“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.”