to evaporate. When the air is drier, the water can evaporate faster.

Where are clouds going for a better life? What are they up to?

Where are these clouds going for a better life? Well the clouds are migrating away from the equator and away from roughly what we can call middle latitudes (which is where most human population/civilizations are) going higher up into the atmosphere and more towards the north and south poles. As the Earth becomes warmer, the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere and where weather is born) can grow taller enabling and allowing the clouds to rise higher up into the sky. Roughly 70% of sky above the oceans are covered with clouds although land with urbanisation has less than 60% of the sky covered with clouds.

Although, these clouds may be taking a step back from us they can help us in some aspects theoretically to battle against climate change. So theoretically as temperatures are rising, the amount of clouds would increase with the sky being more dense with them and the clouds themselves becoming more dense. This could be because the warmer the temperatures the rates of evaporation can become faster making more water vapour available for the condensation of clouds. Relatively dense clouds can reflect sunlight which would act as a cooling effect on the land. This could decrease higher temperatures caused by the greenhouse effect. However, this is not the case, because as temperatures get warmer the number of clouds decrease and they become less dense. This is seen from observations nowadays.

This is because as the temperature gets warmer, it effects the air near the surface making it drier which gives the clouds less water vapour to feed off of to be created in big quantities and thick density. However negatively, these clouds that are more dense can increase the number of storm clouds which can lead to an increase in precipitation and snow falls. These storm clouds extend to high distances, and they are very good absorbers of thermal radiation which could make up for the fact of how they block sunlight.

What are the actions of different kinds of clouds?

As there are many types of varieties of clouds, depending on weather conditions for instance, most of them have different positive and negative effects. For example, stratocumulus named clouds have low density and are quite thin. They are commonly found above oceans and are placed quite low. Because they are placed closer to the ground, they can block sunlight quite efficiently although this makes them radiate a similar amount of heat as the surface of the ground. In contrast to this clouds, the cirrus clouds, which are placed very high up are cold for this reason. This causes them to absorb any kind of thermal radiation coming towards their way making them release more as well.

We can see that clouds have many positive and negative attributes towards how they are affecting climate change. Depending on their characteristics and/or their nature they are either good or bad additions. They may seem like they have very simple jobs but they do so much for our environment. They share their attributes in order to attempt to help us.