Stratocumulus clouds are rather boring. They’re not as elegant as cirrus clouds (those horsetail wisps high in the sky) or as majestic as cumulonimbus clouds (big, scary thunderheads). But stratocumulus clouds, which hover low in the sky and create vast decks of cloud cover, have a supreme value in our warming world: Their white tops reflect lots of solar radiation back into space.

But Earth’s broad portfolio of clouds in the year 2019 could potentially be altered by extreme climate change. Those stratocumulus cloud decks could vanish, further intensifying global warming.

That’s the unsettling conclusion of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, based on a computer model that provides a new warning…