Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything (2020) s01e05 Episode Script
Clouds
1
[soft music playing]
[Nasser]
Most clouds weigh more than a blue whale,
which is weird, right?
They hover over us every day
with the power to give life
and to take it away.
And yet we barely even look up at them.
But this isn't just a story
about the clouds in the sky.
It's also a story about the cloud
that connects our computers,
and how those two very different clouds
are themselves connected.
It's a journey that'll take us through,
among other things,
an ambulance driver,
an electronic country,
a deadly shipwreck,
tiny killers you can track from space,
shark-proof garden hoses
and these guys soaking in a hot tub.
So
let's go cloud hopping.
[thunder rumbles]
[upbeat music playing]
[meditative music playing]
I'm Latif Nasser,
and this is a show about
the astonishing connections all around us,
connections between you and me
and our world
that'll make you see that world
in a whole new way.
Our journey through the clouds
starts here
at a spot where, 160 years ago,
a cloud changed human history.
Well, not one cloud
but a conglomeration of clouds
that together caused
one of the most notorious storms
of the nineteenth century.
My guide,
gold prospector Vince Thurkettle,
spent nine years diving here.
It's the site of his holy grail:
the wreck of the Royal Charter.
[Thurkettle] The Royal Charter
was the most amazing ship.
It was almost space-age in the 1850's.
Iron hull, three-masted,
with a steam engine.
And in the 1850's
that was a really big deal.
It sounds almost like you're describing
the Titanic of its time.
[Thurkettle] Absolutely. Absolutely.
You've got, say, 200 gold miners
and a lot of their families on board.
And they are carrying so much gold.
In American dollars, in today's money,
I think it was carrying 150 million.
Wow.
[Nasser] With one day left on its journey
from Australia to Liverpool,
the ship met hurricane-force winds.
[tense music playing]
[Thurkettle] Hurricanes aren't common here.
I think in the nineteenth century,
that storm,
now called the Royal Charter Storm,
was the biggest by miles.
[Nasser] The Royal Charter dropped anchor,
but the anchor snapped.
The waves hurled the ship
repeatedly against the rocks.
-[Nasser] Are these the exact rocks?
-[Thurkettle] They're the exact rocks.
I mean, it's unbelievable now.
You look at that,
and it's a calm, peaceful, tranquil scene.
But this was just horrendous chaos
at the time.
A huge iron ship
partly smashed and broken,
and then this mass of dead people,
horrendously mutilated dead people.
[Nasser]
Four hundred and fifty people died,
including women and children,
and that was just on this one ship.
A hundred and thirty-two other ships
went down in that same storm.
It was all over the papers at the time.
And one of the people
reading those newspapers
was a retired navy captain,
an old, salty dog named Robert Fitzroy.
[lively music playing]
[Thurkettle] As a young man, Fitzroy was
one of the most able in the British Navy.
He quickly got top jobs
like taking Charles Darwin out
in the Beagle.
[Nasser] By this time,
Fitzroy had retired from life at sea
and was basically pushing paper
in a government office
that collected old ship logbooks.
Then the Royal Charter happened,
and he was so moved by this,
he thought, something must be done.
[tense music playing]
[Nasser] As a former navy captain himself,
he knew what it was like
to lose souls at sea.
And he couldn't shake the feeling
that if the other captains
had seen that storm coming,
those hundreds of people
wouldn't have died.
So, Fitzroy convinced his bosses
to let him try a radical experiment.
He set up weather stations
up and down the coast,
and had them send daily readings
to his office.
[telegraph beeping]
And his genius, in some ways,
was to link it with the telegraph.
The telegraph had pretty much
just been invented.
[Nasser] And so he got all that weather
data in more or less real time,
and he entered it
into a bunch of logbooks
[woman] So, if you just want to move
that one for me.
[Nasser] which today sit
at this archive in Exeter, England.
But hidden on one of these shelves,
is something monumental.
[woman] So, here we have the earliest
of the official data collection.
This is the first day
that the observations are coming in,
so they haven't come from everywhere
on the first day.
-It sort of grows. Um
-[Nasser] Wow.
[Ross] But you've got pressure, you've got
the wind direction, the wind force.
He's looking out for signs of a storm,
-signs of something he needs to warn for.
-Right.
The first example of that we get
is in this book.
[Nasser] Okay.
[suspenseful music playing]
-If we go through to the end of July
-Uh-huh.
here we have
the very first public weather forecast.
[Nasser] The first ever weather forecast.
He even coined the term.
-This is the actual book that he wrote in?
-Yes.
-[Nasser] This is the actual ink?
-Yep.
This is the first time you have
a weather forecast written down.
Whoa.
So, what is the first weather forecast?
Okay, so, the first weather forecast says,
"General weather probable next two days.
In the north,
moderate westerly wind, fine."
-Fine weather conditions.
-[Nasser] Okay.
-"West, moderate southwesterly, fine."
-[Nasser] Fine.
[Ross] "South, fresh westerly, fine."
-His handwriting's not so good.
-His handwriting's tricky.
[Nasser] And then "RF," Robert Fitzroy.
-And what happened?
-It was basically right. [chuckles]
Really?
The first ever weather forecast was right?
Yes.
So, it's like, on July 29, 1861,
there was no
No forecast.
There was no such thing
as the weather forecast.
And then on July 31,
that was the weather forecast.
-Absolutely.
-Wow. That's so nuts.
In the thickness of this one page,
the world was changed forever.
[Ross] But still, there were a lot
of errors, a lot of problems.
The scientific establishment
came down hard on him
on a consistent basis.
They weren't convinced
that it was a viable thing.
The weather was an act of God.
It's so chaotic. How could you possibly
know what was going to happen?
And he was quite frequently wrong.
[Thurkettle] Think how long ago this was.
The weather forecasters
don't get it right now.
But every time he got it wrong,
his critics sharpened their knives
and went for him
because whole fishing fleets
stayed in harbor
and then a storm didn't come,
and they were furious with him
for the loss of catch.
[ominous music playing]
The man worked in his office tirelessly
because he absolutely wanted
to get it right,
and he believed in it.
After doing this excellent work
for about five years,
he was so exhausted and sick of criticism,
he kissed one of his daughters one morning
and then went and cut his throat.
[Nasser] No one can know for sure
exactly why Fitzroy killed himself.
Whatever the reason, it was a tragedy.
He had created the weather forecast
to save lives,
but he ended up taking his own.
It would've been so good
if Fitzroy had lived to see
just how well
his weather forecasting went.
And the fact that he didn't is bitter.
[Nasser] Before his death, the very paper
that carried Fitzroy's forecasts for years
ran a quote:
"Never again would trustworthy scientists
venture to foretell the weather."
It's ironic, right? They predicted
there would be no more predictions.
To see just how wrong that was,
you gotta take a right
on Fitzroy Road.
[exhilarating music playing]
Fitzroy's little four-person office
has grown into one of the largest
weather-forecasting bureaus in the world:
the Met Office.
And, something that would shut up
a lot of his critics,
it has an accuracy rate
of almost 90 percent.
But these days,
most of the predictions are done
by this behemoth.
The Cray XC40.
And man, is it loud!
It's one of the most powerful
forecasting machines in the world,
according to one of its programmers,
Paul Selwood.
These computers we have
can do 14 thousand trillion calculations
every second.
[laughs]
That's not even a real number.
That's like a cartoon number.
It just feels, like, so big
that it doesn't even make sense.
It's crazy. It's a huge number.
-That's--
-Jaw-dropping. [chuckles]
[Nasser] Fourteen thousand trillion
calculations a second.
That's what you need to do
when you receive
as many weather observations every day
as there are stars in the Milky Way.
-[Nasser] Is this right now?
-That's right now.
-That's right now.
-Right now.
[Nasser] And what's even more impressive
than the million lines of code
that make this all possible
is that the basic concept of it
was dreamt up over a hundred years ago,
at a time and a place, and by a person,
that you wouldn't expect.
A mathematician
named Lewis Fry Richardson.
Richardson was a pacifist Quaker
who worked as an ambulance driver
during World War I.
[gunshots]
While he was ferrying bodies
through the mud,
with bullets flying overhead,
he wanted to think about anything
other than combat.
So, he thought about
the skies.
And over 50 years
after Fitzroy invented the forecast,
Richardson wondered how
he could make that forecast more accurate.
[upbeat music playing]
[Ross] So, in here,
we have the draft of his book.
[Nasser] Okay.
-Weather Prediction by Numerical Process.
-Okay.
[Ross] And here you can see
he starts to lay out
the fundamental equations.
While sitting on a wet pile of hay
in the back lines of the First World War,
he comes up with an entirely new way
of forecasting the weather.
[Nasser] What he realizes is that,
since weather is such a fluid thing,
you can't predict the weather
of any given spot
without knowing
what the weather is next door.
But you can't predict the weather there
without knowing
what the weather is next door to that,
and so on and so on.
So, to have a really accurate
weather forecast,
you need to forecast it
for the entire globe.
So how do we do that?
[Ross] Essentially what he does
is works out what he calls a checkerboard.
[Nasser] So, he drew this?
So, this is printed,
but it's the earliest one we know of.
-You can see it's been weather-affected.
-Oh, yeah.
That feels right. It feels like
it should be weather-affected.
[Nasser] His idea was to divide the world
into a giant checkerboard.
Each square would be responsible
for measuring and calculating
its own weather.
But that would require
a lot of measurements,
a lot of data, a lot of processing.
He figured it would take
32 computers three hours
to predict the weather
for a single square.
That meant that you'd need
64,000 computers
to predict the weather for the whole world
in a single day.
But those 64,000 computers
weren't computers at all.
How could they be?
Computers hadn't been invented yet.
They were people.
Human calculators.
Many of whom were women,
who did a lot of scientific calculations
in labs around the world at the time.
[Ross] And so,
one of the lovely things in this book
um is he starts to try and describe
if this could be done with people,
what might it look like?
-Yeah.
-And so, he writes this wonderful thing:
"After so much hard reasoning
may one play with a fantasy."
[exhilarating music playing]
[Nasser] He imagined
a giant spherical theater,
with a map of the world
painted on the walls.
The ceiling would be the North Pole.
England would be in an upper balcony.
Australia would be in the dress circle.
All 64,000 of the human computers
would be there, calculating the weather
for their assigned square of the world.
They'd be listening to each other,
learning from each other,
playing together like a massive orchestra,
except instead of musical instruments,
they'd have these old-timey calculators
called slide rules.
And instead of performing a symphony,
they'd be predicting the weather
for the entire world.
To come up with that is quite remarkable.
-It's kind of beautiful too.
-[Ross] Yes.
-It's a very beautiful analogy.
-[Ross] Yeah.
He's basically describing
how a supercomputer would actually work.
[Nasser] And does work,
in this very basement.
Except instead of 64,000 people,
it's hundreds of thousands
of computer cores,
all crunching the data
from different sectors of the sky.
But Richardson's fantasy
would prove prophetic
in a whole other way.
This is just like a glimmer
of a possibility that one day,
there will be this network of computers
working together.
He, at once, fully saw it,
but he didn't have any of the ingredients.
But now we're living in his dream.
Yeah. His dream became a reality.
[Nasser] And that reality
is basically the cloud.
If the internet is a global network
of computers linked together,
the term "the cloud" describes
a way to use that network:
to pool all our computing power,
access files from anywhere on Earth,
and collaborate in real time.
And Richardson predicted
almost all of that.
Today, the cloud shapes
so much of what we do online,
from Google Docs, Instagram, Spotify,
even storing our selfies on iCloud.
But the cloud
isn't just simplifying people's lives,
it may actually be saving them.
[sheep baas]
[soothing music playing]
[Nasser] The cloud got its name
when early engineers
needed a simple way
to diagram complex networks
connected through the internet.
So they drew these bubbles around them
that looked like clouds,
and the name stuck.
Today, just outside Washington, DC,
NASA scientist Assaf Anyamba
uses both types of clouds
to predict something
seemingly unrelated to the weather.
[Anyamba] We look at anomalies.
We look at anomalies in rainfall.
We look at anomalies in temperature.
We look at anomalies
in satellite vegetation measurements.
So, putting those together,
we can then be able
to make an assessment
of where particular diseases
will emerge from.
[Nasser]
Assaf and a colleague had a hunch
that they could use the same information
that we use to forecast weather
to forecast disease.
And that maybe we could do it
early enough
so that we could step in
and stop the disease in its tracks.
They started
with one disease in particular.
So, we have been working
in South Africa, basically,
uh putting together a good picture
of the outbreak patterns
of Rift Valley fever.
So, these are outbreaks
of Rift Valley fever?
Yeah, these are locations
where outbreaks happened.
[suspenseful music playing]
[woman] What will generally happen is
a farmer will wake up one morning
Yeah, I'll tell you now.
and he walks out into his field
and it's just a field of carcasses.
Rift Valley fever
has a major effect on this area.
In 2010, I myself lost 55 sheep.
-Fifty-five sheep?
-Fifty-five.
-The big ones. Without the small ones.
-[Anyamba] Yeah.
[Cordel] It's devastating,
and it's not only the livestock.
With the last outbreak we had, in 2010,
the mortality rate in people
was eight percent,
which is actually quite high.
One of my friends is dead.
-He's dead? Because of Rift Valley fever?
-Yeah, because what happened
When the sheep died,
he came and cut it open.
-[Anyamba] Okay.
-Yes.
He got infected from handling
the carcass of a dead sheep.
Yeah.
[whistles]
[Nasser] Assaf's team plotted
Rift Valley fever data
next to the weather data,
and they found a pattern
no one had seen before.
[Anyamba] Every Rift Valley fever outbreak
that happened in Africa
seemed to have happened
during an El Niño event.
[Nasser] Every few years, El Niño
disrupts rain patterns across Africa.
[Anyamba] When El Niño happens, you tend
to have wetter than normal conditions
-in eastern Africa.
-Huh.
So, imagine that whole area
flooding with rain for about three months.
Continuous rain.
[Nasser] And that continuous rain
creates the perfect breeding ground
for mosquitoes.
[Anyamba] They like to lay their eggs
where there is water.
When they hatch, they contain
the virus of Rift Valley fever.
[Nasser] And then, an outbreak.
Now, in southern Africa,
El Niño causes droughts,
but those areas aren't safe
from Rift Valley fever either.
During droughts,
mosquitoes are going to migrate
to where people store water in containers,
even their flowerpots.
[Nasser] Either way, El Niño
is basically setting the stage
to have an epidemic.
[lively music playing]
You can put the north one here.
[Anyamba] Here?
You can't really see a mosquito
from satellites.
So, we place mosquito traps
to see if there's a virus
in the mosquitoes.
Trap is set.
And then we also have weather stations
to give us the exact conditions that exist
when we are collecting mosquitoes.
On a complex project like this one,
you have to have everybody collaborating
and contributing data.
So, the data that is collected here
is sent automatically to a cloud system.
We can retrieve it
from my lab back in Maryland
and that data can be shared
by various partners on the project.
It's just crazy to me
because the chain is so long.
-We're looking at ocean temperature.
-Yeah.
That leads you to the rainfall data
which you're also collecting,
which will also inform
the locations of all the mosquitoes.
You're able to follow
these different links down the chain.
Yeah.
-Ultimately, to a disease outbreak.
-Yeah.
[Nasser] Then, using that information,
local governments can know
where to start vaccinating healthy animals
and containing the infected ones.
Just imagine looking all the way down
from a satellite orbiting the Earth
to try to predict
what a single tiny mosquito
is gonna do
on a single South African farm,
and, based on that,
being able to save lives.
[indistinct speech]
[Nasser] Because you're collaborating
with so many people,
you're using so much data,
you're manipulating it,
-Yeah.
-do you think you would be able
to do this without the cloud?
At this particular point in time,
that is the only way to go.
That's the way to go.
[lively music playing]
[Anyamba] We are looking
at the entire Earth,
all its components, how they interact.
Because life is interconnected.
[sheep baas]
[Nasser]
Nations across east and southern Africa
are taking cues
from Assaf's cloud-based research,
and it's actually starting to work.
[ethereal music playing]
But one small European country
wants to ascend into the cloud entirely.
[man] Hello, everyone. Welcome, uh
Welcome to our home.
And everything's ready,
so please get naked.
Do whatever you want, within reason.
Yeah, thank you for coming.
-[exhilarating music playing]
-[indistinct chattering]
Hey.
[Nasser] Okay, you're probably wondering
what kind of freaky-deaky nudist colony
we've just wandered into.
But this is just an Estonian sauna party.
When you live in one of the world's
most digitally advanced nations,
you end up with a lot of free time.
This is Marten Kaevats,
Estonia's national digital adviser.
[Marten] Our country
is the first country in the world
that can operate from the cloud.
This means that each and every time
you need to interact with the government
you never have to stand in a line
to, I don't know, renew your license
or register a car.
[Nasser] Estonia is using the cloud
to streamline government bureaucracy.
[Kaevats] For example, for the US,
you need to drive to a DMV
and have a utility bill
to prove that you're you.
And that's absurd.
[Nasser] Estonia has what's known
as a "once only" policy.
Which basically means
that if you've ever given any piece
of your personal profile information
to the government,
the government
should never ask that again.
[Nasser] Things like filing your taxes
are now kid-simple.
Seriously, try not to get jealous.
I did my taxes this year in 18 seconds.
The average in Estonia is three minutes.
I think, in the whole of my life,
I have spent less than 15 minutes
declaring taxes.
Imagine, you could vote in the sauna,
you could start a business in the hot tub,
you could do your taxes on the toilet.
And the only paperwork you need
is on a roll next to you.
-[upbeat music playing]
-[siren wailing]
[speaking Estonian]
[Nasser] Cutting time in paperwork
helps the most
when you don't have much time to spare.
[Kaevats] All health records in Estonia
have been digitalized since 2009.
[Nasser] If you need an ambulance,
you call, tell them what's wrong,
and they'll be able to pull up
your blood type,
your medical history,
what medications you're on
All before the ambulance
gets to your door.
[Kaevats] In Estonia,
everyone has a digital ID number,
and this actually
is like your digital name.
[Nasser] Your digital name,
which also comes in the form of a card,
unlocks access
to all digital government services,
making it a travel ID,
health insurance card, and voter ID
all in one.
[exhilarating music playing]
[Nasser] Surprisingly, despite having
all of this highly personal information
up in the cloud,
how much money you make,
how many parking tickets you have,
where your kids go to school,
most Estonians don't seem
especially worried about privacy.
Or security, for that matter,
because since this program started
in 2002,
no Estonian has ever had
his or her digital identity stolen.
My ID number is
3-8-5-0-7-1-5-0-3-8-2.
This is not like a Social Security number
which you need to keep hidden.
Social Security number is stupid.
In Estonia, this is like my name.
I can tell it to you,
and nothing actually happens.
[Nasser] That's because the entire
Estonian system is premised on the idea
that your data belongs to you,
and you have a right to see,
if not decide, how it gets used.
In the UK, I have health records,
but I have no idea where they are.
I don't know who's been looking at them,
how that data is secured.
In Estonia, though,
I control access to my health records
through my digital ID card.
I can see who's been using their card
to log in and look at those records.
So, to us, we see paper
as the risky, faith-based system,
whereas digital
is about increased security, for us.
[Nasser] And that's not just a matter
of personal data security.
It's a matter of national security.
The Estonian government's cyber unit
is one of the top-ranked in the world,
and protects the entire system
against threats.
Today, the digital ID system
works so well in Estonia,
it's hard not to imagine
more and more governments
jumping up into the cloud.
[Kaevats] The main lesson from Estonia
is that this is not about
technological gadgetry.
This is about building
a mindset and culture
that is constantly ready
to adopt new things.
[indistinct chatter]
[Nasser] Even if you live outside Estonia,
chances are your personal information
isn't just confined to your home computer.
Your email password,
your bank account number,
your embarrassing photos
from your sweet sixteen birthday party,
those are all
somewhere up there in the cloud.
But, wait a second, somewhere up there
Up where?
It turns out, internet infrastructure
is actually very much earthbound.
Every server and data center
that makes up "the cloud"
is on land.
And, chances are,
when you upload something to the cloud,
you're not sending stuff up,
you're sending stuff down,
through the ocean.
-[suspenseful music playing]
-[clicks]
[clicks]
[clicks]
[Nasser] This is the cloud.
[clicks]
Or at least it's what the cloud looks like
aboard the SubCom Decisive.
[uplifting music playing]
The SubCom Decisive
is a 450-foot-long ship
whose sole purpose
is to install and maintain
hundreds of millions of feet
of fiber-optic cables
across the bottom of the ocean.
Basically, anywhere that has
an internet connection,
we've probably run a cable there
at least once.
My name is Alysia Johnson.
I'm the first officer
on board SubCom Decisive.
This is like
a self-contained little city out here
just installing the internet.
It's pretty cool. I like it.
The cable that we're installing,
it's basically a wire rope
with a fancy core.
The fancy core is glass fibers
that carry light pulses
that are signals for the internet.
[Nasser] These cables are hair thin
and information travels across them
as fast as anything in the universe
can possibly go: the speed of light.
[Brian] You have your fiber optics,
and around that we have steel wires
that protect those fibers,
and on top of that
we have a copper conductor
which conducts electricity.
On top of that we have a polyethylene
that protects from water,
and then on top of that, if we need,
then we have armor wires.
[Nasser] These cables need
some serious protection
because there's only one place
they can be deployed:
the very bottom of the ocean.
Besides potential water damage,
it's unpredictable down there.
There's earthquakes,
wildlife,
who knows what else.
[Johnson] These vessels have found
unmarked ordinance from World War II.
There's a lot of crazy stuff
on the bottom of the ocean.
The whole internet as we know it travels
over these shark-proof garden hoses.
There's already over two million
kilometers of cable under there,
connecting one continent to another.
That's enough cable
to go to the moon and come back again
three times.
[indistinct chatter]
Okay, we're going to sneak,
so put the camera down and follow me.
Right behind you.
The weird thing about the cable, right,
is it's all one piece.
It doesn't ever stop.
So, this is the inside of the cable tank.
What they're doing is,
the cable's coming down
from the cable factory.
We call it spinning the cable.
So, the one guy is walking around
and he's guiding the cable,
and then everyone else is sitting here
and they're snapping it,
which you can hear, the cable snapping.
So, we're loading this cable
basically the same way
that they loaded
the first transatlantic cable.
You see engravings of it sometimes,
and there's oil lamps lit
and they're wearing top hats
instead of hard hats,
and there's a bunch of guys
sitting in the tank turning cable
just like we're doing now.
For as long as we've been making
communications cables,
this part of the process
is pretty much the same.
[clicks]
[uplifting piano music playing]
[Nasser] Just think,
all of the forwarded email
from your parents,
every frame of every movie
that you've streamed,
each earwormy song
that you've listened to over and over
Every one of those has traveled
as a beam of light
down cables like these.
[electronic beeps]
[Nasser]
But all of this transoceanic travel
comes with a cost.
It turns out, sending all this data
all over the world
does have a major drawback.
It's an energy suck.
A single Google search,
this is just a typical search,
takes the same amount of energy
as a standard LED light bulb
on for three minutes.
That doesn't sound like a lot,
but just think of how many Google searches
you do in a typical day.
And in a typical week,
and in a typical year.
Now multiply that number
by half the world's population.
And think about how many other things
you rely on the cloud for.
In fact, just by streaming this episode,
you're using the same amount of energy
it takes to keep that light bulb lit
for over five days.
The truth is the cloud costs us
about two percent
of the world's electricity bill,
much of which
is from nonrenewable sources.
It emits about as much CO2
as the entire airline industry.
Ironically, the more CO2 we emit,
the higher, warmer, and more chaotic
our oceans will get,
and the more the undersea cables
and the cloud will be in danger.
And it's not just the cloud
that's at risk,
it's the puffy clouds too.
-[Nasser] Wow, it's so pretty up here.
-[man] Yeah.
Ah!
Not many clouds though.
Pretty clear. Some cirrus left over.
-Oh, cirrus? Those are cirrus?
-Yeah.
[Nasser] I'm with Tapio Schneider,
a senior research scientist
at NASA's jet propulsion lab.
He spends his time asking the question
"What is climate change
gonna do to the clouds?"
And he has a bold prediction
about one kind of cloud in particular.
[gentle music playing]
[Schneider] So, stratocumulus clouds, it's
the most frequent cloud type on Earth.
It's 45% or so of Earth's sky
is covered with stratocumulus clouds.
-Wow, it's that big.
-Yeah.
It's a white blanket,
over the oceans, typically.
You see them, say,
when you take off from LAX,
you see them underneath you
as just this white continuous blanket.
And the clouds reflect sunlight,
so that is a strong cooling effect
on Earth's surface underneath.
[Nasser] While stratocumulus clouds
are helping the Earth stay cool,
they are cooling themselves as well
by releasing heat
higher into the atmosphere.
But now climate change is threatening
to disrupt this whole process.
[Schneider] As you put
more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,
the greenhouse gases above the clouds
makes it harder for the clouds
to cool themselves
by radiating heat upwards.
And the cooling is very important
because that is what nourishes the clouds,
what keeps them alive.
I mean, in a way it's like
a blanket on top of a blanket.
That's what it is, yep.
The clouds are trying to send
some of those rays back up and out
Right.
but the greenhouse gases
are sending that heat back down.
Exactly. Exactly.
And it's conceivable
that you get to the point where
well, you lose them altogether.
[Nasser] Tapio predicts
that if greenhouse gas levels
continue to increase,
we'll reach a point
when stratocumulus clouds
could completely vanish.
And when it comes to global warming,
that could make already dire conditions
even worse.
Because they are so important
for cooling large fractions of Earth,
if you lose all of the stratocumulus,
you get about eight degrees centigrade
or 14 degrees Fahrenheit warming
on top of whatever you had
up to that point.
Eight degrees?
But all these international meetings
and stuff,
they're all talking about,
like, two degrees.
But you're talking about eight.
Eight degrees seems like a lot.
It's eight degrees on top of what you had.
So that would add to whatever problems
you would have at that point.
This seems like Wow.
This seems even worse than everything
I already knew and expected.
[Nasser] Add that up and you get
a whopping 10 degree Celsius
or 18 degree Fahrenheit
increase in Earth's temperature,
making many of today's cities
totally uninhabitable.
If it were to happen,
it would be truly dramatic climate change.
[Nasser] How remote a possibility is this?
Or how real a possibility is this?
If greenhouse gas emissions
continue to climb as they are now,
that could happen
around a hundred years from now,
maybe a little bit later.
A hundred years from now,
if we were standing in the same place
and we look up,
like, what are we going to see?
Well, if the stratocumulus clouds
break up,
we probably wouldn't be standing here
because it would be so unbearably hot
-you wouldn't want to be here anymore.
-Wow. Yeah.
I mean, Earth, we call it the Blue Marble,
but if you look at it,
it's really a white planet, right?
It's clouds that reflect sunlight
and changing them changes the climate.
Wow.
[Nasser] The extinction of a cloud.
It feels like
we're about to break the sky.
Tapio remains optimistic
that we can limit
our greenhouse gas emissions
and avoid the cloud apocalypse.
But in the meantime, climate change
has already driven clouds the world over
to go haywire,
causing epic floods
and crippling droughts.
But what if we could
just reach right into a cloud and fix it?
Well, that brings us here,
to this old airplane hangar
in San Angelo, Texas,
where I'm going to meet a guy
who's gonna fly me
right up into the clouds
and show me how to do just that.
[majestic instrumental music playing]
[Nasser] This is the home
of the West Texas
Weather Modification Association,
where I'm meeting
with Jonathan Jennings.
[indistinct speech]
He's not just a meteorologist,
he's also a rainmaker.
So, weather modification
is the process of taking an aircraft,
flying below a thunderstorm
and releasing material
that interacts with the cloud
to allow for precipitation to occur
more efficiently.
So, it sounds like
you can't make a cloud out of nothing.
-No.
-You can take a cloud that's already there
and make it rain.
Yes, exactly.
"Rain enhancement" is what we call it.
Oh, my You're like a wizard!
[thunder rumbles]
[Nasser] In order to rain,
liquid water droplets inside clouds
have to become heavy
and large enough to fall.
But this process has been disrupted
in many places around the world,
including West Texas.
[Jennings] We're a very dry environment.
We have a lot of dust
that gets suspended
into the atmosphere from the winds
and start interacting with our clouds,
pulling moisture away
from the larger particles
that produce rainfall more efficiently.
When that takes place,
our droplet sizes get too small,
and they're not heavy enough
to fall as precipitation.
So, the whole process of the cloud
is just failing.
Is it like
I'm just trying to get an analogy here.
Is it like the cloud
is kind of constipated?
Is that sort of what it is?
[chuckles] Yes, that's exactly what
our chief scientist says all the time.
Um but yeah, the cloud's sick.
It's just not working efficiently.
I mean, last year we were coming out
of one of the strongest droughts
we've had in Texas.
And the farmers,
they really rely on the rainfall.
It's what they live off of.
So, what we're trying to do
is squeeze that sponge.
[exhilarating music playing]
[Nasser] And these flares filled
with silver iodide are, you know,
the suppositories
for the constipated clouds.
[Nasser] Okay, here we go. All right!
Hey, there.
-Great. Ready to go up?
-[Nasser] Yeah.
-[pilot] Awesome.
-Hua!
Yeah. Is there a seat belt here?
[uplifting music playing]
-You guys in position?
-[pilot] I'm good to go.
[Nasser from radio]
I can't believe this is my job.
Here we go.
[laughs]
Oh, man,
you can feel every little breeze up here.
[pilot] Oh, yeah.
[laughs]
Ah! My stomach!
Oh, I can see him.
I can see him right there.
[pilot] Two-four,
you wanna give us a wave?
[laughs]
[Nasser] Do you ever get nauseous up here?
No. I've been flying for so long
it doesn't ever bother me.
[Nasser] Oh, interesting.
[pilot] You okay?
Hang onto it. Hang onto it.
-[Nasser] Oh, my God.
-[pilot laughs]
[Nasser] Good, I'm good.
-It's starting to get a lot cloudier.
-[pilot] Oh, yeah.
Do you see that development of clouds
right ahead of us?
[Nasser] Looks like we're driving straight
into this super ominous bank of clouds.
Yeah.
That's exactly what we're looking for.
Two-four-five, you gonna stay
along the leading edge
of these, uh good clouds here?
Uh, yeah,
I think that'll work just fine.
All right, copy that.
We'll proceed with some seeding.
See if we can get it going here.
Sounds like a plan. Two-four-five out.
Ah! Cool.
So, it's kicking up
all that silver iodide, is that right?
Correct, yeah.
You can see the trail very lightly.
-You can totally see it.
-Off the back of it, yeah.
[Nasser] The silver iodide is light enough
to get sucked upwards, into the clouds,
where their crystalline structure
tricks the water droplets
into freezing around them, creating ice.
Ice, which is heavy enough
to fall to the ground,
melting on the way down.
Voilà.
-[Nasser] Oh, my God.
-[pilot laughs]
I cannot believe that I am up here,
like, manipulating clouds.
-Right.
-It's crazy.
[pilot] It's awesome.
[lively music playing]
Hey, two-four-five, I'm getting
some higher tops here on infrared.
Looks like we're doing some good.
[Nasser]
Will these clouds actually rain later?
And if they do,
will that be, for sure, because of us?
The science is really hard to pin down.
Still, dozens of countries seed clouds
to combat drought,
and scientists
are also exploring other techniques,
like artificially puffing up
and whitening clouds,
that could possibly slow the warming
that caused a lot of those droughts
in the first place.
It's nowhere near a total solution
to the problem of global warming,
but it is encouraging.
A bright spot on a hazy horizon.
In a little over a century and a half,
we've gone from predicting the clouds
to engineering them.
When faced with the catastrophes
of their own eras,
Fitzroy and Richardson
innovated out of necessity.
They knew that to tackle
a problem that defies borders,
you have to build a system
that transcends borders too.
-[electronic beeps]
-The cloud is our best way to do that.
And sure, it has a serious cost,
one that we have to find a way
to pay for renewably.
But we still need it
because it's our best shot
at living together,
working together,
thinking together.
Especially now, as we face
our most existential threat yet.
Whatever we do, we gotta do it fast,
and we gotta do it together.
If we're going to save the clouds,
and the rest of our planet
for that matter,
we've gotta tune up our
international orchestra of slide rules,
we've gotta lay
even more shark-proof garden hoses,
and we've gotta plug in.
Because what we need
is nothing short of a global brainstorm.
[music fades]
[upbeat song playing]
[soft music playing]
[Nasser]
Most clouds weigh more than a blue whale,
which is weird, right?
They hover over us every day
with the power to give life
and to take it away.
And yet we barely even look up at them.
But this isn't just a story
about the clouds in the sky.
It's also a story about the cloud
that connects our computers,
and how those two very different clouds
are themselves connected.
It's a journey that'll take us through,
among other things,
an ambulance driver,
an electronic country,
a deadly shipwreck,
tiny killers you can track from space,
shark-proof garden hoses
and these guys soaking in a hot tub.
So
let's go cloud hopping.
[thunder rumbles]
[upbeat music playing]
[meditative music playing]
I'm Latif Nasser,
and this is a show about
the astonishing connections all around us,
connections between you and me
and our world
that'll make you see that world
in a whole new way.
Our journey through the clouds
starts here
at a spot where, 160 years ago,
a cloud changed human history.
Well, not one cloud
but a conglomeration of clouds
that together caused
one of the most notorious storms
of the nineteenth century.
My guide,
gold prospector Vince Thurkettle,
spent nine years diving here.
It's the site of his holy grail:
the wreck of the Royal Charter.
[Thurkettle] The Royal Charter
was the most amazing ship.
It was almost space-age in the 1850's.
Iron hull, three-masted,
with a steam engine.
And in the 1850's
that was a really big deal.
It sounds almost like you're describing
the Titanic of its time.
[Thurkettle] Absolutely. Absolutely.
You've got, say, 200 gold miners
and a lot of their families on board.
And they are carrying so much gold.
In American dollars, in today's money,
I think it was carrying 150 million.
Wow.
[Nasser] With one day left on its journey
from Australia to Liverpool,
the ship met hurricane-force winds.
[tense music playing]
[Thurkettle] Hurricanes aren't common here.
I think in the nineteenth century,
that storm,
now called the Royal Charter Storm,
was the biggest by miles.
[Nasser] The Royal Charter dropped anchor,
but the anchor snapped.
The waves hurled the ship
repeatedly against the rocks.
-[Nasser] Are these the exact rocks?
-[Thurkettle] They're the exact rocks.
I mean, it's unbelievable now.
You look at that,
and it's a calm, peaceful, tranquil scene.
But this was just horrendous chaos
at the time.
A huge iron ship
partly smashed and broken,
and then this mass of dead people,
horrendously mutilated dead people.
[Nasser]
Four hundred and fifty people died,
including women and children,
and that was just on this one ship.
A hundred and thirty-two other ships
went down in that same storm.
It was all over the papers at the time.
And one of the people
reading those newspapers
was a retired navy captain,
an old, salty dog named Robert Fitzroy.
[lively music playing]
[Thurkettle] As a young man, Fitzroy was
one of the most able in the British Navy.
He quickly got top jobs
like taking Charles Darwin out
in the Beagle.
[Nasser] By this time,
Fitzroy had retired from life at sea
and was basically pushing paper
in a government office
that collected old ship logbooks.
Then the Royal Charter happened,
and he was so moved by this,
he thought, something must be done.
[tense music playing]
[Nasser] As a former navy captain himself,
he knew what it was like
to lose souls at sea.
And he couldn't shake the feeling
that if the other captains
had seen that storm coming,
those hundreds of people
wouldn't have died.
So, Fitzroy convinced his bosses
to let him try a radical experiment.
He set up weather stations
up and down the coast,
and had them send daily readings
to his office.
[telegraph beeping]
And his genius, in some ways,
was to link it with the telegraph.
The telegraph had pretty much
just been invented.
[Nasser] And so he got all that weather
data in more or less real time,
and he entered it
into a bunch of logbooks
[woman] So, if you just want to move
that one for me.
[Nasser] which today sit
at this archive in Exeter, England.
But hidden on one of these shelves,
is something monumental.
[woman] So, here we have the earliest
of the official data collection.
This is the first day
that the observations are coming in,
so they haven't come from everywhere
on the first day.
-It sort of grows. Um
-[Nasser] Wow.
[Ross] But you've got pressure, you've got
the wind direction, the wind force.
He's looking out for signs of a storm,
-signs of something he needs to warn for.
-Right.
The first example of that we get
is in this book.
[Nasser] Okay.
[suspenseful music playing]
-If we go through to the end of July
-Uh-huh.
here we have
the very first public weather forecast.
[Nasser] The first ever weather forecast.
He even coined the term.
-This is the actual book that he wrote in?
-Yes.
-[Nasser] This is the actual ink?
-Yep.
This is the first time you have
a weather forecast written down.
Whoa.
So, what is the first weather forecast?
Okay, so, the first weather forecast says,
"General weather probable next two days.
In the north,
moderate westerly wind, fine."
-Fine weather conditions.
-[Nasser] Okay.
-"West, moderate southwesterly, fine."
-[Nasser] Fine.
[Ross] "South, fresh westerly, fine."
-His handwriting's not so good.
-His handwriting's tricky.
[Nasser] And then "RF," Robert Fitzroy.
-And what happened?
-It was basically right. [chuckles]
Really?
The first ever weather forecast was right?
Yes.
So, it's like, on July 29, 1861,
there was no
No forecast.
There was no such thing
as the weather forecast.
And then on July 31,
that was the weather forecast.
-Absolutely.
-Wow. That's so nuts.
In the thickness of this one page,
the world was changed forever.
[Ross] But still, there were a lot
of errors, a lot of problems.
The scientific establishment
came down hard on him
on a consistent basis.
They weren't convinced
that it was a viable thing.
The weather was an act of God.
It's so chaotic. How could you possibly
know what was going to happen?
And he was quite frequently wrong.
[Thurkettle] Think how long ago this was.
The weather forecasters
don't get it right now.
But every time he got it wrong,
his critics sharpened their knives
and went for him
because whole fishing fleets
stayed in harbor
and then a storm didn't come,
and they were furious with him
for the loss of catch.
[ominous music playing]
The man worked in his office tirelessly
because he absolutely wanted
to get it right,
and he believed in it.
After doing this excellent work
for about five years,
he was so exhausted and sick of criticism,
he kissed one of his daughters one morning
and then went and cut his throat.
[Nasser] No one can know for sure
exactly why Fitzroy killed himself.
Whatever the reason, it was a tragedy.
He had created the weather forecast
to save lives,
but he ended up taking his own.
It would've been so good
if Fitzroy had lived to see
just how well
his weather forecasting went.
And the fact that he didn't is bitter.
[Nasser] Before his death, the very paper
that carried Fitzroy's forecasts for years
ran a quote:
"Never again would trustworthy scientists
venture to foretell the weather."
It's ironic, right? They predicted
there would be no more predictions.
To see just how wrong that was,
you gotta take a right
on Fitzroy Road.
[exhilarating music playing]
Fitzroy's little four-person office
has grown into one of the largest
weather-forecasting bureaus in the world:
the Met Office.
And, something that would shut up
a lot of his critics,
it has an accuracy rate
of almost 90 percent.
But these days,
most of the predictions are done
by this behemoth.
The Cray XC40.
And man, is it loud!
It's one of the most powerful
forecasting machines in the world,
according to one of its programmers,
Paul Selwood.
These computers we have
can do 14 thousand trillion calculations
every second.
[laughs]
That's not even a real number.
That's like a cartoon number.
It just feels, like, so big
that it doesn't even make sense.
It's crazy. It's a huge number.
-That's--
-Jaw-dropping. [chuckles]
[Nasser] Fourteen thousand trillion
calculations a second.
That's what you need to do
when you receive
as many weather observations every day
as there are stars in the Milky Way.
-[Nasser] Is this right now?
-That's right now.
-That's right now.
-Right now.
[Nasser] And what's even more impressive
than the million lines of code
that make this all possible
is that the basic concept of it
was dreamt up over a hundred years ago,
at a time and a place, and by a person,
that you wouldn't expect.
A mathematician
named Lewis Fry Richardson.
Richardson was a pacifist Quaker
who worked as an ambulance driver
during World War I.
[gunshots]
While he was ferrying bodies
through the mud,
with bullets flying overhead,
he wanted to think about anything
other than combat.
So, he thought about
the skies.
And over 50 years
after Fitzroy invented the forecast,
Richardson wondered how
he could make that forecast more accurate.
[upbeat music playing]
[Ross] So, in here,
we have the draft of his book.
[Nasser] Okay.
-Weather Prediction by Numerical Process.
-Okay.
[Ross] And here you can see
he starts to lay out
the fundamental equations.
While sitting on a wet pile of hay
in the back lines of the First World War,
he comes up with an entirely new way
of forecasting the weather.
[Nasser] What he realizes is that,
since weather is such a fluid thing,
you can't predict the weather
of any given spot
without knowing
what the weather is next door.
But you can't predict the weather there
without knowing
what the weather is next door to that,
and so on and so on.
So, to have a really accurate
weather forecast,
you need to forecast it
for the entire globe.
So how do we do that?
[Ross] Essentially what he does
is works out what he calls a checkerboard.
[Nasser] So, he drew this?
So, this is printed,
but it's the earliest one we know of.
-You can see it's been weather-affected.
-Oh, yeah.
That feels right. It feels like
it should be weather-affected.
[Nasser] His idea was to divide the world
into a giant checkerboard.
Each square would be responsible
for measuring and calculating
its own weather.
But that would require
a lot of measurements,
a lot of data, a lot of processing.
He figured it would take
32 computers three hours
to predict the weather
for a single square.
That meant that you'd need
64,000 computers
to predict the weather for the whole world
in a single day.
But those 64,000 computers
weren't computers at all.
How could they be?
Computers hadn't been invented yet.
They were people.
Human calculators.
Many of whom were women,
who did a lot of scientific calculations
in labs around the world at the time.
[Ross] And so,
one of the lovely things in this book
um is he starts to try and describe
if this could be done with people,
what might it look like?
-Yeah.
-And so, he writes this wonderful thing:
"After so much hard reasoning
may one play with a fantasy."
[exhilarating music playing]
[Nasser] He imagined
a giant spherical theater,
with a map of the world
painted on the walls.
The ceiling would be the North Pole.
England would be in an upper balcony.
Australia would be in the dress circle.
All 64,000 of the human computers
would be there, calculating the weather
for their assigned square of the world.
They'd be listening to each other,
learning from each other,
playing together like a massive orchestra,
except instead of musical instruments,
they'd have these old-timey calculators
called slide rules.
And instead of performing a symphony,
they'd be predicting the weather
for the entire world.
To come up with that is quite remarkable.
-It's kind of beautiful too.
-[Ross] Yes.
-It's a very beautiful analogy.
-[Ross] Yeah.
He's basically describing
how a supercomputer would actually work.
[Nasser] And does work,
in this very basement.
Except instead of 64,000 people,
it's hundreds of thousands
of computer cores,
all crunching the data
from different sectors of the sky.
But Richardson's fantasy
would prove prophetic
in a whole other way.
This is just like a glimmer
of a possibility that one day,
there will be this network of computers
working together.
He, at once, fully saw it,
but he didn't have any of the ingredients.
But now we're living in his dream.
Yeah. His dream became a reality.
[Nasser] And that reality
is basically the cloud.
If the internet is a global network
of computers linked together,
the term "the cloud" describes
a way to use that network:
to pool all our computing power,
access files from anywhere on Earth,
and collaborate in real time.
And Richardson predicted
almost all of that.
Today, the cloud shapes
so much of what we do online,
from Google Docs, Instagram, Spotify,
even storing our selfies on iCloud.
But the cloud
isn't just simplifying people's lives,
it may actually be saving them.
[sheep baas]
[soothing music playing]
[Nasser] The cloud got its name
when early engineers
needed a simple way
to diagram complex networks
connected through the internet.
So they drew these bubbles around them
that looked like clouds,
and the name stuck.
Today, just outside Washington, DC,
NASA scientist Assaf Anyamba
uses both types of clouds
to predict something
seemingly unrelated to the weather.
[Anyamba] We look at anomalies.
We look at anomalies in rainfall.
We look at anomalies in temperature.
We look at anomalies
in satellite vegetation measurements.
So, putting those together,
we can then be able
to make an assessment
of where particular diseases
will emerge from.
[Nasser]
Assaf and a colleague had a hunch
that they could use the same information
that we use to forecast weather
to forecast disease.
And that maybe we could do it
early enough
so that we could step in
and stop the disease in its tracks.
They started
with one disease in particular.
So, we have been working
in South Africa, basically,
uh putting together a good picture
of the outbreak patterns
of Rift Valley fever.
So, these are outbreaks
of Rift Valley fever?
Yeah, these are locations
where outbreaks happened.
[suspenseful music playing]
[woman] What will generally happen is
a farmer will wake up one morning
Yeah, I'll tell you now.
and he walks out into his field
and it's just a field of carcasses.
Rift Valley fever
has a major effect on this area.
In 2010, I myself lost 55 sheep.
-Fifty-five sheep?
-Fifty-five.
-The big ones. Without the small ones.
-[Anyamba] Yeah.
[Cordel] It's devastating,
and it's not only the livestock.
With the last outbreak we had, in 2010,
the mortality rate in people
was eight percent,
which is actually quite high.
One of my friends is dead.
-He's dead? Because of Rift Valley fever?
-Yeah, because what happened
When the sheep died,
he came and cut it open.
-[Anyamba] Okay.
-Yes.
He got infected from handling
the carcass of a dead sheep.
Yeah.
[whistles]
[Nasser] Assaf's team plotted
Rift Valley fever data
next to the weather data,
and they found a pattern
no one had seen before.
[Anyamba] Every Rift Valley fever outbreak
that happened in Africa
seemed to have happened
during an El Niño event.
[Nasser] Every few years, El Niño
disrupts rain patterns across Africa.
[Anyamba] When El Niño happens, you tend
to have wetter than normal conditions
-in eastern Africa.
-Huh.
So, imagine that whole area
flooding with rain for about three months.
Continuous rain.
[Nasser] And that continuous rain
creates the perfect breeding ground
for mosquitoes.
[Anyamba] They like to lay their eggs
where there is water.
When they hatch, they contain
the virus of Rift Valley fever.
[Nasser] And then, an outbreak.
Now, in southern Africa,
El Niño causes droughts,
but those areas aren't safe
from Rift Valley fever either.
During droughts,
mosquitoes are going to migrate
to where people store water in containers,
even their flowerpots.
[Nasser] Either way, El Niño
is basically setting the stage
to have an epidemic.
[lively music playing]
You can put the north one here.
[Anyamba] Here?
You can't really see a mosquito
from satellites.
So, we place mosquito traps
to see if there's a virus
in the mosquitoes.
Trap is set.
And then we also have weather stations
to give us the exact conditions that exist
when we are collecting mosquitoes.
On a complex project like this one,
you have to have everybody collaborating
and contributing data.
So, the data that is collected here
is sent automatically to a cloud system.
We can retrieve it
from my lab back in Maryland
and that data can be shared
by various partners on the project.
It's just crazy to me
because the chain is so long.
-We're looking at ocean temperature.
-Yeah.
That leads you to the rainfall data
which you're also collecting,
which will also inform
the locations of all the mosquitoes.
You're able to follow
these different links down the chain.
Yeah.
-Ultimately, to a disease outbreak.
-Yeah.
[Nasser] Then, using that information,
local governments can know
where to start vaccinating healthy animals
and containing the infected ones.
Just imagine looking all the way down
from a satellite orbiting the Earth
to try to predict
what a single tiny mosquito
is gonna do
on a single South African farm,
and, based on that,
being able to save lives.
[indistinct speech]
[Nasser] Because you're collaborating
with so many people,
you're using so much data,
you're manipulating it,
-Yeah.
-do you think you would be able
to do this without the cloud?
At this particular point in time,
that is the only way to go.
That's the way to go.
[lively music playing]
[Anyamba] We are looking
at the entire Earth,
all its components, how they interact.
Because life is interconnected.
[sheep baas]
[Nasser]
Nations across east and southern Africa
are taking cues
from Assaf's cloud-based research,
and it's actually starting to work.
[ethereal music playing]
But one small European country
wants to ascend into the cloud entirely.
[man] Hello, everyone. Welcome, uh
Welcome to our home.
And everything's ready,
so please get naked.
Do whatever you want, within reason.
Yeah, thank you for coming.
-[exhilarating music playing]
-[indistinct chattering]
Hey.
[Nasser] Okay, you're probably wondering
what kind of freaky-deaky nudist colony
we've just wandered into.
But this is just an Estonian sauna party.
When you live in one of the world's
most digitally advanced nations,
you end up with a lot of free time.
This is Marten Kaevats,
Estonia's national digital adviser.
[Marten] Our country
is the first country in the world
that can operate from the cloud.
This means that each and every time
you need to interact with the government
you never have to stand in a line
to, I don't know, renew your license
or register a car.
[Nasser] Estonia is using the cloud
to streamline government bureaucracy.
[Kaevats] For example, for the US,
you need to drive to a DMV
and have a utility bill
to prove that you're you.
And that's absurd.
[Nasser] Estonia has what's known
as a "once only" policy.
Which basically means
that if you've ever given any piece
of your personal profile information
to the government,
the government
should never ask that again.
[Nasser] Things like filing your taxes
are now kid-simple.
Seriously, try not to get jealous.
I did my taxes this year in 18 seconds.
The average in Estonia is three minutes.
I think, in the whole of my life,
I have spent less than 15 minutes
declaring taxes.
Imagine, you could vote in the sauna,
you could start a business in the hot tub,
you could do your taxes on the toilet.
And the only paperwork you need
is on a roll next to you.
-[upbeat music playing]
-[siren wailing]
[speaking Estonian]
[Nasser] Cutting time in paperwork
helps the most
when you don't have much time to spare.
[Kaevats] All health records in Estonia
have been digitalized since 2009.
[Nasser] If you need an ambulance,
you call, tell them what's wrong,
and they'll be able to pull up
your blood type,
your medical history,
what medications you're on
All before the ambulance
gets to your door.
[Kaevats] In Estonia,
everyone has a digital ID number,
and this actually
is like your digital name.
[Nasser] Your digital name,
which also comes in the form of a card,
unlocks access
to all digital government services,
making it a travel ID,
health insurance card, and voter ID
all in one.
[exhilarating music playing]
[Nasser] Surprisingly, despite having
all of this highly personal information
up in the cloud,
how much money you make,
how many parking tickets you have,
where your kids go to school,
most Estonians don't seem
especially worried about privacy.
Or security, for that matter,
because since this program started
in 2002,
no Estonian has ever had
his or her digital identity stolen.
My ID number is
3-8-5-0-7-1-5-0-3-8-2.
This is not like a Social Security number
which you need to keep hidden.
Social Security number is stupid.
In Estonia, this is like my name.
I can tell it to you,
and nothing actually happens.
[Nasser] That's because the entire
Estonian system is premised on the idea
that your data belongs to you,
and you have a right to see,
if not decide, how it gets used.
In the UK, I have health records,
but I have no idea where they are.
I don't know who's been looking at them,
how that data is secured.
In Estonia, though,
I control access to my health records
through my digital ID card.
I can see who's been using their card
to log in and look at those records.
So, to us, we see paper
as the risky, faith-based system,
whereas digital
is about increased security, for us.
[Nasser] And that's not just a matter
of personal data security.
It's a matter of national security.
The Estonian government's cyber unit
is one of the top-ranked in the world,
and protects the entire system
against threats.
Today, the digital ID system
works so well in Estonia,
it's hard not to imagine
more and more governments
jumping up into the cloud.
[Kaevats] The main lesson from Estonia
is that this is not about
technological gadgetry.
This is about building
a mindset and culture
that is constantly ready
to adopt new things.
[indistinct chatter]
[Nasser] Even if you live outside Estonia,
chances are your personal information
isn't just confined to your home computer.
Your email password,
your bank account number,
your embarrassing photos
from your sweet sixteen birthday party,
those are all
somewhere up there in the cloud.
But, wait a second, somewhere up there
Up where?
It turns out, internet infrastructure
is actually very much earthbound.
Every server and data center
that makes up "the cloud"
is on land.
And, chances are,
when you upload something to the cloud,
you're not sending stuff up,
you're sending stuff down,
through the ocean.
-[suspenseful music playing]
-[clicks]
[clicks]
[clicks]
[Nasser] This is the cloud.
[clicks]
Or at least it's what the cloud looks like
aboard the SubCom Decisive.
[uplifting music playing]
The SubCom Decisive
is a 450-foot-long ship
whose sole purpose
is to install and maintain
hundreds of millions of feet
of fiber-optic cables
across the bottom of the ocean.
Basically, anywhere that has
an internet connection,
we've probably run a cable there
at least once.
My name is Alysia Johnson.
I'm the first officer
on board SubCom Decisive.
This is like
a self-contained little city out here
just installing the internet.
It's pretty cool. I like it.
The cable that we're installing,
it's basically a wire rope
with a fancy core.
The fancy core is glass fibers
that carry light pulses
that are signals for the internet.
[Nasser] These cables are hair thin
and information travels across them
as fast as anything in the universe
can possibly go: the speed of light.
[Brian] You have your fiber optics,
and around that we have steel wires
that protect those fibers,
and on top of that
we have a copper conductor
which conducts electricity.
On top of that we have a polyethylene
that protects from water,
and then on top of that, if we need,
then we have armor wires.
[Nasser] These cables need
some serious protection
because there's only one place
they can be deployed:
the very bottom of the ocean.
Besides potential water damage,
it's unpredictable down there.
There's earthquakes,
wildlife,
who knows what else.
[Johnson] These vessels have found
unmarked ordinance from World War II.
There's a lot of crazy stuff
on the bottom of the ocean.
The whole internet as we know it travels
over these shark-proof garden hoses.
There's already over two million
kilometers of cable under there,
connecting one continent to another.
That's enough cable
to go to the moon and come back again
three times.
[indistinct chatter]
Okay, we're going to sneak,
so put the camera down and follow me.
Right behind you.
The weird thing about the cable, right,
is it's all one piece.
It doesn't ever stop.
So, this is the inside of the cable tank.
What they're doing is,
the cable's coming down
from the cable factory.
We call it spinning the cable.
So, the one guy is walking around
and he's guiding the cable,
and then everyone else is sitting here
and they're snapping it,
which you can hear, the cable snapping.
So, we're loading this cable
basically the same way
that they loaded
the first transatlantic cable.
You see engravings of it sometimes,
and there's oil lamps lit
and they're wearing top hats
instead of hard hats,
and there's a bunch of guys
sitting in the tank turning cable
just like we're doing now.
For as long as we've been making
communications cables,
this part of the process
is pretty much the same.
[clicks]
[uplifting piano music playing]
[Nasser] Just think,
all of the forwarded email
from your parents,
every frame of every movie
that you've streamed,
each earwormy song
that you've listened to over and over
Every one of those has traveled
as a beam of light
down cables like these.
[electronic beeps]
[Nasser]
But all of this transoceanic travel
comes with a cost.
It turns out, sending all this data
all over the world
does have a major drawback.
It's an energy suck.
A single Google search,
this is just a typical search,
takes the same amount of energy
as a standard LED light bulb
on for three minutes.
That doesn't sound like a lot,
but just think of how many Google searches
you do in a typical day.
And in a typical week,
and in a typical year.
Now multiply that number
by half the world's population.
And think about how many other things
you rely on the cloud for.
In fact, just by streaming this episode,
you're using the same amount of energy
it takes to keep that light bulb lit
for over five days.
The truth is the cloud costs us
about two percent
of the world's electricity bill,
much of which
is from nonrenewable sources.
It emits about as much CO2
as the entire airline industry.
Ironically, the more CO2 we emit,
the higher, warmer, and more chaotic
our oceans will get,
and the more the undersea cables
and the cloud will be in danger.
And it's not just the cloud
that's at risk,
it's the puffy clouds too.
-[Nasser] Wow, it's so pretty up here.
-[man] Yeah.
Ah!
Not many clouds though.
Pretty clear. Some cirrus left over.
-Oh, cirrus? Those are cirrus?
-Yeah.
[Nasser] I'm with Tapio Schneider,
a senior research scientist
at NASA's jet propulsion lab.
He spends his time asking the question
"What is climate change
gonna do to the clouds?"
And he has a bold prediction
about one kind of cloud in particular.
[gentle music playing]
[Schneider] So, stratocumulus clouds, it's
the most frequent cloud type on Earth.
It's 45% or so of Earth's sky
is covered with stratocumulus clouds.
-Wow, it's that big.
-Yeah.
It's a white blanket,
over the oceans, typically.
You see them, say,
when you take off from LAX,
you see them underneath you
as just this white continuous blanket.
And the clouds reflect sunlight,
so that is a strong cooling effect
on Earth's surface underneath.
[Nasser] While stratocumulus clouds
are helping the Earth stay cool,
they are cooling themselves as well
by releasing heat
higher into the atmosphere.
But now climate change is threatening
to disrupt this whole process.
[Schneider] As you put
more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,
the greenhouse gases above the clouds
makes it harder for the clouds
to cool themselves
by radiating heat upwards.
And the cooling is very important
because that is what nourishes the clouds,
what keeps them alive.
I mean, in a way it's like
a blanket on top of a blanket.
That's what it is, yep.
The clouds are trying to send
some of those rays back up and out
Right.
but the greenhouse gases
are sending that heat back down.
Exactly. Exactly.
And it's conceivable
that you get to the point where
well, you lose them altogether.
[Nasser] Tapio predicts
that if greenhouse gas levels
continue to increase,
we'll reach a point
when stratocumulus clouds
could completely vanish.
And when it comes to global warming,
that could make already dire conditions
even worse.
Because they are so important
for cooling large fractions of Earth,
if you lose all of the stratocumulus,
you get about eight degrees centigrade
or 14 degrees Fahrenheit warming
on top of whatever you had
up to that point.
Eight degrees?
But all these international meetings
and stuff,
they're all talking about,
like, two degrees.
But you're talking about eight.
Eight degrees seems like a lot.
It's eight degrees on top of what you had.
So that would add to whatever problems
you would have at that point.
This seems like Wow.
This seems even worse than everything
I already knew and expected.
[Nasser] Add that up and you get
a whopping 10 degree Celsius
or 18 degree Fahrenheit
increase in Earth's temperature,
making many of today's cities
totally uninhabitable.
If it were to happen,
it would be truly dramatic climate change.
[Nasser] How remote a possibility is this?
Or how real a possibility is this?
If greenhouse gas emissions
continue to climb as they are now,
that could happen
around a hundred years from now,
maybe a little bit later.
A hundred years from now,
if we were standing in the same place
and we look up,
like, what are we going to see?
Well, if the stratocumulus clouds
break up,
we probably wouldn't be standing here
because it would be so unbearably hot
-you wouldn't want to be here anymore.
-Wow. Yeah.
I mean, Earth, we call it the Blue Marble,
but if you look at it,
it's really a white planet, right?
It's clouds that reflect sunlight
and changing them changes the climate.
Wow.
[Nasser] The extinction of a cloud.
It feels like
we're about to break the sky.
Tapio remains optimistic
that we can limit
our greenhouse gas emissions
and avoid the cloud apocalypse.
But in the meantime, climate change
has already driven clouds the world over
to go haywire,
causing epic floods
and crippling droughts.
But what if we could
just reach right into a cloud and fix it?
Well, that brings us here,
to this old airplane hangar
in San Angelo, Texas,
where I'm going to meet a guy
who's gonna fly me
right up into the clouds
and show me how to do just that.
[majestic instrumental music playing]
[Nasser] This is the home
of the West Texas
Weather Modification Association,
where I'm meeting
with Jonathan Jennings.
[indistinct speech]
He's not just a meteorologist,
he's also a rainmaker.
So, weather modification
is the process of taking an aircraft,
flying below a thunderstorm
and releasing material
that interacts with the cloud
to allow for precipitation to occur
more efficiently.
So, it sounds like
you can't make a cloud out of nothing.
-No.
-You can take a cloud that's already there
and make it rain.
Yes, exactly.
"Rain enhancement" is what we call it.
Oh, my You're like a wizard!
[thunder rumbles]
[Nasser] In order to rain,
liquid water droplets inside clouds
have to become heavy
and large enough to fall.
But this process has been disrupted
in many places around the world,
including West Texas.
[Jennings] We're a very dry environment.
We have a lot of dust
that gets suspended
into the atmosphere from the winds
and start interacting with our clouds,
pulling moisture away
from the larger particles
that produce rainfall more efficiently.
When that takes place,
our droplet sizes get too small,
and they're not heavy enough
to fall as precipitation.
So, the whole process of the cloud
is just failing.
Is it like
I'm just trying to get an analogy here.
Is it like the cloud
is kind of constipated?
Is that sort of what it is?
[chuckles] Yes, that's exactly what
our chief scientist says all the time.
Um but yeah, the cloud's sick.
It's just not working efficiently.
I mean, last year we were coming out
of one of the strongest droughts
we've had in Texas.
And the farmers,
they really rely on the rainfall.
It's what they live off of.
So, what we're trying to do
is squeeze that sponge.
[exhilarating music playing]
[Nasser] And these flares filled
with silver iodide are, you know,
the suppositories
for the constipated clouds.
[Nasser] Okay, here we go. All right!
Hey, there.
-Great. Ready to go up?
-[Nasser] Yeah.
-[pilot] Awesome.
-Hua!
Yeah. Is there a seat belt here?
[uplifting music playing]
-You guys in position?
-[pilot] I'm good to go.
[Nasser from radio]
I can't believe this is my job.
Here we go.
[laughs]
Oh, man,
you can feel every little breeze up here.
[pilot] Oh, yeah.
[laughs]
Ah! My stomach!
Oh, I can see him.
I can see him right there.
[pilot] Two-four,
you wanna give us a wave?
[laughs]
[Nasser] Do you ever get nauseous up here?
No. I've been flying for so long
it doesn't ever bother me.
[Nasser] Oh, interesting.
[pilot] You okay?
Hang onto it. Hang onto it.
-[Nasser] Oh, my God.
-[pilot laughs]
[Nasser] Good, I'm good.
-It's starting to get a lot cloudier.
-[pilot] Oh, yeah.
Do you see that development of clouds
right ahead of us?
[Nasser] Looks like we're driving straight
into this super ominous bank of clouds.
Yeah.
That's exactly what we're looking for.
Two-four-five, you gonna stay
along the leading edge
of these, uh good clouds here?
Uh, yeah,
I think that'll work just fine.
All right, copy that.
We'll proceed with some seeding.
See if we can get it going here.
Sounds like a plan. Two-four-five out.
Ah! Cool.
So, it's kicking up
all that silver iodide, is that right?
Correct, yeah.
You can see the trail very lightly.
-You can totally see it.
-Off the back of it, yeah.
[Nasser] The silver iodide is light enough
to get sucked upwards, into the clouds,
where their crystalline structure
tricks the water droplets
into freezing around them, creating ice.
Ice, which is heavy enough
to fall to the ground,
melting on the way down.
Voilà.
-[Nasser] Oh, my God.
-[pilot laughs]
I cannot believe that I am up here,
like, manipulating clouds.
-Right.
-It's crazy.
[pilot] It's awesome.
[lively music playing]
Hey, two-four-five, I'm getting
some higher tops here on infrared.
Looks like we're doing some good.
[Nasser]
Will these clouds actually rain later?
And if they do,
will that be, for sure, because of us?
The science is really hard to pin down.
Still, dozens of countries seed clouds
to combat drought,
and scientists
are also exploring other techniques,
like artificially puffing up
and whitening clouds,
that could possibly slow the warming
that caused a lot of those droughts
in the first place.
It's nowhere near a total solution
to the problem of global warming,
but it is encouraging.
A bright spot on a hazy horizon.
In a little over a century and a half,
we've gone from predicting the clouds
to engineering them.
When faced with the catastrophes
of their own eras,
Fitzroy and Richardson
innovated out of necessity.
They knew that to tackle
a problem that defies borders,
you have to build a system
that transcends borders too.
-[electronic beeps]
-The cloud is our best way to do that.
And sure, it has a serious cost,
one that we have to find a way
to pay for renewably.
But we still need it
because it's our best shot
at living together,
working together,
thinking together.
Especially now, as we face
our most existential threat yet.
Whatever we do, we gotta do it fast,
and we gotta do it together.
If we're going to save the clouds,
and the rest of our planet
for that matter,
we've gotta tune up our
international orchestra of slide rules,
we've gotta lay
even more shark-proof garden hoses,
and we've gotta plug in.
Because what we need
is nothing short of a global brainstorm.
[music fades]
[upbeat song playing]