Climate Change: Why the Details Remain Cloudy
Prof. Dr. Björn Stevens (Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie Hamburg)

Clouds play a fundamental role in mediating the fluxes of energy through the earth system.
Our lack of understanding of what factors regulate the global distribution of cloudiness frustrates attempts to predict how the climate will change as a result of changing atmospheric composition, or how the climate has changed in the past, for instance due to different distributions of land masses or orbital variations.
In this talk I will review the ways in which clouds render climate prediction difficult, as well as recent progress in understanding fundamental issues related to the equilibrium structure of one particularly important cloud regime.