>>Gavin Pretor-Pinney: Ten years ago, it was almost to this week, in fact, I started a
society, The Cloud Appreciation Society.
And, no, it's nothing to do with the virtual cloud.
It's about the real ones up in the sky.
It's for people who like clouds, people who dislike blue-sky thinking.
And we've got members in 94 countries around the world.
They're all united in the belief that we shouldn't just think of clouds as things that get in
the way of the sun.
We shouldn't just think of them, shouldn't moan about someone having a cloud hanging
over them or a cloud on the horizon, because they're what bring variety, beauty, drama
to our skies.
When was the last time that you sat back and just watched a cloud?
Just watched the way it builds in brilliant white, cauliflower mounds?
Was it when you were a kid?
Before time was money?
When your only deadline was bedtime?
They're so omnipresent, aren't they, so everyday that it's easy to forget they're even there.
It's easy to miss that in a way, clouds are the most dynamic and evocative of nature's
displays.
So for the next 15 minutes, we're going to forget about blue-sky thinking, and we're
going to see what happens when you open your eyes to the formations in this ocean of air
above us, when you pay attention to the things that other people miss.
So let's start with this cloud here.
Does anybody in the audience know what type of cloud this is?
Are there any pilots in the audience?
It's a cumulus cloud, absolutely right.
So this is the fair-weather cloud, forms on a sunny day, borne up on invisible thermals
of air rising off the sun-warmed ground.
It's the Simpson's cloud, all right?
It's the generic one.
You close your eyes, think of a cloud, this is the one that comes to mind.
And with its crisp, well-defined edges, it's also the best type of cloud for finding shapes
in.
So it's usually a cumulus that you're looking up at when you glance up and you go, wait
a second, it's a goldfish.
[ Laughter ] It's usually cumulus there on the other side
of the river when you go, it kind of looks like a giant taking a stroll.
They're like nature's version of those ink blot images, aren't they?
You know, like you say, like shrinks used to show their patients.
"What would it mean, Dan, if you look up and you see up above the shopping mall there's
the abominable snowman with a gun going to rob a bank?
What would that mean?"
[ Laughter ] >>> Probably to do with your mother.
>>Gavin Pretor-Pinney: Probably to do with your mother.
Exactly.
Usually is, isn't it?
They're the natural stimulants, aren't they?
And who here hasn't at one time or another sat back and looked for shapes in the clouds?
But perhaps you don't do it so much now that you're adults.
Perhaps it feels a bit frivolous to -- a bit aimless, a bit frivolous to look up and go,
wait a second, it's an angel with a camcorder.
[ Laughter ] Perhaps it's -- feels a bit kind of, well,
whatever when you go over and mention to your neighbors that there's an Ostrich pecking
on their roof.
It may be aimless, but that doesn't mean it's pointless.
Because when you have your head in the clouds like this, when your brain is in coasting
mode, that's a chance, that's a space for your subconscious to speak.
And that's when you give yourself the space to make connections, you know, make novel
connections, come up with new ideas.
So, those cumulus clouds are nature's invitation to daydream.
But those same clouds, under certain circumstances, when the atmosphere is unstable, can build
and grow up in the sky.
They can grow taller and taller, rising eventually to 8, 10, 12 miles up into the sky.
This is when they start to spread out at the top, in enormous anvils covering over hundreds
of square miles.
It's where it's become the cumulonimbus storm clouds.
They're the king of clouds.
These majestic beasts of the atmosphere are what produce thunder and lightning and hail,
and when they get together, they can combine into enormous and destructive storm systems.
The cumulonimbus is the embodiment of the power that drives our atmosphere.
And the way it develops out of those innocent little cumulus clouds is an indication of
the fact that clouds are forever in flux, forever changing, metamorphosing from one
form to another.
High clouds, like these Cirrus, are composed entirely of ice crystals.
And unlike those low clouds, those cumulus, they're composed of water droplets.
So these are ice crystals.
And the way these ice crystals form through the sky is what gives this cloud its distinctive
wavy streaks.
The Latin name for them means a lock of hair.
So as those minusculized crystals tumble from the upper reaches of the atmospheres they're
swept along in the high winds.
200, 300 miles an hour.
And it gives them these very beautiful, I think, wavy appearances.
I think it's one of the most beautiful of the common clouds.
And these are common clouds.
These and the cumulus before and the cumulonimbus are three of the common types of clouds.
There are 10 main types.
But what about the rarer ones?
Because there are many more exotic and unusual forms.
For instance, the lenticularus cloud, which looks a little bit like this.
There we are.
Lenticularus cloud.
It's named after the Latin for a lentil.
So this forms in stable air in the region of mountains, and as the air rises to pass
over the mountain, it can, in certain circumstances, take a rising and dipping path in the lee
of the peak with one of these UFO-shaped clouds at the crest of the wave.
It's a standing wave of air.
So the air and the droplets are all rushing through, but the position of the cloud remains
fixed in the sky relative to the mountain.
And then there are mamma clouds.
So these come from the Latin for udders.
And these pouches hang from the underside of the cloud layer.
The larger ones, the more dramatic ones form on the underside of the anvil of a storm cloud.
The exact mechanism for these clouds to form is still not clear to us.
But one of the rarest types of cloud is this one, the Kelvin-Helmholtz wave cloud.
It looks like a succession of waves with the tops curling over like ocean breakers.
And this is caused by shearing wind, so the wind above the cloud layer and the wind below
the cloud layer differ significantly, and in between you get this undulation where the
cloud is.
And if the difference between those two speeds is just right, then the tops of those undulations
curl over in beautiful vortices.
Now, all those clouds form within the lower part of our atmosphere.
All right?
In the part called the troposphere but there's one type of cloud that forms higher than these,
much higher and it can only be seen at night.
The noctilucent cloud.
It's 50 miles up in the atmosphere, so it's not in the stratosphere which is above the
troposphere.
It's in the mesosphere, the part above that, which is an incredibly cold and incredibly
dry part of our atmosphere.
And they get the name noctilucent because being so high up, when the sun has gone down
over the horizon, the sky has become dark, these still catch the light.
Noctilucent means light shining in Latin.
They still catch the light and they have these beautiful, eerie, rippled, sort of mysterious
appearance to them.
Which is kind of appropriate because they are mysterious.
We don't understand how the water that forms the ice in these clouds gets up into the incredibly
dry part of the atmosphere.
Nor do we understand since the end of the 19th century when they were first observed,
these clouds seem to be spotted more and more frequently.
A few years ago, somebody sent us from the states, in fact, from Iowa, they sent us a
photograph of a cloud that looked a little bit like this; all right?
Looks like kind of very turbulent sea.
Very, very rough turbulent sea, maybe as if you're looking up from below.
And when people send them into the Cloud Appreciation Society, we put them up on the gallery and
we kind of nerdily decide what type of cloud it is and categorize it, as you do, and I
wasn't quite sure what to call these clouds because there is a name for wavy clouds, undulatus,
wave clouds, but these seemed like undulatus turned up to 11.
They weren't your normal undulatus cloud.
Now we then got one -- another one got sent in about a year later.
In fact, every once in a while they would appear, and each time I would go there's another
one of those sort of weird nameless clouds.
Until one day I thought, wait a second.
Maybe if they don't have a name, maybe these clouds need a name.
Maybe these clouds sent in for our network from all around the world should have a classification
of their own.
And I thought how do you go about that?
Well, you've got to come up with a Latin name, haven't you?
And I thought, well, I called up my cousin, Phillip.
He's a Latin teacher.
And I said, "Phillip, what's a good Latin name could I use for when the sea is rough
or turbulent?"
And Phillip said, "Glacialis hiemps aquilonibus asperat undas."
[ Laughter ] I said it's a bit long.
He said no, no, no.
That is a term that translates -- that's a quotation by Virgil, the Roman poet, and it
means the waves were roughened by the icy winter's northern gales, and the word you
want in there is asperat.
The verb aspero.
It means to be roughened.
So asperatus would be the term you'd use for that, roughened.
So I thought great.
Asperatus.
That's what I'm calling it.
But how do you go about making a cloud official?
Cloud classification official?
I know you've all asked yourselves that question at one time or another.
[ Laughter ] Well, I took it to the Royal Meteorological
Society in the U.K., and I said, "What about this?
It's a new cloud type."
And they looked at it and said, "Yeah, it's distinctive.
You might have a case, but you need to find out more about it."
So I took it to the University of Redding, and they said -- they looked into it, looked
into the way the cloud formed, stuff like that, and they said, "You may have a case
for this being a new classification."
But it didn't matter what either of those lots said, because the only people who matter
when it comes to the official classification of clouds is the World Meteorological Organization,
U.N. organization based in Geneva.
They publish the International Cloud Atlas, which is no page turner --
[ Laughter ] -- but it is the final word in cloud classification.
So if you want your cloud to be official, it's got to get into the International Cloud
Atlas.
All right?
The only problem is -- Well, it's been first published in 1896 and they've had versions
every now and then since then.
The problem is the U.N. don't do anything in a hurry, as we all know, and they had no
plans to do a new edition of the International Cloud Atlas.
They'd only just done one in 1974.
[ Laughter ] So I wasn't holding my breath.
But I was very pleased to hear just last week that perhaps as a result of being hounded
by journalists who kind of liked this story, you know, weird guy, wants to name a cloud,
viral story handed to them, they decided they are going to do a new edition of the International
Cloud Atlas.
[ Applause ] They're going to put it -- They got their
experts to look into whether there should be any changes or additions to it, and they
have concluded that they think asperatus should be a new official classification.
The first new cloud type since 1951.
[ Cheers and Applause ] People often ask me where in the world is
the best place to watch clouds; all right?
And one place has to be this, the Salar de Uyuni, which is in Bolivia.
Southwest of Bolivia.
It's a very large salt flat.
4,000 square miles.
You can see, you know, no obstructions to the sky.
But the reason this is a good place to watch clouds is because in the wintertime, when
it's the wet season, it can get flooded; all right?
Heavy rains, and you can get the whole area of the salt flats with one inch of water over
it.
And this being so still, this water surface acts as a perfect mirror to the sky.
So being out on the salt flats is to be suspended in cloud cuckooland.
But in fact, it's not the best place to watch clouds because the best place to watch clouds
is wherever you are.
It's in your backyard.
From the window of a plane.
When you're on holiday and on vacation, from the beach.
And clouds are the most egalitarian of nature's displays.
We all have a fantastic view of them.
So it doesn't matter.
You don't have to go somewhere special to see special clouds.
You just have to pay attention to the sky.
And that is something that climate scientists have realized we need to be doing more of:
Paying attention to the clouds.
Because the role that they play in regulating temperatures on Earth is profound, and it's
also complex.
It's not straightforward.
The low clouds, those cumulus I talked about at the beginning, they have the effect of
reflecting away more of the sun's heat than they do trap in the Earth's heat.
The high clouds, those wispy Cirrus, they don't trap reflect so much of the sun's heat
away, but they trap more of the Earth's heat in.
So one's cooling and one's warming.
And here's the problem.
We don't know, as temperatures change on Earth in the future, whether that means there will
be more clouds or fewer clouds.
We don't know whether the effect will be greater on the low clouds, the cooling ones, or the
high clouds, the warming ones.
And only when we better understand the role that clouds play in regulating our climate
will we have any chance of understanding or making competent predictions.
It doesn't matter what you think about the causes and the extent of global warming.
The one thing that everyone agrees upon is that the clouds are the wild cards; all right?
Only when we better understand them will we be able to make confident predictions about
what the temperatures will be considered to be the norm for future generations.
So there's a message to take from all this.
What is it?
Allowing your thoughts to drift along in the breeze is something I don't think we do enough
of.
Our attentions, that's drifting all the time.
Our attention is drifting all the time.
We're around the Internet.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter.
With all the feverishness of information addicts.
But if we want quality ideas to come out of all that stimulation, we need to build in
time to recharge, to reboot.
We need to give our self-conscious sides the chance and the time and the space to forge
connections to make original ideas.
And where better to do that than in this ocean of air above us, in the -- those inkblots,
just like those inkblots, the abstract forms of the clouds are whatever we make of them.
They allow our imaginations to find purchase.
It's the opposite of blue-sky thinking, because great ideas don't happen in a vacuum.
It's the things that get in the way that lead us to new solutions, that force us to think
differently.
So look up.
Marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and remember to live life with your head in the clouds.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]