In short
Clouds—how they’re made, why they’re hard to predict, and how they may affect climate change; plus a sound-design “clouds” motif and a firsthand thunderstorm flight.
Guests/backgrounds
Umair Irfan (Vox Science reporter) interviews cloud scientists Scott Collis (Argonne National Laboratory atmospheric scientist), Angie Pendergrass (Cornell climate physicist), and Gavin Pretter-Pinney (founder, Cloud Appreciation Society). Tom Warner is the “fearless flyer” describing WWII-era 1949 propeller/radial aircraft flights into cumulonimbus storms.
Key claims
Clouds form when water vapor condenses on aerosols (dust, salt, pollen, pollution). Cloud behavior is “emergent” and the atmosphere is chaotic, making prediction difficult. Clouds could either amplify or mitigate warming depending on low liquid clouds vs high ice “blanket” clouds, and we lack pre-industrial cloud records.
Notable examples
hail “hail shaft” noise; St. Elmo’s fire/buzzing and plasma from antenna charge; sailors’ and ship logs; possible Krakatoa-linked red skies in Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExperiencing Thunderstorms from the Cockpit
0:51 to 2:10
A pilot recounts the thrilling experience of flying through thunderstorms.
“but never had the opportunity to fly an aircraft that's kind of in that World War II era, you know, 1949 vintage.”
The Power of Clouds
2:12 to 4:20
Discussion on the beauty and power of cumulonimbus clouds and their effects.
“wall, the aircraft would start to rise on its own.”
Cloud Science Overview
4:22 to 5:50
An exploration of the importance of clouds in our environment and their unpredictable nature.
“It is amazing how much science you can do just by looking at clouds.”
Understanding Cloud Composition
5:51 to 6:30
Explaining what clouds are made of and how particles contribute to their formation.
“Because they are so important, we really want to be able to get ahead of them.”
Cloud Formation and Stability
6:31 to 9:24
Discussion on how cloud particles stay suspended and the conditions needed for cloud formation.
“You know, it's just water vapor condensing around a tiny particle.”
Challenges in Predicting Weather
9:25 to 10:46
Challenges faced by scientists in predicting cloud behavior and weather phenomena.
“and if being able to predict how they move and form is so important, how do scientists go from this kind of small-scale understanding to larger-scale questions like predictions?”
Clouds and Climate Change
10:47 to 13:17
Exploring the dual role of clouds in climate change mitigation and exacerbation.
“to meters and kilometers and then over entire continents.”
Introduction to the Political Landscape
14:04 to 14:20
Explore how Donald Trump influenced American politics over the last decade.
“You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.”
The Post-Trump Political Discussion
14:20 to 15:18
Discuss the possibility of political discourse without Trump at the center.
“politics has basically revolved around one man.”
Understanding Clouds and Climate Change
15:27 to 17:52
Delve into the complex relationship between clouds and climate change.
“All right, Wednesday morning, cloudy with a chance of unexplainable.”
Show all 14 chapters
The Challenge of Measuring Clouds
17:52 to 19:19
Learn about the difficulties scientists face in understanding historical cloud data.
“So you're saying more high-altitude clouds, more heat on the planet, right?”
Historical Perspectives on Clouds
19:19 to 21:59
Examine how historical records and art provide insight into past cloud behavior.
“And that makes it really hard to get a sense of what we're doing to the planet now.”
Analyzing Edvard Munch’s 'The Scream'
21:59 to 22:57
Discuss the possible environmental influences depicted in Munch's famous painting.
“It's sort of like the predecessor to Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.”
Understanding Human Influence on Clouds
22:57 to 25:11
Explore the implications of human activities on cloud formation and climate.
“be looking at that Munch painting and seeing, oh wow, this is just some really weird portrayals of clouds with this sort of like red, orange, yellow colors.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Gavin Pretor-Pinney:Hi, I'm Christian Ayala, and I'm the sound designer for Unexplainable. This episode is one of the first ones that I worked on when I joined the team. Imagine showing up to a new job and someone asking you to figure out what a cloud sounds like. And not just a cloud, lots of clouds. Fluffy clouds, stormy clouds, all kinds of clouds. People kept comparing the clouds to the ocean, so I added the sound of waves. But it didn't quite have the right texture, so after some thinking, I settled on adding some lava bubbles to sell the slow-moving nature of clouds. Look out for this while you listen to the episode.
0:44Gavin Pretor-Pinney:Enjoy!
0:50I had flown many different aircraft and planes for the Air Force, but never had the opportunity to fly an aircraft that's kind of in that World War II era, you know, 1949 vintage.
1:05Big old propeller, big old radial engine on the front. Once the storm started to form, we would get notified that the storms were starting to build in this area to get ready, and so we'd prop the aircraft. And when it was time to launch, then we'd fire it up and then take off. And then you kind of look ahead and see this huge towering cumulonimbus ahead of you. I mean, to me, that's the ultimate cloud, the cumulonimbus, the thunderstorm. It's capable of so much power and so much beauty at the same time, and it can boil with the updraft. It just looks like it's alive. you briefly ask yourself I can't believe I'm going to go fly through this thing that is no place for an aircraft to fly but this aircraft was modified it was capable it did it for over 30 years so to me it was not about the adrenaline it was about getting the opportunity to witness the power the beauty the the strength of severe weather from inside a thunderstorm, and not many people have had that opportunity.
2:10We would aim right for it. It would be sunny and calm on the outside, and as soon as you hit that wall, the aircraft would start to rise on its own. We could keep climbing at 2 ,000 feet per minute. This is when you would really find out if you didn't have your straps tightened down. Lots of rain and hail, and that was one thing that was just remarkable to me, was just how noisy it was, is how loud the hail was when you got into the hail shaft. And as charge builds up on the aircraft, it starts creating what we call St. Elmo's fire from the communication antenna. And so you start hearing this buzzing sound over the radio, and it increases its intensity and its frequency the more charge that it builds up.
2:57And sure enough, bam, there'd be a bright flash, and when it attaches to the teller, that plasma flows right over you. It doesn't get inside the aircraft because the aircraft's metal and it acts like a Faraday cage. And it usually didn't do any damage except for just melting a little bit of metal on the trailing edge of the tail or wing or put a little pit on the propeller. So we'd continue out the forward flank of the storm and eventually break out of the storm, get out of the storm, assess how the engine is doing, and then we'd set up and do a 180-degree turn and go back and do it again.
3:51Scott M. Collis:It's unexplainable. I'm Noah Hassenfeld. And I'm here with Umair Irfan, Vox Science reporter. And obviously, my first question after listening to that is, why is this guy flying an old tiny plane straight into a thunderstorm?
4:05Angeline Pendergrass:Well, it turns out that even though clouds are ubiquitous and found everywhere on Earth, there's still a lot we don't know about them. Sometimes the best way to actually understand what's going on is to go straight into the middle of them. So I decided to start talking to a bunch of cloud scientists about this. And, well, one of the first things you learn talking to cloud scientists is they really love clouds.
4:25Gavin Pretor-Pinney:It is amazing how much science you can do just by looking at clouds. I love deep convective clouds. Those are the really puffy and tall and juicy clouds that happen all the time in the tropics. The asperitas cloud, it looks like crazy waves, as if you're beneath the sea snorkeling and you're looking up on a really rough and turbulent day. Mamatis is this droopy, undular kind of cloud. And when you get a sunset and those warm red colors of the sunset reflect on the bottom of a Mamatis cloud, it looks like looking into the mouth of a giant.
5:04Angeline Pendergrass:Clouds are where the rubber meets the road in terms of weather. You know, things like rainfall, things like temperature, wind. A lot of that is mediated and governed by cloud formation, where the clouds are and how quickly they move. So understanding them is to fill in a crucial blank with whether we have enough water available to grow crops. Or if we lose clouds in a given area, will that cause heat to accumulate in that area? So a lot of our real-world interactions, a lot of the things that we do day-to-day, are affected by clouds in really profound ways.
5:37Scott M. Collis:Okay, so clouds are really important. They impact crops and rainfall and temperature. But are they unexplainable? Like, what do we still not know about them?
5:47Angeline Pendergrass:Well, it's really hard to anticipate them. Because they are so important, we really want to be able to get ahead of them. And right now, there's still a lot that we're still trying to figure out. At the molecular scale, we understand basically how cloud particles form. And then at the overall planetary scale, we kind of understand how clouds spread over continents and over the oceans. But connecting those in the middle, that's really difficult. And without being able to connect those dots there, it's really hard to predict how clouds are going to form and the effects that they're going to have on us.
6:21Scott M. Collis:Okay, so we've got this small-scale understanding, this very large-scale understanding. We're sort of missing the connective tissue there. Let's start small. What exactly is a cloud? Like, what's the stuff of a cloud?
6:35Angeline Pendergrass:It's pretty simple. You know, it's just water vapor condensing around a tiny particle. Tiny, tiny little particles we call aerosols. I talked to Scott Collis, who's this atmospheric scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.
6:51Gavin Pretor-Pinney:Aerosols are about one millionth of one meter in diameter. So these things are absolutely tiny. And they act as a surface that water can condense onto and make droplets. So it can be a piece of dust, it can be salt spray from the ocean, it can be pollen, it can even be pollution, and it can be synthetic chemicals that, you know, people deliberately try to seed clouds with.
7:18Scott M. Collis:That's interesting because I would have thought of a cloud as a gas. And you're basically telling me that a cloud is actually a mixture of solids and liquids, like solids at the core and liquids kind of coalescing around those small solids.
7:36Angeline Pendergrass:Right. That's really weird. I mean, if you think about it, if you look up at a cloud, they look almost weightless.
7:41Scott M. Collis:Yeah.
7:42Angeline Pendergrass:But if you were to imagine, say, a cloud that's, you know, a kilometer on each side, like, say, a cubic cloud that's, like, one kilometer on each side, that's about a million pounds of water right there. Huh. You know, we're talking, you know, ponds and lakes worth of water directly above your head, and the very low density of it helps keep it afloat in the air.
8:01Scott M. Collis:I just am kind of astounded at the fact, like, I get why a bunch of gas could stay above us and not fall down. But if you're telling me that there's a bunch of solids and liquids in the sky that are the amount of water as a pond and it is not falling on me all the time, like, how?
8:22Angeline Pendergrass:I mean, it's the amount of water even as giant rivers. Like, there's more water in the air above the Amazon than there is in the Amazon River. What? Yeah. It's a tremendous volume of water. You know, like every tree in the rainforest can move about a bathtub's worth of water into the air every day. And they effectively help generate about half of the rainfall in the rainforest. So the trees are kind of watering themselves. How does the water, like, stay up there? Think about like a spray bottle, right? Like if you've ever used like a mister, that water doesn't necessarily fall out of the air. Now, if you could make those particles that come out of a mist or even smaller, they can stay suspended in the air for a very long time.
9:04Angeline Pendergrass:But, you know, we can have those ingredients and still not get clouds. You know, you can have dust in the air and still have it where the atmospheric conditions won't lead to cloud formation. And it's really hard to tell exactly what that is because it can change from moment to moment from place to place.
9:20Scott M. Collis:Okay, so clouds are made up of tiny bits of water that surround particles. and if being able to predict how they move and form is so important, how do scientists go from this kind of small-scale understanding to larger-scale questions like predictions?
9:36Angeline Pendergrass:Well, I talked to this scientist about just that. You know, this is a scientist named Angie Pendergrass. She's a climate physicist at Cornell University. And she told me that the moment you start talking about more than one droplet, it gets really complicated really quickly.
9:50Gavin Pretor-Pinney:There's just these hard limits to what it is that you can say, especially about the specifics of how things are going to change in the future.
9:59Angeline Pendergrass:Angie describes these as, you know, billions of droplets moving together, kind of like a double pendulum.
10:06Gavin Pretor-Pinney:So if you have a pendulum hanging from another pendulum and you start spinning one of them, you stop being able to predict what it's going to do.
10:15Angeline Pendergrass:You've got these layers and layers of complexity that keep building up.
10:19Gavin Pretor-Pinney:And you can't know what it's going to do because small differences grow really quickly and dominate the system.
10:28Angeline Pendergrass:So when you have these layers of complexity building on each other, it becomes harder and harder to model and predict what's going to happen next.
10:35Gavin Pretor-Pinney:When you have a really small effect, it grows.
10:38Angeline Pendergrass:So then these tiny, subtle changes that happen at the microscopic level suddenly become really, really difficult to scale up. And they have huge effects as they ripple out from the microscopic level to meters and kilometers and then over entire continents.
10:53Gavin Pretor-Pinney:The atmosphere is chaotic. And when you make one tiny change, that can grow exponentially and change everything.
11:04Scott M. Collis:So you're saying basically we can't necessarily predict what kind of effect pumping a certain gas into the atmosphere in one place might have on rainfall or weather in a different place?
11:15Angeline Pendergrass:It's really difficult. And right now it's beyond a lot of our capabilities. I mean, I'll give you an example. You know, think about the boundaries of a cloud.
11:24Gavin Pretor-Pinney:So like when you're underneath a cloud and you see its bottom, it looks pretty solid and it looks pretty flat a lot of times. But really, it's a lot more complicated than it looks.
11:34Angeline Pendergrass:You know, it's not as though there's a sudden line where you go from cloud to not cloud. You know, the atmosphere is filled with water vapor. And so it's this constant churn of evaporation, condensation, movement, freezing, thawing, all happening at the boundaries and within these clouds.
11:50Gavin Pretor-Pinney:It's not quite always clear what even you mean by a cloud, and it's not always what it looks like it might be.
11:58Scott M. Collis:I wonder if this is an appropriate analogy, but it almost makes me think of like a wave in an ocean, thinking of a wave as like a thing, but it's almost the rest of the ocean maybe coming into a certain shape, but there's not necessarily a moment where the wave becomes the rest of the ocean.
12:18Angeline Pendergrass:That's right. You know, scientists kind of describe these things as emergent phenomenon. And this is this idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts or behaves in a different way. So if you were to look at an individual water droplet, you would expect some very predictable behaviors, you know, how it would roll or how it would move around in space if it was like a suspended aerosol. But when they're all aggregated together in clouds, those properties begin to shift and change. then they begin to behave as an aggregate. Clouds then move together. They fuse and they create layers in the sky or they form columns where they move up and down or they condense and that water then precipitates out of the sky as rain and snow.
Read the full transcript
12:59Angeline Pendergrass:So it has all these other properties that you wouldn't necessarily be able to extrapolate from just its constituent parts. And that's why you have to look at clouds both at a very tiny scale, but then also at this massive scale over kilometers and even over continents to fully grasp the influence that they're having on the planet. And clouds, you know, while they have important effects in the near term over the course of days and weeks in our lives, they also have an even bigger effect over the long term. And that's where the picture gets even more complicated, particularly if you're concerned about climate change.
13:39Scott M. Collis:clouds might mitigate climate change but they also have the potential to make it worse we just don't really know which outcome we're going to get that's after the break
13:52Scott M. Collis:hi i'm bernie brown and i'm adam grant and we're here to invite you to the curiosity shop a podcast that's a place for listening wondering thinking feeling and questioning it's gonna be
14:03Gavin Pretor-Pinney:fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. For the last
14:19Scott M. Collis:10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat.
14:31Gavin Pretor-Pinney:I am officially running For president of the United States, it's going to be only America first. America first. Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building. But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Vox. The idea of like a post-Trump or not exactly Trump-focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel like so reactive.
15:03Scott M. Collis:You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far, it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time, you see on a major issue, open opposition from the start of this war. I'm Estet Herndon and welcome to America Actually.
15:26Scott M. Collis:Popular pie plant pictured here.
15:35Scott M. Collis:All right, Wednesday morning, cloudy with a chance of unexplainable. Umair, we're back. In the first half, you were talking about how clouds are this sort of hard to explain emergent phenomenon. I mean, we know what they are on a very, very granular level, but it's very hard to really explain how they move and change and behave. And you left off on this note of how difficult it is to predict the future and what impact that could have on climate change. So what are we talking about here? Like, what is the potential impact of clouds on climate change?
16:10Angeline Pendergrass:So there's a lot of far-reaching effects that are going to change depending on how the clouds change as the climate warms up. You know, if you look at climate models, one of the biggest sources of uncertainty is what humans will do, whether we will actually get our act together and curb greenhouse gas emissions or just keep doing what we're doing. But after that, clouds are almost always the largest source of uncertainty in those models. So where could this cloud uncertainty take us? Well, it can go in two directions. You know, you can see clouds that make climate change worse and enhance warming, or you can see clouds that sort of offset it and mitigate some of those effects.
16:46Angeline Pendergrass:Oh, so clouds could actually, like, help us out on global warming? That's right. Scott Collis, the atmospheric scientist we heard from earlier, explained this pretty well.
16:54Gavin Pretor-Pinney:So the basic way our climate works and climate change works is visible light comes in, heats the surface of the planet, and some of that radiation gets radiated back to space. Now, low clouds that sit very close to the surface of the Earth and look very white and fluffy that are mainly made up of liquid water, they do a really good job of reflecting that incoming solar radiation back out into space.
17:21Scott M. Collis:Okay, so the low-altitude clouds might be like, I don't know, wearing white on a hot day in the summer, like keeping the heat out, reflecting it?
17:30Angeline Pendergrass:Right. On the other hand, when you have some of the more high-altitude clouds... You know, above 30 ,000, 40 ,000 feet in the Earth's atmosphere are mainly made of ice.
17:39Gavin Pretor-Pinney:And they can actually appear to be kind of translucent. They let some of that sunlight through, but they're very effective at blocking the outgoing infrared radiation. So they act more like a blanket.
17:52Scott M. Collis:So you're saying more high-altitude clouds, more heat on the planet, right? Yeah. And I guess the issue is here that we don't really know on a large scale whether we're going to get more of these blanket clouds or more of these cooling clouds?
18:07Angeline Pendergrass:It could quite easily go either way. Right. It can go both ways at the same time. You know, we've only really been measuring clouds and observing them scientifically in an era where we've been also modifying them extensively. Like, we've been doing this since the Industrial Revolution, when humans have been pumping greenhouse gases into the air as well as pollution. We don't have a good sense of what clouds were like before humans started drastically interfering in the atmosphere. And that's because we don't really have a good record of clouds. There's no fossil record. We have ice cores that we can use to sample the atmosphere from decades, centuries, and millennia ago.
18:45Angeline Pendergrass:We have tree rings that we can use to look at rainfall patterns. We can look at the geological record. But clouds themselves, they have barely a footprint. And so we don't really know what they looked like and how they behaved before we started spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, before we started emitting particles of soot and sulfur from our industrial facilities.
19:08Scott M. Collis:It's almost like if scientists are trying to predict how clouds will change over time and how that will impact climate change, they don't really have a before picture.
19:18Angeline Pendergrass:Exactly. And that makes it really hard to get a sense of what we're doing to the planet now. We don't really have something to compare it to. We've only seen it under our influence. And the best records we have to go on are just what people told us back in the past. For instance, sailors and navigators for a long time keep very accurate track of weather because, you know, weather and wind is very important for sailing.
19:45Gavin Pretor-Pinney:And so now scientists are really trying to delve back into old handwritten records, especially from ship's logs, to try to understand pre-industrial cloudiness.
19:57Angeline Pendergrass:We have maritime shipping logs going back centuries that some researchers are working on digitizing so they can actually get a sample of what clouds were like over the ocean hundreds of years ago. You know, like even sailors' legends about how they look for certain types of clouds as heralds of bad weather or good weather.
20:16Scott M. Collis:Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailors delight. Exactly. And, you know, there's truth to that.
20:23Gavin Pretor-Pinney:You're really looking for those high cirrus clouds usually generated, they're created by thunderstorms. When a thunderstorm happens, the vertical winds in that storm push up water vapor and cloud droplets and ice. So if you see that cirrus cloud coming to you in the morning, you know you've probably got a storm coming at you.
20:47Angeline Pendergrass:Another thing that some scientists have suggested we should look at is art and literature.
20:52Scott M. Collis:What do you mean? Like how people wrote about clouds?
20:55Angeline Pendergrass:Well, exactly.
20:56Gavin Pretor-Pinney:They have been rich metaphors and rich inspiration for poets and artists throughout the ages.
21:04Angeline Pendergrass:This is Gavin Predder-Pinney. He is the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, a group with more than 55 ,000 members across the world. The Cloud Appreciation Society. Oh yeah, there's a lot to appreciate about clouds. And one thing that he built my appreciation for is just how profoundly clouds have influenced art and literature and culture.
21:23Gavin Pretor-Pinney:You can see carvings on stones in Mexico showing cumulonimbus storm clouds with recognizable features to them. You know, thousands of years old.
21:37Angeline Pendergrass:Like, you know, how were clouds depicted in paintings from centuries ago? Does that provide a useful signal?
21:43Gavin Pretor-Pinney:You know, zoom right forward to the romantics of the 19th century, and you have landscape painters like John Constable said that the sky is the chief organ of sentiment in a landscape.
21:58Angeline Pendergrass:Have you heard of that painting, The Scream, by Edvard Munch? Yeah. The Norwegian painter?
22:03Scott M. Collis:Yeah, I love The Scream. It's sort of like the predecessor to Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
22:08Angeline Pendergrass:Exactly.
22:08Scott M. Collis:With his hands on his cheeks, kind of looking like a ghost skeleton.
22:11Angeline Pendergrass:Well, if you look past the eerie skull-shaped character in the front and into the background, you can see these vivid red streaks in the sky. And some scientists say that this was actually what the sky looked like in Norway about a decade before he painted this. This was due to the Krakatoa volcano eruption that spewed soot into the air all over the world and caused these amazing sunsets. Now, some scientists dispute that. They say the time gap was too large. Others will say that this was actually another type of cloud that you actually see in the northern latitudes called Nacrius clouds that are actually seen in and around Arctic and polar regions that actually reflect sunlight in these vivid colors.
22:50Angeline Pendergrass:Seriously? So this may have actually been an early depiction of a phenomenon that we've only now begun to appreciate.
22:57Scott M. Collis:So some people might be looking at that Munch painting and seeing, oh wow, this is just some really weird portrayals of clouds with this sort of like red, orange, yellow colors. And then other people might be like, oh no, oh, he's totally serious. That's actually what the clouds were like then.
23:14Angeline Pendergrass:Well, maybe in that particular moment or that specific memory that he was evoking. I mean, that's fascinating. But the other thing to caveat is, of course, this is art and there is some artistic license.
23:23Gavin Pretor-Pinney:Paintings and art, they're constructed a lot of the time. You know, they're not photographs of the sky. They don't give you a real indication of how many of them there were, how often they were around. All these quantifiable factors which are important in understanding how our climate has changed. We get glimpses at the sky throughout history, but that's all we can get from human culture, really.
23:51Scott M. Collis:So what have scientists learned from all of these glimpses of cloud history?
23:56Angeline Pendergrass:I think it's a process right now, especially with the digitization of nautical records.
24:02Gavin Pretor-Pinney:The impossible-to-read handwriting of the crew of some whaling ship in the 18th century to try and pick out references to the weather. It's going to take time to actually get enough useful information out of them.
24:19Angeline Pendergrass:Eventually, you know, you could use this to sort of put together a picture, a spotty picture, but a picture nonetheless of what the oceans and the skies looked like centuries ago.
24:31Scott M. Collis:You know, it strikes me, Mare, that we're talking here about how there's so much we don't know about how clouds might change and behave in the future. There's probably even more we don't know about how clouds behaved in the past. Where does that leave us right now?
24:48Angeline Pendergrass:I think it should leave us here with a little bit of humility to understand that, you know, there's a lot we still don't know and that there's still some things beyond our control. But it should also give us, you know, inspiration and motivation to study this further, that we know that clouds are going to be something that's hugely consequential for us, that these are really important blank spaces that we really need to fill in, and we should redouble our efforts to try to understand them.
25:16Gavin Pretor-Pinney:Our relationship with our atmosphere is a crucially important one going forward. And one way to help that is to be more connected to the atmosphere, to realize that we don't live beneath the sky, we live within it. and the sky is an ocean that we inhabit. We just happen to live on the bed of that ocean.
25:43Angeline Pendergrass:So once you start appreciating clouds, you start appreciating your role in the world and your role as both an observer and a participant in the atmosphere.
25:52Gavin Pretor-Pinney:And so what we put into that ocean is not something separate from us. It's not something that happens above us. It is something that happens to us.
26:02Angeline Pendergrass:And that may help you sort of center yourself in the world.
26:05Gavin Pretor-Pinney:When you notice out of the corner of your eye something interesting or beautiful appear above you, be prepared to stop and look up. Just allow your imagination to drift along with the breeze for a few moments. To do that, to have a few moments with your head in the clouds, helps you keep your feet on the ground.
26:35Gavin Pretor-Pinney:Thanks to all the cloud experts we heard from in today's episode. Tom Warner, our fearless flyer from the beginning, Scott Collis, Angie Pendergrass, and Gavin Pritter-Penny. This episode was produced and co-reported by me, Meredith Hodnot, and edited by Brian Resnick, Bird Pinkerton, Jillian Weinberger, and Noam, who also made the music. We had sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala. Mandy Nguyen did the fact check for this episode, and Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of Vox Audio. If you want some juicy, undulating pictures of clouds, video of Tom Warner's plane getting hit by lightning, or more information on the Cloud Appreciation Society, sign up for our newsletter.
27:17Gavin Pretor-Pinney:You can do that at vox.com slash unexplainable. And send us your thoughts on the show. Email us at unexplainable at vox.com. We read every email, and we'd love to hear what you're thinking. And if you like the show, tell a friend. Leave us a review or a rating. Do whatever you can to help bring new Unexplainable listeners into the fold. Unexplainable is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you for listening.
27:56Thank you.
From the publisher
It’s surprisingly hard to predict how clouds form, move, and change, but it’s essential to try. Because how clouds react to a warming world helps determine how hot our future will be.
Guests: Vox contributor Umair Irfan, scientists Scott M. Collis, Angeline Pendergrass, and author Gavin Pretor-Pinney
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts
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