Chris Bretherton, an atmospheric scientist and mathematician at the University of Washington, performed some of the first simulations of these clouds combined with idealized climate models in 2013 and 2014. He and his collaborators modeled a small patch of stratocumulus and found that as the sea surface below it warmed under the influence of CO2, the cloud became thinner. That work and other findings — such as NASA satellite data indicating that warmer years are less cloudy than colder years — began to suggest that the least sensitive global climate models, the ones predicting little change in cloud cover and only 2 degrees of warming, probably aren’t right.Bretherton, whom Schneider calls “the smartest person we have in this area,” doesn’t only develop some of the best simulations of stratocumulus clouds; he and his team also fly through the actual clouds, dangling instruments from airplane wings to measure atmospheric conditions and bounce lasers off of cloud...
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