Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

What causes the shinkage of clouds? By writing "we’re stepping on the gas" you seem to imply that somehow humanity is causing this.

Do you mean my dog or other animals are responsible for this? Humans are the only species that are capable of modifying the environment.

No we are not, and a brief look at the history of the planet will show that. We're driving most of the changes today, but the planet itself also changes on it's own (tectonic shifts, for one), as do extra-planetary factors (solar cycles), and both of these impact our upper atmosphere.

From the article, there's significant uncertainty what's driving the currently measured effect:

> Climate scientists now need to figure out what’s causing these cloud changes.

> The team also found that 80% of the overall reflectivity changes in these regions resulted from shrinking clouds, rather than darker, less reflective ones, which could be caused by a drop in pollution. For Tselioudis, this clearly indicates that changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, not pollution reductions, are driving the trend.

> But Loeb, who leads work on the set of NASA satellite instruments called Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System, which tracks the energy imbalance, thinks pollution declines may be playing an important role in the cloud changes, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. “The observations are telling us something is definitely changing,” he says. “But it’s a complicated soup of processes.”

To your point, however, we do appear to be the only ones capable of intentionally modifying the environment, so if anybody's going to understand and address this, it'll be us.