This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.

There’s an old adage about oysters: During months whose names don’t contain the letter r—May, June, July, and August—it’s best to stay away.

An oyster eaten outside these months should have a satisfying snap, like al dente pasta, says Shina Wysocki, the farm director at Chelsea Farms, in Washington State. That slightly firm texture is a sign that you’re eating a sexually immature oyster. But summer oysters—that is, oysters in their mating season—naturally get flabby, and their gonads swell with gametes. “It’s sperm and eggs,” says Gary Fleener, the senior scientist at Hog Island Oyster Co., in Marshall, California. “It coats your mouth like heavy cream does.” It is, shall we say, an eating experience that not everyone finds appetizing.

For decades, however, oyster consumers have been able to ignore the conventional wisdom about oysters and r months. Regulations, refrigeration, and the rise of industrial-scale oyster farming now make it possible to eat oysters year-round. Even more crucially, in the late 1970s, scientists selectively bred a new kind of oyster, known as the triploid oyster, that’s sterile, faster growing, and less “spawny” than its naturally occurring counterparts. The emergence of triploids has untethered oyster consumption from the natural oyster life cycle, and consumer demand now peaks in the summer, when people want cold beer, chilled wine, and sea treats served on ice.

[Read: The invention of the modern oyster]

“Similar to how we use selective breeding in watermelon to produce seedless watermelon, you can do the same thing with oysters,” says Matthew George, the coastal-shellfish manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. In 2016, 50 percent of all Pacific oysters farmed on the West Coast of the United States were triploids. But recently, growers have noticed disproportionately higher triploid mortality rates.

A recent study showing that triploid oysters may be more sensitive to extreme heat than their diploid progenitors has scientists and oyster farmers worrying about the future of these scrumptious shellfish—and questioning whether today’s hotter climate means that our enjoyment of oysters should return to a more seasonally driven schedule.

Originally, George says, scientists figured that sterile triploid oysters would be more resilient than their cousins with just two sets of chromosomes. Rather than exerting energy to produce gonads, he says, the oysters could spend their resources on survival. But over time, oyster farmers have noticed that triploid oysters don’t fare as well during heat waves—or in general. “Anyone at my farm would tell you that triploids seem to be a bit fussy,” Fleener says.

In the lab, George and his team confirmed triploid oysters’ sensitivity. When exposed to heat stress, triploid Pacific oysters die at a rate 2.5 times that of the diploids.

Plus, juvenile triploid oysters (known in the industry as “seed”) are more expensive than diploid seed—and many farmers are becoming less willing to gamble on such poor odds for survival.

Wysocki, of Chelsea Farms, used to buy triploid seed but isn’t currently growing any. “I spent a lot of money on triploid seed to have them die,” she says. Similarly, about eight years ago, Washington-based Taylor Shellfish Farms was planting 70 percent triploids and 30 percent diploids. That ratio has now flipped. And in 2022, Washington’s Hama Hama Oyster Company was planting 24 percent triploids. That number is now down to 18 percent, says Adam James, the general manager of shellfish operations at the company: “We’ve kind of moved away from purchasing lots of triploids, because we were seeing greater mortalities.”

With global temperatures on the rise, triploids are likely to suffer. What does this mean for an industry in which consumer demand is at its peak when regular diploid oysters are too sexually ripe for many people’s palate? Will consumers have to readapt to oysters’ natural seasonal variability? Or should farmers and scientists double down on developing more resilient triploid oysters?

Five years ago, Taylor Shellfish Farms started working on the latter. The company began selectively breeding oysters in the hope of eventually developing triploid oysters that survive better in the ocean.

Neil Thompson, an oyster geneticist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is also working to selectively breed more disease-resistant diploid Pacific oysters with the aim of then breeding triploid oysters that are less sensitive to environmental stressors. The trick is to identify specific heritable traits that correlate with survival and then select for those in order to strengthen the oyster’s climate adaptability.

[Read: Oyster insomnia is real]

In the meantime, West Coast oyster farmers can continue to meet summer demand by finding ways to diversify the origins of their oysters, such as by sourcing the shellfish from colder locations when temperatures rise. Of course, shipping oysters from afar emits planet-warming carbon dioxide, so oyster growers are also exploring other techniques, including suspending their developing oysters in deeper, cooler water to delay spawning.

Then there’s the marketing angle. “Maybe we need to find the language to talk about a creamy oyster without using the word spawny or gonad,” James says.

As far as consumer behavior goes, farmers and restaurant owners don’t want to deter anyone from enjoying oysters in the summer. Rather, they encourage people to also seek the shellfish during the seasonal peak—when the weather is cold, the oysters have a snap, and the complex flavors imbued by the local bays and inlets are worthy of a chef’s kiss.

In the tropics, along the band of sky near the equator, clouds and wind run the show. These are juicy clouds that aggregate and disaggregate in agglomerations and that can live a long time, as far as clouds go. In the summer, when the ocean is especially hot, they can pile up high, breeding hurricanes; at all times of year, the behavior of tropical cloud systems drives global atmospheric circulation, helping determine the weather all over the world. And still, clouds remain one of the least understood—or least reliably predictable—factors in our climate models. “They are among the biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate change,” Da Yang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, told me.

Yang is a cloud expert—a cloud guy, really, drawn to their mysteries. He recently moved from California to Chicago, where he gets to see a lot more clouds on a daily basis. “I find clouds are beautiful to watch,” he said. “If I take an airplane, and I can see clouds down below or far away, I’m always fascinated by how rich the cloud organizations are. How they interact with each other …” He trailed off. Clouds are complex and ephemeral, which makes them difficult to fully understand. Yang listed for me key aspects of clouds for which we still lack comprehensive understanding: how they form, what determines their spatial scale, how long they can last. “Those sound like simple questions,” he said, “but they are actually at the forefront of the field.”

The cloud problem has persistently plagued climate models. Although these models do many jobs extraordinarily well—understanding the energy balance of the planet, describing a trajectory of warming from human-made greenhouse-gas pollution—they can’t seem to get clouds right. Models will sometimes produce cloud-related projections that are simply incorrect, and some models “run hot,” meaning they predict catastrophic warming, possibly because of cloud dynamics.

One major stumbling block is the resolution of climate models, or how finely or coarsely they represent the Earth; to represent individual clouds, which can be the size of a minivan or the state of Minnesota, would require models at a resolution finer than the current finest model. Climate modelers have recently begun to produce fine-scale models at the regional level, where they can zoom in on the individual details of clouds. But, Yang told me, stitching such snapshots together into a picture of the whole globe would exceed the capacity of the largest existing supercomputer.  

Even if computers did have the capacity to do these analyses, scientists would need more tools to understand the results. For that, Yang said, we need more cloud theory. “Without theoretical understanding, we would not be able to interpret the model results,” he told me. “Without these first-principal-based understandings, we don’t really know whether the model is accurate.”

Tiffany Shaw, a climate physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that some models are producing inaccurate visions of entire regions, possibly because of the cloud problem. For example, models predict more warming in the east Pacific than the west; the opposite is true in reality. Another example is the narrow belt of rainfall that rings the planet in the deep tropics and produces some of Earth’s strongest thunderstorms—and, as such, many clouds. Our planet generally has one such belt, but atmospheric-ocean climate models have been insisting for decades that it has two. This may, in part, be an issue of undercooked cloud modeling.

To Shaw, these irregularities are not a sign of something amiss; rather, they show the maturation of climate science. The field has gotten many of the big things right, and now it is learning to incorporate the smaller, more granular things into its vision of the world: things like clouds. Because of their complexity, Shaw is also excited about the possibility of using machine learning to understand them. “They’re data-hungry algorithms, and we have a lot of data,” she said.

[Read: Playing God with the atmosphere]

One big question haunts all cloud research: Scientists know that there’s a lot of uncertainty about how to predict future cloud dynamics, and that those dynamics will likely have some bearing on how climate change progresses. But how significant of a bearing? For now, initial indications point to reassuring conclusions rather than catastrophic ones. “What we’re learning is that not everything matters for climate change. Which is good!” Shaw told me. For example, losing shallow cumulus clouds as the ocean warms—which some computer models have suggested could happen—would have a destabilizing effect on the tropics, potentially provoking runaway warming. But, Shaw said, a recent observational study found that the clouds aren’t as sensitive to warming as the computer models thought; the feedback between heat and clouds does amplify global warming, but not to the extreme degree suggested.

[Read: America’s climate boomtowns are waiting]

One of the keys to reconciling modeling and reality is simply more observations. Chris Fairall, a research physicist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association, has been studying clouds since the 1970s, when he worked on fog forecasting for the U.S. Navy, in highly foggy Monterey, California. “Fog is a cloud that sits on the ground. The Navy is very interested in fog, because they don’t want their ships running into things,” he told me. Fairall has seen the field of cloud science improve dramatically, in part thanks to efforts, including his own, to measure them. In 2020, he was the lead scientist on NOAA’s ATOMIC project, which flew one of the agency’s “Hurricane Hunter” planes and sent a ship to survey cumulus-cloud formations off the east coast of Barbados, as part of a larger joint cloud project with European researchers. Over the next few years, the data from those missions will help improve cloud models. Although Fairall likes studying relatively shallow cumulus clouds, he told me that the biggest cloud questions are about deep convective clouds, the ones that go all the way up into the troposphere, where they begin to develop complex ice, snow, hail, and supercooled water interactions. Cumulus clouds are complex enough; those deep clouds “have 100 times the complexity,” he said.

In his view, the U.S. is devoting a tremendous amount of effort to cloud research; it’s only up from here, in terms of cloud knowledge. NASA, NOAA, the Department of Energy, the Navy, and the Army all have researchers working on cloud problems, he said. Clouds envelop two-thirds of the Earth in their moist embrace, and in every moment help determine our collective physical reality. Surely the quest to understand them is among the most salient scientific endeavors of our time.

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I get meeting times wrong all the time. I mean to schedule an hour earlier or an hour later, but then I get mixed up. The problem is, I always have to compensate for where I am, which is in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Greetings from the lonely, dismal heart of central standard: a land before time and, also, a land after it.

To those of you who work and live in a proper, respectable time zone such as eastern or Pacific, the full extent of my shame will be difficult to fathom. “Oh, yeah, I’m in central time, actually,” I say, as if acknowledging a terrible skin condition or an inconvenient food allergy. Everyone is polite, of course. “Ah, okay, got it,” they reply, as we all scramble to adjust our calendars. This is not respect. It is pity.

I moved here from eastern, which is the nation’s anchor time zone. I say that not because of its affiliation with New York City or Washington, D.C., but because almost half the U.S. population holds to its authority. Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Atlanta are on eastern time, along with almost all of Florida and Michigan, the whole of Ohio, and other less notable places made more notable simply by their participation in the most normal time in America.

Eastern time starts the day; it sets the pace for the nation. The stock market opens on Wall Street, corporate lawyers file into Back Bay offices, spoons swirl café cubanos in Miami. It’s morning again in America. On the other coast, where it’s three hours earlier, nobody cares. Such is the glory of the Pacific time zone, which houses a smaller sliver of the country’s population—just 16 percent or so. Some West Coasters—surfers, almond farmers, theme-park vendors—may be up during the eastern a.m. hours, though not because investment bankers or media professionals compel them. But the whole Atlantic Seaboard morning has elapsed by the time that most Pacific-time professionals have stumbled to the office, smoothies in hand. They will always be behind, no matter what they do. This is not a disadvantage; it’s a lifestyle.

[Read: China only has one time zone—and that’s a problem]

The mountain time zone is in some ways central’s partner. Its residents share our temporal confusion, living earlier than most Americans but later than some others. But the region’s sparseness spares it more embarrassment. The mountain zone is mostly empty space: Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico. Only 6 percent of the nation lives there, and almost one-third of those people are confined to Arizona, a state that doesn’t observe daylight saving time and thus LARPs as California for half the year. And unlike central time, mountain time gets to have a name that evokes thin, clear air and rugged individualism.

Here in central, we get nothing. Our name isn’t bad, but it isn’t cool. It’s just … middling. A center forms a foundation, but it can never be exceptional. Such is the fate of the average people who get averaged out within our time zone’s borders. Central time afflicts St. Louis but also Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Memphis, and New Orleans; in all, its victims live in the whole or parts of 20 states. We’re stuck together in this in-between, always just a little bit too early and a fair amount too late, our heads turning back and forth toward our betters on the coasts.

This isn’t just another form of grousing about being overlooked. Flyover country’s cultural and economic woes, or its benefits, are separate from the indignities of central time. Nobody needs to visit you in Tulsa or Little Rock to coordinate a call or set a deadline. But plenty of the people living here are obligated by professional or personal ties to connect with the many others who might crisscross the skies above our homes. This creates a special and profound malaise.

Millions of us live this way, caught between morning and afternoon. We do mathematics. When should we meet? Let me think, I’m two hours ahead of you, and so-and-so is one more ahead of me, so N your time is N+3 theirs, which makes me N+3-1. So-and-so’s day already started in Manhattan, and I’m behind; it feels more like I’m arriving late than living on a different clock. Okay, now I’m free, but it’s still too early for you guys in Santa Cruz.

Coordination is accommodation. To coordinate in space, one makes room—a seat at the table. To coordinate in time, one clears calendars. Everyone, no matter their time zone, performs some version of this daily work. But in central time, that work feels, well, central to our lives. We can never be on time, not really, because our time is not our own. It’s always someone else’s: two hours ahead, an hour behind, today, tomorrow, and forever.

The three men were killed during a camping and surfing trip along Mexico's Pacific coast.