A startling new study in the journal Nature Geoscience concludes that another century of burning fossil fuels at today’s levels could trigger the total loss of the world’s stratocumulus clouds and trigger another 8.0°C/14.0°F of global warming.
“Clouds currently cover about two-thirds of the planet at any moment,” writes science journalist Natalie Wolchover in Quanta Magazine. But a supercomputer simulation by researchers at the California Institute of Technology “revealed a tipping point: a level of warming at which stratocumulus clouds break up altogether. The disappearance occurs when the concentration of CO2 in the simulated atmosphere reaches 1,200 parts per million [ppm]—a level that fossil fuel burning could push us past in about a century, under ‘business-as-usual’ emissions scenarios.”