(AU) Stop Making Sense: Why It's Time To Get Emotional About Climate Change

The Guardian - Rebecca Huntley

The science has been settled to the highest degree, so now the key to progress is understanding our psychological reactions

Rebecca Huntley, an Australian social researcher and expert on social trends, at home in Sydney. Her new book is How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

This article is an edited extract from How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference, by Rebecca Huntley (Murdoch Books, $32.99)

It took me much longer than it should have to realise that educating people about climate change science was not enough. Due perhaps to my personality type (highly rational, don’t talk to me about horoscopes, please) and my background (the well-educated daughter of a high school teacher and an academic), I have grown up accepting the idea that facts persuade and emotions detract from a good argument.

Then again, I’m a social scientist. I study people. I deal mostly in feelings, not facts. A joke I like to tell about myself during speeches is that I’m an expert in the opinions of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Over the 15 years I’ve been a social researcher, I’ve watched with concern the increasing effects of climate change, and also watched as significant chunks of the electorate voted for political parties with terrible climate change policies.

There is clearly a disconnect between what people say they are worried about and want action on and who, when given the chance, they pick to lead their country.

The science behind climate change has been proven correct to the highest degree of certainty the scientific method allows. But climate change is more than just the science. It’s a social phenomenon. And the social dimensions of climate change can make the science look simple – the laws of physics are orderly and neat but people are messy.

A climate protest painted on a bridge over the Avon River in the Gippsland town of Stratford in Victoria. Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters

When social researchers like me try to analyse how a person responds to climate change messages the way they do, we’re measuring much, much more than just their comprehension (or not) of the climate science. We’re analysing the way they see the world, their politics, values, cultural identity, even their gender identity. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say we’re measuring their psyche, their innermost self.

In his book Why We Disagree About Climate Change, the British professor Mike Hulme argues that this is one of the reasons we argue so much about the issue. “The sources of our disagreement with climate change lie deep within us, in our values and in our sense of identity and purpose,” he writes. “They do not reside ‘out there’, a result of our inability to grasp knowingly some ultimate physical reality.”

It follows that to help resolve, even to some degree, the conflict and disagreement about climate change in the community, we need to understand those different belief systems and the emotional responses and social forces that shape them. And take them into account when we communicate about climate change and what should be done.

This is even more important given how politicised climate change has become, especially in countries like the US and Australia. US research from has shown that reactions to climate change as a topic were becoming increasingly polarised along partisan lines around the late 1990s. He argues that the climate change views of Democrats and Republicans were not significantly different until the Kyoto protocol negotiations of 1997, when policymakers started to explore possible solutions to global warming.

 ‘Think about where you get your information, how reliable it is and whether you only read the things that agree with what you want to think rather than the actual truth.’ Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

In an article for the academic journal Risk Analysis, the head of Yale’s program on climate change communications, Tony Leiserowitz, showed that in 2003, when respondents were asked in surveys for their first reaction to the phrase “global warming”, only 7% reacted with words like “hoax” or “scam”. By 2010 that had risen to 23%. There was a parallel trend in the UK: between 2003 and 2008, the belief that claims about climate change had been exaggerated almost doubled from 15% to 29%.

The huge success and positive impact of Al Gore’s first documentary, 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, had the less-than-positive side-effect of strongly associating the issue with the progressive side of politics. Today, as Leiserowitz comments, climate change scepticism and even denial in the US have become part of a cluster of beliefs (along with anti-abortion and anti-immigration) that are obvious markers of Republican allegiance.

In my own social research with Australian voters, I see this politicisation all the time. Nowadays, I don’t even have to ask how someone voted in the last election to hazard a guess about their views on climate change. Sometimes all it takes is for me to ask them how they feel about the role of government (Are you taxed too much? Do you feel there is too much regulation?) and what media they trust the most (blogs and social media or public broadcasters?).

The degree of polarisation in places like Australia and the US is not universal. The esteemed Pew Research Center found in 2015 that in “Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom, followers of conservative parties are much less likely than followers of liberal or green parties to believe they will be harmed by climate change”. But in many other countries there are much less pronounced political differences, and much less public and political interest in contesting the science.

For environmental activists in these less-polarised countries – often countries already feeling serious impacts from climate change but emitting negligible amounts of CO₂ –the endless debate about the truth of the climate science in the big western countries is gobsmacking. Activists have expressed their frustration and disbelief, and it’s contributed not a little to their despair about progress at an international level.

Thousands of school students from across Sydney attend the global Climate Strike rally at Town Hall in March last year. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

So when it comes to talking to people about climate change, it helps enormously to think about it not just as a scientific question but as a social and political one. But understanding how people’s already existing (and often entrenched) political allegiances influence their response to climate change is only part of the picture. Understanding their emotional reactions is even more important, and that leads us from politics towards psychology.

Viewing the climate change issue through a psychological lens yields endless important insights into why we are where we are. Have a look at the must-watch 2018 Ted Talk by the meteorologist J Marshall Shepherd, on three kinds of bias that shape your worldview. As a self-proclaimed weather geek, he often gets asked if he believes in climate change. He finds the question odd because science isn’t about belief. It’s about proof that things are real or not. He is agog at the chasm between what scientists know to be true and what surveys have shown the US public believes about issues like vaccinations, evolution and, of course, climate change.

This has led the natural scientist to start thinking about psychology, namely what biases shape our perceptions of the world around us. He picks three big ones. The first, and probably the most obvious, is confirmation bias, namely that we zero in on evidence that supports what we already believe. Confirmation bias is even more pronounced in a world where we can use our social media to filter out information we don’t want to absorb and where we follow influencers who reinforce our existing beliefs.

J Marshall Shepherd on stage. Photograph: Ted

The second bias is called Dunning-Kruger, which describes our human tendency to think we know more than we do as well as to underestimate what we don’t know. Again, I see this happen in focus groups all the time, when participants with no scientific credentials or training pick apart the science of climate change.

The third and final bias is cognitive dissonance. When people encounter actions or ideas they cannot reconcile psychologically with their own beliefs, they experience discomfort. They then try to resolve their discomfort by arguing away the new evidence.

Given that climate change is such a discomforting topic, I see this cognitive dissonance all the time in focus groups, where people try to find reasons other than climate change for the events happening around them, even when faced with a strong scientific explanation. They pick it apart because of Dunning-Kruger and then, because of confirmation bias, try to find a blog that states something other than what the scientific evidence shows.

J Marshall Shepherd argues that we need to close the gap between public perception and scientific fact, to create a better future and preserve life as we know it. He challenges us to take an inventory of our biases and of the beliefs we use to prop them up. Think about where you get your information, how reliable it is and whether you only read the things that agree with what you want to think rather than the actual truth. Then share what you’ve learned – about yourself and about the world – with other people.

I’m not saying facts don’t matter or the scientific method should be watered down or we should communicate without facts. What I am saying is that now the climate science has been proven to be true to the highest degree possible, we have to stop being reasonable and start being emotional.

More science isn’t the solution. People are the solution.

Links

• Coronavirus And Climate Change: Collective Action Is The Only Way Forward
• How Our Brains Make It Hard To Solve Climate Change
• With Coronavirus And Climate Change, It’s About Time
• What Do We Think About Climate Change, And Why?
• Psychiatrist Studied Major 20th Century Atrocities, Now Turns To Climate Change
• Anna Skarbek: Finally there is real movement on Australia's climate policy but time isn’t on our side
• 'It's all about vested interests': untangling conspiracy, conservatism and climate scepticism

Climate Battles Are Moving Into The Courtroom, And Lawyers Are Getting Creative

Daily Times 

Climate change may be having its day in court.

With the slow pace of international climate negotiations, lawyers from Switzerland to San Francisco are increasingly filing lawsuits demanding action.

And they are getting creative — using new legal arguments to challenge companies and governments before a judge.

Two decades ago, only a handful of climate-related lawsuits had ever been filed worldwide. Today, that number is 1,600, including 1,200 lawsuits in the United States alone, according to data reported Friday by the London School of Economics.

“The courts are an increasingly important place for addressing the problem of climate change,” said Hari Osofsky, the dean of Penn State Law and the School of International Affairs.

Already, climate campaigners are seeing glimmers of success.

In the Netherlands in December, the country’s Supreme Court upheld a ruling in favour of the Urgenda campaign group’s demand that the Dutch government move faster to cut carbon emissions.

And in January, a judge in Switzerland acquitted a dozen climate protesters from trespassing charges, filed after the group staged a tennis match within a branch of Credit Suisse in 2018 to draw attention to the bank’s fossil fuel loans. Defence lawyers had argued that the protesters’ actions were necessitated by the “imminent danger” posed by climate change. The ruling was met in court with a standing ovation.

“It was an exceptional ruling,” one of the defence lawyers, Aline Bonard, told Reuters. Given that the protesters admitted to trespassing, “the infraction is undeniable.”

But cases like these suggest a shift in how people are understanding the role of the judiciary in mediating cases related to the warming climate. Now, “there is bound to be a new wave of legal proceedings using a similar line of argument,” Bonard said.

New legal tactics

As rulings that compel governments to cut emissions remain rare, lawyers still see promise in targeting large, polluting companies. Such cases in the past tended to accuse coal-fired power stations or government of failing to limit emissions. Cases now are being fought on arguments such as consumer protections and human rights.

This shift been especially pronounced in the United States, where more than a dozen cases filed by states, cities and other parties are challenging the fossil fuel industry for its role in causing climate change and not informing the public of its harms. (Reuters Insight)

Last month, both Minnesota state and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits alleging that oil majors had misled consumers on how using their products involved releasing carbon emissions and contributing to climate change.

Those cases followed another filed in October by Massachusetts, which also used consumer protection arguments in suing Exxon Mobil Corp. All three accused the oil companies of engaging in deceptive practices and false advertising.

“As awareness of climate change grew in the general public to the extent that their disinformation campaigns were no longer acceptable, there was a pivot to greenwashing,” Kate Konopka, Washington D.C.’s deputy attorney general, told Reuters.

In each case, most of the companies denied the allegations. BP Plc declined to comment.

Exxon said the Washington D.C. lawsuit was part of a “coordinated, politically motivated” campaign against energy companies and was without merit. Chevron Corp also dismissed the D.C. case, saying the litigation “distracts” from its efforts to address climate change.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc said it was “committed to playing our part” in addressing climate change, but that lawsuits “impede the collaboration needed for meaningful change.”

But companies appear to be worried. The National Association of Manufacturers formed a group in 2017 to push back against “activist lawyers” for trying to scapegoat energy manufacturers.

The group, called the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, applauded a December ruling in New York clearing Exxon Mobil of securities fraud charges, after it was accused of failing to inform investors about what it knew about climate change.

Links

• Climate change lawsuits expand to at least 28 countries around the world
• The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
• Sabin Center for Climate Change Law
• Global trends in climate change litigation: 2019 snapshot
• Climate Change Laws of the World
• Australian Climate Change Litigation database
• Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP)
• Eyes in the sky: Investors reach for new tools to gauge climate change risk

Climate Crisis: Thawing Arctic Permafrost Could Release Deadly Waves Of Ancient Diseases, Scientists Suggest

The Independent - Harry Cockburn

Researchers have reactivated 30,000-year-old RNA viruses from tundra

The permafrost is now thawing for the first time since before the last ice age ( Getty ).

Disturbing things are happening in the Arctic.

In the last fortnight a devastating heatwave has seen temperatures in Siberia reach a record 38C (100.4F), meanwhile, vast fires are burning, releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and dramatically illustrating the vicious circle of climate breakdown.

As climate scientists ponder whether these extremes portend the dawn of a terrifying new era of supercharged heat in the Arctic, the planet also remains gripped by the coronavirus pandemic.

It is at this pivotal moment a startling new risk could also be unleashed upon the world – one which binds together both the implications of an overheating planet and the tragedy of a highly contagious disease.

Scientists have said the rapidly warming climate in the far north risks exposing long-dormant viruses, which may be tens or even hundreds of thousands of years old, and have been frozen in the permafrost in the Arctic.

Due to the rapid heating – the Arctic is warming up at least twice as fast as the rest of the world – the permafrost is now thawing for the first time since before the last ice age, potentially freeing pathogens the like of which modern humans have never before grappled with.

Jean Michel Claverie, a virologist at Aix-Marseille University, told Greenpeace’s investigative journalism outfit Unearthed: “The idea that bacteria can survive for very long I think is definitely accepted. The remaining debate is for how long? Is it a million years? 500,000 years? Is it 50,000 years?”

He added: “There are extremely good papers that say yes, you can revive bacteria from deep permafrost.”

Dr Chantal Abergel, also a virologist at the same institution, added: “We are able to revive viruses out of ancient permafrost samples. So far we have not been able to go up to 30,000 years, but it may come at some point.”

So far researchers have been able to successfully reactivate ancient DNA viruses, but not the more fragile RNA viruses.

RNA viruses include diseases such as Spanish flu and the coronavirus responsible for the current pandemic.

DNA viruses include the now practically eradicated disease smallpox.

Another threat is from bacteria – in 2016 an outbreak of anthrax killed thousands of reindeer.


Climate change triggers Great Barrier Reef bleaching in 2020

Dr Claverie said the risk was not only due to the thawing permafrost, but also due to the increased human and animal activity in areas which have long been very sparsely populated.

He said: “This is a recipe for disaster because you have humans here and you have the virus when it is fresh. When viruses are released from the permafrost in nature, what happens? They fall into the river. They are exposed to oxygen, which is bad for viruses. They are exposed to light, which is also bad for viruses. And so they will not be revived for very long if they don’t find a host very quickly.”

He added: “If [the viruses] come into contact with a proper host then they will reactivate. So if you put a human in a place with frozen viruses associated with pandemic, then those humans could be infected and replicate the virus and start a new pandemic.”

Links

• The permafrost pandemic: could the melting Arctic release a deadly disease?
• NASA Images Show Extreme Heat And Fires Raging Across Siberia
• Arctic Circle Sees 'Highest-Ever' Recorded Temperatures
• Devastating Simulations Say Sea Ice Will Be Completely Gone In Arctic Summers By 2050
• Arctic Climate Change – It’s Recent Carbon Emissions We Should Fear, Not Ancient Methane ‘Time Bombs’
• The Arctic May Have Crossed Key Threshold, Emitting Billions Of Tons Of Carbon Into The Air, In A Long-Dreaded Climate Feedback
• 2019 Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Tied For Second Lowest On Record
• Climate Change: Arctic Permafrost Now Melting At Levels Not Expected Until 2090
• The Smithsonian’s Renewed Fossil Hall Sends A Forceful Message About Climate Change
• Melting Permafrost In Arctic Will Have $70tn Climate Impact – Study
• An Ocean Of Evidence On Warming Is Our Cue To Take Action - Now
• Melting Arctic Ice Is Now Pouring 14,000 Tons Of Water Per Second Into The Ocean, Scientists Find

(AU) Trend Towards Worsening Heatwaves Is Accelerating, New Research Finds

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Heatwaves have become more frequent and have been lasting longer across much of the planet, including Australia, over the past seven decades and the trend is accelerating as the world warms.

Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes based at the University of NSW said the findings emerged from the first comprehensive assessment of heatwaves down to regional levels.

Australia is among the parts of the world experience more frequent and longer heatwaves, and the trend is accelerating as the planet warms up. Credit: Twitter/@andrewmiskelly

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Sophie Lewis developed a metric of so-called cumulative heat to enable the comparison of heatwaves over time and between regions. Their results are published in Nature Communications journal on Friday.

Typically a heatwave would be at least three successive days in the top 10 per cent of warmest days for that time of the year for a particular location. The cumulative or additional heat is based on counting the extra degrees above that 90th percentile threshold using the Berkeley Earth temperature dataset.

For Australia, the worst heatwave season - such as the 2009 belter across southern Australia - caused an additional 80 degrees of cumulative heat across the country, the paper found. For Russia in 2010 and the Mediterranean in 2003, their most extreme seasons involved 200 degrees of extra heat.

“Not only have we seen more and longer heatwaves worldwide over the past 70 years, but this trend has markedly accelerated,” Sarah Perkins Kirkpatrick, the paper's lead author, said.

“Cumulative heat shows a similar acceleration, increasing globally on average by 1-4.5 degrees each decade but in some places, like the Middle East, and parts of Africa and South America, the trend is up to 10 degrees a decade.”

Anthropogenic climate change caused by rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions was driving the shift in heatwaves, the paper said.

As heatwaves are getting longer, average intensity changes during hot spells are statistically insignificant for most parts of the world. The exceptions, though, include southern Australia and small parts of Africa and South America where heatwave intensity is showing a detectable rise over time, the researchers said.

Teasing out the regional variations was important because areas that were enduring longer, slightly warmer heatwaves would require different management systems for public health and energy supply than shorter, more intense events – even if cumulative intensities were similar, the paper said.

Trend changes were not globally uniform in magnitude, with the biggest shifts occurring in regions already "known to experience disproportionately more adverse effects of climate change", it stated.

“This research is just the latest piece of evidence that should act as a clarion call to policymakers that urgent action is needed now if we are to prevent the worst outcomes of global warming," Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said. "The time for inaction is over."

Links

• Australia among global 'hot spots' as droughts worsen in warming world
• Year of extremes as record heat, fire danger and dismal rainfall dominate
• (AU) Just How Hot Will It Get This Century? Latest Climate Models Suggest It Could Be Worse Than We Thought
• Unsuitable For 'Human Life To Flourish': Up To 3B Will Live In Extreme Heat By 2070, Study Warns
• Climate Change Has Already Made Parts Of The World Too Hot For Humans
• The First Three Months Of 2020 Are Already Nearing Temperature Records
• (AU) ‘If You’re Not Sweating’ In This Town, ‘There’s Something Wrong’
• (AU) These Are The Places Across Australia People Will Soon Struggle To Live In Without Serious Challenges

The Climate Change Clues Hidden In Art History

BBC - Diego Arguedas Ortiz*

Art historians are exploring their collections through a climate lens, revealing overlooked connections between our past and present, writes Diego Arguedas Ortiz.

As the 1850s were drawing to a close, the artist Frederic Edwin Church was navigating off the Canadian coast of Newfoundland in preparation for his next painting. The search for the Northwest Passage had captured the public’s imagination for much of that decade and Church – America’s best-known landscape painter – was also lured. He chartered a schooner to approach the sea ice and spent weeks among the frozen blocks before returning to his studio in New York with about 100 sketches.

Church’s monumental painting The Icebergs was presented in an exhibition in New York in 1861, just 12 days after the start of the American Civil War. Its original and more politically-charged name (The North) reflected the time’s views on the Arctic and on ice itself.

The Icebergs by Frederic Edwin Church – America’s most famous painter – reflected 19th-Century society’s view of the Arctic. (Credit: Dallas Museum of Art)

It was sublime, untamable. The icebergs’ sharp features offered no resistance. A book published to coincide with the exhibition, by a friend who went North with Church hammered that point home: “After all, how feeble is man in the presence of these Arctic wonders.” Before the painting was exhibited in London two years later, the artist added a broken mast that dominated the centre of the scene, a reminder of humanity’s fragility.

“That’s kind of the opposite of what modern paintings of ice are saying,” explains Karl Kusserow, the John Wilmerding curator of American art at the Princeton University Art Museum. “Later pieces of art are about the ice melting because of what we've done to it.”

Kusserow is talking about works such as Ice Watch, an installation by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, in which more than two dozen blocks that had already been lost from Greenland’s ice sheet were placed in London and left to thaw, so that passersby were reminded of the melting, fragile Arctic. “It’s a kind of a flip-flop,” says Kusserow, “using that same kind of metaphor; this element of ice.”

Our conception of nature has been dramatically altered in the last century

Only one-and-a-half centuries have passed between the two pieces – a blink of an eye for a species like ours and even less so for the planetary cryosphere – but the relationship between humanity and ice is radically different. In Church’s time, the greenhouse effect had barely been suggested by scientists such as Eunice Newton Foote and John Tyndall, who coincidentally attended the painting’s preview party in London. In 2020, we are certain we are literally melting the planet’s ice.

In Ice Watch by Olafur Eliasson, ice is a metaphor for the damage humans have inflicted on the Earth. (Credit: Olafur Eliasson/Minik Rosing)

As scientists, policy-makers and members of the public attempt to make sense of the climate crisis, art historians poring over artworks are finding all sorts of answers (and a handful of new questions) about how our relationship with nature has changed, about past and present societies’ ideas of climate and even about the physical changes of our planet.

A changing relationship

One of the central conclusions art historians have made is that our conception of nature has been dramatically altered in the last century. If you visited the Princeton Art Museum for its 2018 exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, you might have caught glimpses of this transition (albeit one that’s messy, non-linear and far from finished) from immutable to frail nature.

The exhibition, co-curated by Kusserow, followed a journey of more than three centuries of American art. Nature’s Nation ranged from works such as the panoramic Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt, a celebration of nature’s power in the US during the 1870s, to its 21st-Century reponse, Valerie Hegarty’s Fallen Bierstadt, which portrays a very similar monumental landscape in decay, as if consumed by time or fire.

Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt, is a celebration of nature’s power in the 1870s, and was part of a 2018 exhibition Nature’s Nation. (Credit: The North Carolina Museum of Art)

“There’s a 180-degree switch from a world that we have no control over, to one in which we are actually controlling the fate of the planet, and recognising that we’re not doing a very good job on it,” says Kusserow.

He argues that a noticeable transition, at least in the US, occurred during the 1960s, propelled by the counterculture movement and books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring – whose first chapter is also a speculative fiction short story. The following decades saw artists producing work that was self-conscious about environmental issues and moved beyond romantic representations of the natural world.

One of those pieces is Ocean Landmark, a concept-defying installation by Betty Beaumont, built between 1978 and 1980. It falls into the relatively compact field of ‘land art’, which is made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself.

Partly sponsored by the US Department of Energy and the Smithsonian Institution, Beaumont took 17,000 neutralised coal fly-ash blocks and dumped them 3 miles (5km) from the coast of New York. The coal reached 70ft (21.3m) deep and rested on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, where it became a hybrid between sculpture and artificial reef. Yet its remoteness and the decision to create art for nature also says something about its time.

Ocean Landmark, built by Betty Beaumont between 1978-1980, is a more self-consciously environmental approach to landscape art. (Credit: Betty Beaumont)

“The reason why I like this piece is that it’s something you can’t access. Because it’s underwater, it’s always going to be elsewhere. It shows we can connect with the environment, but without claiming it as our own,” says Francesca Curtis, who’ll be presenting a paper on this piece at a conference on art history and climate change organised by the Courtauld Institute of Art in mid-2020. “The ocean space is there, and it exists, but it’s not for us.”

Ocean Landmark also challenges the concept of nature as something opposed or at least different to culture. The artwork is the reef, which is now considered a fish haven by the US government. “You can’t separate the idea of the environment from all the political problems that exist today, precisely because of things like climate change,” says Curtis, a PhD student at the University of York’s History of Art department.

The tip of the iceberg?

As the 20th Century presented graver and graver environmental challenges, and the anxieties around waste management, nuclear energy and air, water and chemical pollution became multiplied, that boundary between nature and culture blurred.

Half the world away from Ocean Landmark, a cadre of Indian artists have been reflecting and producing work about one of those meeting points between the natural and the human: farmers’ suicides. Art historian and educator Preeti Kathuria has been following this field’s development since the early 2000s, including the work of artists such as Kota Neelima, the collective The Gram Art Project and the duo Thukral and Tagra, and will also present her work at the Courtauld’s conference.

Indian duo Thukral and Tagra have been creating climate change works for six years, including a series of flying houses, Dominus Aeiris. (Credit: Thukral and Tagra Studio)

She has noticed the transition even in the last couple of decades. As the impacts of climate change become more striking, so have artists’ approaches. Kathuria suggests air pollution as an example in which changes in the city are forcing artists to react. “Suddenly, we cannot survive without air purifiers,” she says. “We never needed air purifiers in Delhi. The problem is now coming face-to-face, so naturally the response of the artist has become much more direct.”

Scientists and artists have also studied artworks to aid them in their reconstruction of past weather and climatic conditions. This is partly because of a “climate consciousness” that modern viewers have, says the art historian Theo Gordon, a postdoctoral fellow at The Courtauld Institute and the organiser of its upcoming conference.

Do we limit ourselves to an artist’s contemporary intent or do we try to see other things in the work of art?

“The way we are thinking about the climate now in increasingly alarmed terms is historically specific,” says Gordon, referring to the way people in 2020 interpret climate-related information, including art. That is, Church’s contemporaries in 1860 would not have represented the idea of ‘climate’ with the same emotional baggage as we do, which in turn prompts new questions about how to view these pieces. Do we limit ourselves to an artist’s contemporary intent or do we try to see other things in the work of art? Is an iceberg just an iceberg, or is it a metaphor for how a society sees ice?

Some fields provide straightforward answers. Paintings and sketches allowed researchers in Switzerland to understand how the Lower Grindelwald Glacier, located in the Alps, behaved after 1600 and before photography was invented. The researchers happily agreed in an academic paper published in 2018 that “with a huge number of high-quality pictorial documents, it is possible to reconstruct the (Little Ice Age) history of many glaciers in the European Alps from the 17th to the 19th Centuries.”

Paintings such as this one from 1774 allowed researchers to understand how the Lower Grindelwald Glacier behaved before photography was invented. (Credit: Alamy)

Simply put, if you compare the past extent of glaciers in older paintings with current observations, you can tell how long a glacier was before we started warming up the planet. In turn, that can provide answers for how quickly we might lose ice in the future.

In a similar fashion, scholars from Greece and other countries suggested in a 2014 study that the colours of sunsets painted by famous artists can be used to estimate pollution levels in the Earth’s atmosphere for the past five centuries.

“Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists,” said researcher Christos Zerefos, professor of Atmospheric Physics at the Academy of Athens in Greece, when the research was published. “But we have found that, when colouring sunsets, it is the way their brains perceive greens and reds that contains important environmental information.”

A 2014 study suggested that paintings including JMW Turner’s The Scarlet Sunset could be used to estimate pollution levels for the past five centuries. (Credit: Alamy)

If you go further back, as the German historian Wolfgang Behringer does in his book A Cultural History of Climate, you would notice that prior to the 1500s there are very few occurrences of snowy landscapes in Western European art. Behringer suggests that the lower-than-usual temperatures during the so-called Little Ice Age plunged European artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder into a new branch of landscape painting: the winter landscape.

This subgenre includes works such as Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow, a 1565 oil-on-wood detailed depiction of an idyllic winter scene. But beyond the snow, it’s the little details that reveal the cultural and social dimensions of how people were living with the idea of changes in their climate.

Art offers a window into our past, present and future climate that science alone can never offer

“The hunters have all these dogs behind them,” says George Adamson, a historian and geographer at King’s College London, who believes that artworks help us understand how past societies dealt with meteorological events. “I count 12 or 13 dogs with them, so it’s obvious they’ve got out for a big hunt, but they have one fox on their back.”

Those winter landscapes left a bleak impression in the 1500s, he says. But take a look at the next time temperatures slightly dropped in Western Europe, after the 1700s, and you’ll see a different perception of a blanketed field. “When you see snow scenes again in the 19th Century, they tend not to show quite so much hardship. In fact, you get the more romanticised view of the countryside”.

It has been suggested that the 1500s Little Ice Age inspired artists to paint winter landscapes, such as Bruegel's The Hunters in the Snow. (Credit: Kunsthistorisches Museum)

Adamson makes a crucial, nuanced point: the elements we see in a painting don’t make up a climate on their own. These are meteorological conditions, pictures of weather and a time and place. It’s rather the cultural ways in which humans live in those climates, and their representations of them in art, that we should be observing.

For instance, the best representation of our current emergency is not in temperature charts or in the upwards concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. The climate crisis, and what it means to us in 2020, is better explained with youth strikers’ signs, the debris left behind after a cyclone and the sketches over wildfire emergency maps. To fully understand a climate, even in a painting, we need the cultural artefacts; one must observe the shoes and the dogs.

“Those elements can probably tell you more about climate than a thermometer does,” says Adamson. Art offers a window into our past, present and future climate that science alone can never offer, precisely because it reflects our frustrations, hopes and anxieties about nature. It helps understand something an iceberg survey alone will never accomplish: whether ice is a victim or a villain.

*Diego Arguedas Ortiz is a science and climate change reporter.

Links

• Why does cinema ignore climate change?
• The artists helping to save the planet
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Germany Approves Coal Phaseout By 2038

Deutsche Welle - Agencies

German lawmakers have backed a legislative package to end the use of coal in less than two decades. But activists have decried the measures, saying they aren't bold enough to mitigate the impact of climate change.


Germany lawmakers have passed new legislation finalizing the country’s long-awaited phase-out of coal, over objections from environmental groups the plan is not ambitious enough.

The Bundestag and Bundesrat — Germany's lower and upper houses of parliament — passed legislation on Friday that would phase out coal use in the country in less than two decades as part of a road map to reduce carbon emissions.

"The fossil age in Germany comes to an irrevocable end with this decision," said Economy Minister Peter Altmaier. Environment Minister Svenja Schulze called it a "great political success for all those who care about the climate-friendly future of our children and grandchildren."

The legislative package has two main features. The first establishes a legal avenue for the gradual reduction in emissions by 2038 at the latest, while the second targets regional economies that would be impacted by the phaseout.

Preparing for the future

Coal-producing regions in the German states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg will have access to €40 billion ($45 billion) to help absorb the impact. Those funds are also expected to go towards restructuring regional economies, re-skilling workers and expanding local infrastructure.


Germany lawmakers have passed new legislation finalizing the country’s long-awaited phase-out of coal, over objections from environmental groups the plan is not ambitious enough.

Financial compensation is also be available to coal plant operators who face losses as a result of the early phaseout. However, compensation is contingent on operators announcing plans by 2026 to shutter plants and cease other emissions-intensive activity.

Michael Vassiliadis, who heads the IG BCE trade union, called the measures a "historic landmark." He said the package has provided a safety net for workers affected by the phase out and would provide them with the necessary support to transition to future sectors.

'Historic error'

However, not everyone agrees that the measures are enough to mitigate climate change.

Environmentalist activists say the legislation falls short of its ultimate aim, with Greenpeace managing director Martin Kaiser describing it as a "historic error."

For decades the Ruhr area was notorious for its bad air. If you lived near a coking plant, freshly laundered sheets would turn dirty if you hung them out on the washing line. The image here depicts a skyline of coal, smokestacks, and smoke in Oberhausen — not far from Bottrop. Today, few people in the area miss these consequences of the coal business.

German Green party chief Annalena Baerbock said the legislation was "oblivious to the future" and instead called on the government to complete Germany's coal phase out by 2030 the latest.

Earlier this year, a DeutschlandTrend survey found that 27% of Germans believe climate change is the most pressing issue facing the country, just slightly behind refugees and immigration policy.

Germany is seeking to establish a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. The European Commission has also pushed forward with similar plans for the EU.

Links

• Carrying coals to Germany: Imports still vital despite sagging demand
• As Germany phases out coal, villages still forced to make way for mining
• Bye bye lignite: Understanding Germany's coal phaseout
• Climate change: Germany cuts carbon emissions by 6.3% in 2019
• Germany's growing climate movement demanding action

What An Ocean Hidden Under Antarctic Ice Reveals About Our Planet’s Future Climate

The Conversation - Craig Stevens | Christina Hulbe

Craig Stevens, Author provided 

Authors Craig Stevens is Associate Professor in Ocean Physics, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, University of Auckland Christina Hulbe is Professor and Dean of the School of Surveying (glaciology specialisation), University of Otago

Jules Verne sent his fictional submarine, the Nautilus, to the South Pole through a hidden ocean beneath a thick ice cap. Written 40 years before any explorer had reached the pole, his story was nevertheless only half fiction.

There are indeed hidden ocean cavities around Antarctica, and our latest research explores how the ocean circulates underneath the continent’s ice shelves - large floating extensions of the ice on land that rise and fall with the tides.

These ice shelves buttress the continent’s massive land-based ice cap and play an important role in the assessment of future sea level rise. Our work sheds new light on how ocean currents contribute to melting in Antarctica, which is one of the largest uncertainties in climate model predictions.

The field camp on top of the Ross Ice Shelf. Craig Stevens, Author provided

An unexplored ocean

The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest floating slab of ice on Earth, at 480,000 square kilometres. The ocean cavity it conceals extends 700km south from Antarctica’s coast and remains largely unexplored.

We know ice shelves mainly melt from below, washed by a warming ocean. But we have very little data available about how the water mixes underneath the ice. This is often overlooked in climate models, but our new measurements will help redress this.

The only other expedition to the ocean cavity underneath the central Ross Ice Shelf goes back to the 1970s and came back with intriguing results. Despite the limited technology of the time, it showed the ocean cavity was not a static bathtub. Instead, it found fine layering of water masses, with subtly different temperatures and salinities between the layers.

Other ocean studies have been conducted from the edges or from high above. They have provided insight into how the system works but to really understand it, we needed to take measurements directly from the ocean under hundreds of metres of ice.

The team used a hot-water jet to drill through the ice to the ocean below. Craig Stevens, Author provided

In 2017, we used a hot-water jet, modelled on a British Antarctic Survey design, to drill through 350 metres of ice to the ocean below. We were able to keep the hole liquid long enough to make detailed ocean measurements as well as leave instruments behind to continue monitoring ocean currents and temperature. These data are still coming in via satellite. We found the hidden ocean acts like a massive estuary with comparatively warm (2℃) seawater coming in at the seabed to cycle close to the surface in a combination of meltwater and sub-glacial freshwater squeezed out from the ice sheet and Antarctica’s hidden rocky foundation.

The hundreds of metres of ice isolate the ocean cavity from the furious winds and freezing air temperatures of Antarctica. But nothing stops the tides. Our data suggest tides push the stratified ocean back and forth past undulations on the underside of the ice and mix parts of the ocean cavity.

Antarctica’s ice isolates the ocean cavity from furious winds and freezing air temperatures. Craig Stevens, Author provided

Future projections

This sort of discovery is the ultimate challenge for climate science. How do we represent processes that work at daily scales in models that make projections over centuries? Our data show the daily changes can add up, so finding a solution matters.

For example, data collected outside the ocean cavity and computer models suggest that any given parcel of water spends one to six years making its way through the cavity. Our new data indicate the lower end of the range is more likely and that we should not be thinking in terms of one grand circuit anyway.

The Ross is not the ice shelf in most danger from warming oceans. But its sheer size and its relationship with the neighbouring Ross Sea means it is a vital cog in the planetary ocean system.

The importance of these ice shelves for sea level rise over the next few centuries is very apparent. Research shows that if atmospheric warming exceeds 2℃, major Antarctic ice shelves would collapse and release ice flowing from the continent’s ice cap - lifting the sea level by up to 3 metres by 2300.

What is less well understood, but also potentially a massive agent for change, is the impact of meltwater on the global thermohaline circulation, an oceanic transport loop that sees the ocean cycle from the abyss off the coast of Antarctica to tropical surface waters every 1,000 years or so.

Antarctic ice shelves are like a pit stop in this loop and so what happens in Antarctica resonates globally. Faster melting ice shelves will change the ocean stratification, with repercussions for global ocean circulation - and one result of this appears to be greater climate variability.

Links

• Climate scientists explore hidden ocean beneath Antarctica's largest ice shelf
• How solar heat drives rapid melting of parts of Antarctica's largest ice shelf
• Ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica predicted to bring more frequent extreme weather
• New research shows the South Pole is warming faster than the rest of the world
• Antarctica has lost 3 trillion tonnes of ice in 25 years. Time is running out for the frozen continent
• 200 years of exploring Antarctica – the world’s coldest, most forbidding and most peaceful continent
• Australia wants to install military technology in Antarctica – here’s why that’s allowed