We want to understand clouds on a microscopic scale so we can determine the impact on a massive scale.

Cirrus clouds are like a blanket. They trap heat in the system. That energy has to escape somehow. If enough energy is trapped and stored in the system, it can escape from the tropical ocean in the form of a hurricane, or in a big rain event like a 'Pineapple Express,' which is a deep flow of moisture in the tropics like we recently had hit the East Coast.

Our focus is to understand how high-level clouds, cirrus clouds, impact the climate system. Global warming is the climate change we're the most worried about. We are in the process of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere since the Industrial Age began. The cause is the burning of fossil fuels, and it is significant because it is drastically changing the composition of the atmosphere.

What happens in this part of the world absolutely affects what happens in another part.

I went to an audition the other day, they were casting 13 people to be clouds, 14 people showed up, it was overcast.

The process of star formation is obscured because it takes place in these dense molecular clouds, so it's not yet directly observable. Astrophysicists believe that magnetic fields play a strong role in regulating the star formation by affecting the shape of these molecular clouds.