by Hope Jahren
Clouds. It was a bizarre preoccupation, perhaps even a frivolous one, but he didn’t resist it. He went with it, as he often does, despite not having a specific goal or even a general direction in mind; he likes to see where things go. When Pretor-Pinney returned to London, he talked about clouds constantly. He walked around admiring them, learned their scientific names and the meteorological conditions that shape them, and argued with friends who complained they were oppressive or drab. He was realizing, as he later put it, that “clouds are not something to moan about. They are, in fact, the most dynamic, evocative, and poetic aspect of nature.”
Slowing down to appreciate clouds enriched his life and sharpened his ability to appreciate other pockets of beauty hiding in plain sight. At the same time, Pretor-Pinney couldn’t help noting, we were entering an era in which miraculousness was losing its meaning. Novel, purportedly amazing things ricocheted around the Internet so quickly that, as he put it, we can now all walk around with an attitude like, “Well, I’ve just seen a panda doing something unusual online, what’s going to amaze me now?” His fascination with clouds was teaching him that “it’s much better for our souls to realize we can be amazed and delighted by what’s around us.”
At the end of 2004 a friend invited Pretor-Pinney to give a talk about clouds at a small literary festival in Cornwall. The previous year there were more speakers than attendees, so Pretor-Pinney wanted an alluring title for his talk, to draw a crowd. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” he thought, “to have a society that defends clouds against the bad rap they get—that stands up for clouds?” So he called it “The Inaugural Lecture of the Cloud Appreciation Society.” And it worked. Standing room only! Afterward people came up to him and asked for more information about the Cloud Appreciation Society. They wanted to join the society. “And I had to tell them, well, I haven’t really got a society,” Pretor-Pinney said.
He set up a website. It was simple. There was a gallery for posting photographs of clouds, a membership form, and a florid manifesto. (“We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them,” it began.) Pretor-Pinney wasn’t offering members of his new Cloud Appreciation Society any perks or activities, but to keep it all from feeling ephemeral or imaginary, as many things on the Internet do, he eventually decided that membership should cost $15 and that members would receive a badge and certificate in the mail. He recognized that joining an online Cloud Appreciation Society that only nominally existed might appear ridiculous, but it was important to him that it not feel meaningless.
Within a couple of months the society had 2,000 paying members. Pretor-Pinney was surprised and ecstatic. Then Yahoo placed the Cloud Appreciation Society first on its 2005 list of Britain’s “Weird and Wonderful websites.” People kept clicking on that clickbait, which wasn’t necessarily surprising, but thousands of them also clicked through to Pretor-Pinney’s own website, then paid for memberships. Other news sites noticed. They did their own articles about the Cloud Appreciation Society, and people followed the links in those articles too. Previously Pretor-Pinney proposed writing a book about clouds and was rejected by 28 editors. Now he was a viral sensation with a vibrant online constituency; he got a deal to write a book about clouds.
The writing process was agonizing. On top of not actually being a writer, he was a brutal perfectionist. But The Cloudspotter’s Guide, published in 2006, was full of glee and wonder. Pretor-Pinney relays, for example, the story of the United States Marine pilot who in 1959 ejected from his fighter jet over Virginia and during the 40 minutes it took him to reach the ground was blown up and down through a cumulonimbus cloud about as high as Mount Everest. He surveys clouds in art history and Romantic poetry and compares one exceptionally majestic formation in Australia to “Cher in the brass armor bikini and gold Viking helmet outfit she wore on the sleeve of her 1979 album Take Me Home.” In the middle of the book there’s a cloud quiz. Question No. 5 asks of a particular photograph, “What is it that’s so pleasing about this layer of stratocumulus?” The answer Pretor-Pinney supplies is, “It is pleasing for whatever reason you find it to be.”
The book became a bestseller. There were more write-ups, more clicks, more Cloud Appreciation Society members. And that cycle would keep repeating, sporadically, for years, whenever an editor or blogger happened to discover the society and set it off again. (There are now more than 40,000 paid members.) The media tended to present it as one more amusing curiosity, worth delighting over and sharing before moving on. That is, Pretor-Pinney’s organization was being tossed like a pebble, again and again, into the same bottomless pool of interchangeable online content that he was trying to coax people away from by lifting their gaze skyward. But that was okay with him; he understood that it’s just how the Internet works. He wasn’t cynical about it, and he didn’t feel his message was being cheapened either. It felt as if he were observing the whole thing from afar, and he tried to appreciate it.
Then Pretor-Pinney noticed something odd.
“The way I felt when I first saw it was: Armageddon,” Jane Wiggins said. Wiggins was a paralegal working in downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in June 2006 when she looked out her office window and saw an impenetrable shroud of dark clouds looming over town. Everyone in the office stood up, Wiggins told me, and some drifted to the window. The cloud was so enormous, so terrible and strange, that it made the evening news. Wiggins, who had recently taken up photography, took out her camera.
Soon after that Wiggins discovered the Cloud Appreciation Society website and posted one of her pictures in its gallery. But the anomaly Wiggins thought she had captured wasn’t actually anomalous. Similar photos turned up in the Cloud Appreciation Society’s gallery from Texas, Norway, Ontario, Scotland, France, and Massachusetts. Pretor-Pinney assumed that this phenomenon was so rare that until now no one had recognized it as a repeating form and given it a name. “As the hub of this network, a network of people who are sky-aware,” he said, “it’s easier to spot patterns that perhaps weren’t so easy to spot in the past.”
In fact, many aspects of meteorology already rely on a global network of individual weather observers to identify cloud types with the naked eye, filing them into a long-established scientific framework: not just as cumulus, cirrus, stratus, or cumulonimbus clouds, as schoolchildren learn, but within a recondite system for describing variations. Atypical clouds are either fitted into that existing map of the sky or set aside as irrelevant. Pretor-Pinney liked classifying clouds using these names; he was thankful to have that structure in place. And yet it seemed a shame to repress the glaring, deviant beauty recorded in Wiggins’s photograph by assigning it a name that didn’t sufficiently describe it. He supposed, if you had to, you could call this thing an undulatus—the standard classification for a broad, wavy cloud. But that seemed to be selling the cloud tragically short, stubbornly ignoring what made it so sublime. This was “undulatus turned up to 11,” he said. So he came up with his own name for the cloud: asperatus. (The word asperatus came from a passage in Virgil describing a roughened sea; Pretor-Pinney had asked his cousin, a high school Latin teacher, for help.) He wondered how to go about making such a name official.
In 2008, while shooting a documentary for the BBC about clouds, Pretor-Pinney pitched his new cloud to a panel of four meteorologists at the Royal Meteorological Society. The scientists sat in a line behind a table; Pretor-Pinney stood, holding blown-up photos of asperatus for them to consider. “It was a lot like The X Factor,” he said, referring to the TV talent show. The scientists were encouraging but diplomatic. A new cloud name, they explained, could be designated only by the World Meteorological Organization, an agency within the United Nations, based in Geneva, which has published scientific names and descriptions of all known cloud types in its International Cloud Atlas since 1896. The WMO is exceptionally discerning; for starters, Pretor-Pinney was told, he would need more carefully cataloged incidences of these clouds, as well as a scientific understanding of th
eir surrounding “synoptic situation.” The process would take years. And even then, the chances of inclusion in the atlas were slim. The WMO hadn’t added a new cloud type to the International Cloud Atlas since 1953. “We don’t expect to see new cloud types popping up every week,” a WMO official named Roger Atkinson told me. When I asked why, Atkinson said, “Because 50 or 60 years ago we got it right.”
A cloud is only water, but arranged like no other water on earth. Billions of minuscule droplets are packed into every cubic foot of cloud, throwing reflected light off their disordered surfaces in all directions, collectively making the cloud opaque. In a way, each cloud is an illusion, a conspiracy of liquid masquerading as a floating, solid object.
But for most of human history, what a cloud was, physically, hardly mattered; instead we understood clouds as psychic refuges from the mundane, grist for our imaginations, feelings fodder. Clouds both influenced our emotions and hung above us like washed-out mirrors, reflecting them. The English painter John Constable called the sky the “chief organ of sentiment” in his landscapes. And our instinct as children to recognize shapes in the clouds is arguably one early spark of all the higher forms of creative thinking that make us human and make us fun. Frankly, a person too dull to look up at the sky and see a parade of tortoises or a huge pair of mittens or a ghost holding a samurai sword is not a person worth lying in a meadow with. In Hamlet, Polonius’s despicable spinelessness is never clearer than when Hamlet gets him to enthusiastically agree that a particular cloud looks like a camel, then not a camel at all but a weasel. Then not a weasel but a whale. Polonius will see whatever Hamlet wants him to; he is a man completely without his own vision.
We look for meaning—portents—in the clouds as well, the more grown-up version of picking out puffy animals. “There’s a long history of people finding signs in the sky,” Pretor-Pinney told me, from Constantine seeing the cross over the Milvian Bridge to the often belligerent protesters outside Pretor-Pinney’s talks, who are convinced that the contrails behind commercial airplanes are evidence of a toxic, secret government scheme and are outraged that Pretor-Pinney—the righteous Lorax of clouds—refuses to expose it. In short, clouds exist in a realm where the physical and metaphysical touch. “We look up for answers,” Pretor-Pinney says. And yet we often don’t want empirical answers. There has always been a romantic impulse to protect clouds from our own stubbornly rational intellects, to keep knowledge from trampling their magic. Thoreau preferred to understand clouds as something that “stirs my blood, makes my thought flow” and not as a mass of water. “What sort of science,” he wrote, “is that which enriches the understanding but robs the imagination?”
The scientific study of clouds grew out of a collection of madly appreciating amateurs who struggled with this same tension. The field’s foundational treatise was first presented to a small scientific debating society in London one evening in 1802 by a shy Quaker pharmacist named Luke Howard. Howard, then 30, was not a professional meteorologist but a devoted cloud-spotter with a perceptive, if wandering, mind. His interest in clouds started early. His biographer, Richard Hamblyn, explains that as a young student in Oxfordshire, Howard seems to have found school magnificently boring. He couldn’t bring himself to pay attention, except to his Latin teacher, who punished daydreaming with beatings. Today Howard might covertly pull out his phone and read a link a friend shared about, say, an eccentric society in England that appreciates clouds. But poor Howard’s boredom was analog: all he could do was look out the classroom window at the actual clouds rolling by.
Howard’s intention that night in London was to bring clouds down to earth without depleting their loftiness. After years of closely observing clouds, his appreciation of them had hardened into analysis. He now insisted that though clouds may appear to be blown around in random, ever-changing shapes, they actually take consistent forms, forms that can be distinguished from one another and whose changes correspond to changes in the atmosphere. Clouds can be used to read what Howard called “the countenance of the sky”; they are an expression of its moods, not just in a poetic way, as Constable meant, but meteorologically.
Howard’s lecture was eventually published as “On the Modifications of Clouds, and on the Principles of Their Production, Suspension and Destruction.” It stands as the ur-text of nephology, the branch of meteorology devoted to clouds. Howard divided clouds into three major types and many intermittent varieties of each, all similarly affixed with Latin names or compounds. (He had learned his Latin well.) Like Linnaeus, who used Latin to sort the fluidity of life into genera and species, Howard used his new cloud taxonomy to wrest our understanding of the world’s diversity from superstition and religion. His signature assertion that “the sky, too, belongs to the Landscape” can be read as a call for empiricism—a conviction that science can in fact measure out the mystical.
Nearly a century later Howard’s work would be picked up by another energetic amateur, the Honorable Ralph Abercromby. Abercromby was the bookish great-grandson of a celebrated English war hero. He was apparently so meek and frail (“never robust, even as a boy,” one tribute read after his death) that he was forced to drop out of school and was rarely able to hold a job. He served briefly in the military but seemed completely unsuited to soldiering; deployed to Newfoundland in 1864, Abercromby began theorizing about how the fog there was produced. Later, stationed in Montreal, he scrutinized the wind. It would have been tempting for his superiors to label him “absent-minded” or “unfocused,” but in retrospect it was just another case of a young man intensely focused on something few people considered worthy of attention—another case of a young man in love with clouds.
In 1885, Abercromby took his first round-the-world voyage. He was a civilian again, and his private physician hoped the sea air would restore his pitiable health. But he worked slavishly the whole time, keeping a meticulous weather diary, photographing the clouds at sea. He published many scientific papers and a book about the clouds and weather that he encountered. And he kept traveling: Scandinavia and Russia, Asia and the United States, compelled, as he wrote, to “continue the observation and photography of cloud forms in different countries.” Looking up, Abercromby came to realize that clouds looked essentially the same everywhere. Colonialism was sending goods, resources, and culture around the planet; suddenly it must have seemed obvious that we also shared the same sky.
Abercromby’s primary interest was in refining the science of weather-tracking and forecasting, and he knew that meteorologists everywhere would need a standard way to discuss and share their observations. Eventually, collaborating with a Swedish cloud scientist named Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson, he convened a Cloud Committee to hammer out Hildebrandsson’s meticulous “Nomenclature of Clouds.” They declared 1896 “the International Year of the Cloud.” By year’s end the committee produced the first International Cloud Atlas.
The atlas is now in its seventh edition, and its meticulous taxonomy provides for 10 genera of clouds, 14 species, nine varieties, and dozens of “accessory clouds” and “supplementary features.” The atlas also establishes a grammar with which these terms can be combined to allow for the instability of clouds—the way they morph from one form into another—or to describe their general altitude. A cumulus, for example, might just be a cumulus; or it might be a cumulus fractus, if its edges are tattered; or a cumulus pileus, if a smaller cloud appears over it like a hood. An altocumulus lenticularis, meanwhile, is a vast, tightly bunched flock of clouds stretching across the sky at altitudes from 6,500 to 23,000 feet.
Of course, not everything in the sky needs to be precisely described. As a reference book for meteorologists, the atlas has been concerned only with clouds that have “operational significance”—that reliably reveal something about atmospheric conditions. As far as other clouds go, says Roger Atkinson of the WMO, one person might look at a cloud and say, “ ‘It’s wonderful. It looks like an elephant,’ and someone else might think it’s a camel.” But the
WMO doesn’t particularly care. It does not see its mission as settling disagreements about elephants and camels.
Soon after Pretor-Pinney appeared on the BBC, championing his asperatus cloud, the media seized on the possibility, however remote, that the WMO would add asperatus to its atlas. Suddenly there were stories about the Cloud Appreciation Society all over the place, all over again. This time Pretor-Pinney—previously cast as a charming English eccentric with a funny website—was presented as the crusading figurehead of a populist meteorological revolt. Pretor-Pinney had initially turned defeatist after shooting the documentary and never bothered reaching out to the WMO; the bureaucracy seemed too formidable. Now he didn’t quite know what to say. When reporters called, he suggested they contact the WMO, impishly channeling them as de facto lobbyists.
Then, in 2014, the WMO announced it was preparing the first new edition of the Cloud Atlas in nearly 40 years; the agency felt pressure to finally digitize the book, to reassert its authority over the many reckless cloud-reference materials proliferating online. One of the WMO’s first steps was to convene an international task team to consider additions to the atlas. “Most public interest,” a news release noted, “has focused on a proposal by the Cloud Appreciation Society” to recognize the so-called asperatus. The task team would report to a so-called Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation. Last summer the commission recommended to the World Meteorological Organization’s 17th World Meteorological Congress in Geneva that the cloud be included. Everyone seemed confident that the recommendation would soon be ratified by the WMO’s executive council. Except the new cloud wasn’t asperatus anymore; it was now asperitas. The task team had demoted it from a cloud “variety,” as Pretor-Pinney had proposed, to a “supplementary feature,” and the elaborate naming convention for clouds required supplementary features to be named with Latin nouns, not adjectives. “One of those things that’s so close, but different,” Pretor-Pinney told me, with a tinge of amusement and resentment.