It gets hotter, more water evaporates, increasing the amount of water vapor (a greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere

The water forms clouds, which reflect sunlight back into space, cooling things off.

But at night, the clouds act as an insulating blanket, preventing heat from being radiated into space. This is why deserts are hot during the day, but cold at night.

All these feedback mechanisms (both positive and negative) interact and their cumulative effect is to help moderate temperatures. Some are local, some are global, they often operate at different time scales. Some are linear, some asymptotic, some exponential, some cyclical. Some are of little consequence or influence until certain threshold conditions are reached and a cascade of catastrophic events are unleashed. Others tend to work against each other, cancelling each other out, others work synergistically, feeding on one other.

But as long as you keep pumping in more heat, or increase the insulating blanket of greenhouse gases, its going to get hotter. And as it gets hotter, more energy gets radiated away to space. And the more energy radiates away, eventually you will reach a point where the top of the atmosphere is in thermodynamic equilibrium with the rest of the universe. But it will be at a higher temperature.

There is no way around this. The system will adjust, it will not necessarily lock into a runaway positive feedback loop (although that is not impossible). However, it will eventually stabilize. But the system will not be the same as it was before.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/07/11/the-worlds-clouds-are-in-different-places-than-they-were-30-years-ago/

Here’s how the paper summarizes the changes, region by region: “cloud amount and albedo [i.e., reflectivity] increased over the northwest Indian Ocean, the northwest and southwest tropical Pacific Ocean, and north of the Equator in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Cloud amount and albedo decreased over mid-latitude oceans in both hemispheres (especially over the North Atlantic), over the southeast Indian Ocean, and in a northwest-to-southeast line stretching across the central tropical South Pacific.”

Note that it is not like some parts of the world don’t have any clouds any more. Still, the changes are significant in the context of how radiation originating from the sun enters, and ultimately departs from, the Earth’s system.

Not just one but both of these changes to clouds are “positive feedbacks” to climate change — tending to make warming worse.

Moving cloud tracks toward the poles enhances warming because at higher latitudes, less solar radiation strikes the Earth — so white clouds are reflecting less of it away from the planet than they would if they were closer to the tropics and the Equator, Norris said. Meanwhile, he continued, higher cloud tops in effect thicken the total column of cloud, and that means more trapping of infrared or heat radiation that would otherwise exit to space.

“We now have a thicker blanket, which is also a warming effect,” Norris said.

I lived in Silicon Valley for 8 years. in Mountain View, CA, between Sunnyvale and Palo Alto, a short bike ride from NASA Ames Research Center, the SETI Institute and Stanford University. If I got an early start, I could pedal to all three on the same day and still get home before dark! During the entire time I lived there, I only recall one thunderstorm; three major earthquakes, but only one thunderstorm.

I think I can understand how unsettling the effects of AGW must be to the people of the high Arctic.