THE GATHERING CLOUD
J R Carpenter
Plate No. 1.
Above the horizon, some large
cumulus A typical white fluffy cumulous cloud
stores a half gram of water per square metre.
That works out to about half a million kilos,
a cloud the weight of one hundred elephants.

receiving on their tops a cirrostratus.
In the blue sky, the cirrus fair-weather shapes.
At top, but too near the eye in position.
At left, the feather is rare but genuine.

The
scaleAn estimated 1.8 trillion
gigabytes of digital information
are created and stored globally each year
by ordinary consumers with no sense
that data is physical and storing it
has a direct impact on the environment.
of
The CloudThe Cloud is just someone else's computer,
that's what the coffee mugs and fridge magnets say.
But what does that mean? How much does The Cloud weigh?
should fill us with urgency.