Arctic Cauldron

Washington Post - Chris Mooney | Photos Jonathan Newton

Across the Arctic, lakes are leaking dangerous greenhouse gases. And one lake is behaving very strangely.

Above The Arctic Circle, Alaska

Katey Walter Anthony has studied some 300 lakes across the tundras of the Arctic. But sitting on the mucky shore of her latest discovery, the Arctic expert said she’d never seen a lake like this one.

Set against the austere peaks of the Western Brooks Range, the lake, about 20 football fields in size, looked as if it was boiling. Its waters hissed, bubbled and popped as a powerful greenhouse gas escaped from the lake bed. Some bubbles grew as big as grapefruits, visibly lifting the water’s surface several inches and carrying up bits of mud from below.
This was methane.
As the permafrost thaws across the fast-warming Arctic, it releases carbon dioxide, the top planet-warming greenhouse gas, from the soil into the air. Sometimes, that thaw spurs the growth of lakes in the soft, sunken ground, and these deep-thawing bodies of water tend to unleash the harder-hitting methane gas.
But not this much of it. This lake, which Walter Anthony dubbed Esieh Lake, looked different. And the volume of gas wafting from it could deliver the climate system another blow if lakes like this turn out to be widespread.
The first time Walter Anthony saw Esieh Lake, she was afraid it might explode — and she is no stranger to the danger, or the theatrics, of methane. In 2010, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks posted a video of the media-savvy ecologist standing on the frozen surface of an Arctic lake, then lighting a methane stream on fire to create a tower of flame as tall as she is. It got nearly half a million views on YouTube.
So now, in the Arctic’s August warmth, she had come back to this isolated spot with a small research team, along with her husband and two young sons, to see what secrets Esieh Lake might yield. Was it simply a bizarre anomaly? Or was it a sign that the thawing Arctic had begun to release an ancient source of methane that could worsen climate change?
One thing she was sure of: If the warming Arctic releases more planet-warming methane, that could lead to. . . more warming. Scientists call this a feedback loop.
“These lakes speed up permafrost thaw,” Walter Anthony said. “It’s an acceleration.”
There was only so much the team would learn from the instruments they had hauled here. To get a firsthand look, they would have to get in.

They’d brought their wet suits.

Graduate student Janelle Sharp accompanied researcher Katey Walter Anthony to Esieh Lake. The team brought shotguns as protection against grizzly bears, which frequent the area.

Geese fly at dawn at Esieh Lake in August.

Research technician Philip Hanke moves a measuring chamber that records greenhouse gas fluctuations.

 Arctic lakes that don’t freeze

Walter Anthony, who grew up close to Lake Tahoe, was captivated by Arctic lakes at 19, when she spent a summer at Siberia’s picturesque Lake Baikal.

“I love the solitude of remote lakes and the mystery of what lies beneath the water surface.”
Two decades and several academic degrees later, she was asked by a Native Alaskan group, the NANA Regional Corporation, to search for methane seeps in northwest Alaska, since the gas, despite its climate downsides, could provide a fuel source for remote communities.
How do you find a lake in Alaska that leaks methane? Well, there’s one telltale sign: They don’t fully freeze over.
In April 2017, Walter Anthony put out word among residents of Kotzebue, Alaska, that she was looking for weird lakes. An email that month from a pilot led her to the Noatak region, not far above the Arctic Circle. Last September, she made her first visit to the lake — set against sloping hills covered with rust-colored mosses and blueberry bushes. She brought her family and a graduate student to the spot, so remote it required several days of camping and was completely off the grid.
At first, the sheer volume of gases at Esieh Lake was slightly terrifying, but as Walter Anthony grew accustomed to the lake’s constant spluttering, her fear gave way to wonder.

TOP: Frederic Thalasso, of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico, uses a gas analyzer at Esieh Lake. BOTTOM LEFT:  A breakfast of cranberries and blueberries picked fresh from the tundra at Esieh Lake. BOTTOM RIGHT: Gas bubbles roil the lake. 

Her sounding devices picked up huge holes in the bottom of the lake. Pockmarks, she called them, “unlike anything I’ve ever seen in any Arctic lake.”
Most of Esieh is quite shallow, averaging only a little more than three feet deep. But where the gas bubbles cluster, the floor drops suddenly, a plunge marked by the vanishing of all visible plant life.
Measurements showed that the lake dips to about 50 feet deep in one area and nearly 15 feet in another. When they first studied them, Walter Anthony and her graduate student Janelle Sharp named these two seep clusters W1 and W2, short for “Wow 1” and “Wow 2.”
The next discovery came from the lab.
When the scientists examined samples of the gases, they found the chemical signature of a “geologic” origin. In other words, the methane venting from the lake seemed to be emerging not from the direct thawing of frozen Arctic soil, or permafrost, but rather from a reservoir of far older fossil fuels.
If that were happening all over the Arctic, Walter Anthony figured — if fossil fuels that had been buried for millennia were now being exposed to the atmosphere — the planet could be in even deeper peril.

An exposed wall of permafrost melts alongside Esieh Lake.

 ‘Hotspot’

For the second trip, Walter Anthony had brought a larger team of researchers, more equipment and her family — her husband, Peter Anthony, and sons, Jorgen, 6, and Anders, 3.

The team brought instruments for sampling gases, four inflatable boats, large crates of food, eight tents, a satellite phone for emergencies and two shotguns. As with much of the Alaskan wilderness, the lake is frequented by grizzly bears, and the bear scat around the camp kept everyone keenly aware of their surroundings.
A week before the trip, Walter Anthony had published a major study delivering worrisome news about Arctic lakes in general. Her husband, Peter — also a scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks – was a co-author.
The research tackled the central question now animating scientists who study permafrost soils, which can reach depths of nearly 5,000 feet and were laid down over tens of thousands of years or more as generations of plants died and sank beneath the surface. Because of the cold, those carbon-rich remains never fully decomposed, and the soil preserves them in an icy purgatory. Now, though, as the Arctic warms, decomposition is starting up — and it gives off greenhouse gases.
Scientists know the permafrost contains an enormous amount of carbon — enough to catastrophically warm the planet if it were all released into the atmosphere. But they don’t know how fast it can come out and whether changes will be gradual or rapid.
That’s where Walter Anthony’s work came in.
The authors examined the prevalence of thermokarst lakes, which form when the wedges of ice within permafrost melt and create voids that then fill with water. And they found that the continuing growth of these lakes — many of which have already formed in the tundra — could more than double the greenhouse gas emissions coming from the Arctic’s soils by 2100. That’s despite the fact that the lakes would cover less than 6 percent of the total Arctic land surface.

Accelerating carbon emissions due to permafrost thaw

Thawing permafrost has led to larger lakes and created entirely new ones across the Arctic. This in turn increased the rate of carbon release, a recent study from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks analyzing change in lake area between 1999 and 2014, showed. 

Note: Data aggregated over hexagons 11.1 square miles in size.

Scientists have been puzzling over a dramatic spike in atmospheric methane levels, which since 2006 have averaged 25 million tons more of the gas per year. Walter Anthony’s study found that Arctic lakes could more than double this increase as well.
Overall, if Walter Anthony’s findings are correct, the total impact from thawing permafrost could be similar to adding a couple of large fossil-fuel-emitting economies — say, two more Germanys — to the planet. And that does not take into account the possibility of more lakes like Esieh, which appears to be a different phenomenon from thermokarst lakes, emitting gases faster.

Abruptly thawing thermokarst lakes may add
significant carbon emissions by the end of the century

Note: The abrupt thaw model shown was developed at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The chart shows median model values, under a moderate-emissions scenario.

The landscape around Esieh Lake itself bears the mark of rapid thermafrost thaw.
Along the shore, a large section of the hillside had collapsed, a change that, according to two members of the team, had occurred just since May, when they were last here.
This “thaw slump” was a textbook example of fast-moving permafrost thaw. It had left behind an exposed wall of muddy ice and small islands of peat and mosses.

Philip Hanke pulls the boat carrying scientific supplies through a narrow passage. 

Frederic Thalasso takes gas samples from the lake via boat. 

Katey Walter Anthony’s husband, Peter, dries clothes by the fire after a full day in the field. 

‘It’s kind of freaky’

If it weren’t for the bubbles, the large patches of silty water they create and the slightly unsettling fact that you could light the emerging gases on fire (at one point, Walter Anthony did just that), Esieh Lake might be an idyllic scene. But these features, combined with the fact that it appears to be frequented by grizzly bears, render it more alien than bucolic.

Source: Satellite imagery via DigitalGlobe

But Walter Anthony and research technician Philip Hanke, 25, were determined to explore it from within. On the second day of the trip, they donned wet suits and snorkels and plunged into the cold water, which was below 60 degrees.
They wanted to see the methane seeps up close and learn what they could by swimming among the bubbles.
Hanke went first, venturing into the more vigorous bubble site, Wow 2. There was very little visibility. But, groping in the darkness, Hanke could feel the shape of things.
“It’s kind of freaky,” he reported after he surfaced. “Right where the hole goes in, it slopes, and it’s flattened out, and it coned back down, and that was where some really loose sediment was, and I could stick my hands into it.”
“So there’s different ledges, you’re saying?” Walter Anthony asked.
“Yeah, it was a ledge.”
The second, much deeper site was less murky, more peaceful. Walter Anthony was still in awe when she came up for air.
“You’re just looking down into this stream of bubbles coming up right into your face, and they’re so soft they go all around you,” she said. “And the sunlight’s on them. It’s like out of this world but under this world.”
Another scientist, Frederic Thalasso, had traveled from Mexico City and spent days taking gas measurements around the lake. His initial results: Emissions from Esieh were very high — and clearly had something to do with fossil fuels.
The lakes where he had witnessed similar bubbling activity were in the tropics and polluted — ideal conditions for the production of methane, said Thalasso, a scientist with the Center for Research and Advanced Studies at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico.
But those lakes have gas flows that are “probably 100 times lower than in this lake,” he said.
His instruments also detected ethane, butane and propane — classic signatures of a fossil origin.

Later, after processing his data, he produced an initial estimate that the lake was producing two tons of methane gas every day — the equivalent of the methane gas emissions from about 6,000 dairy cows (one of the globe’s biggest methane sources). That’s not enough to be a big climate problem on its own, but if there are many more lakes like this one — well, that’s another story.

Katey Walter Anthony prepares for a day of work at Esieh Lake. 

 A troubling hybrid

After four nights of camping, the team packed up to make the two-hour boat trip to Kotzebue, Alaska, the first leg on the journey home. Walter Anthony wouldn’t have all the new data processed for a while, but she did have a pretty good hypothesis about what is happening at Esieh Lake.

Permafrost contains a lot of carbon — but in some locations, permafrost soil, and its characteristic wedges of embedded ice, also sits atop ancient reserves of fossil fuels, including methane gas. So as the Arctic warms — which it is doing twice as fast as the rest of Earth — these gases could be liberated into the atmosphere.
The holes in the bottom of Esieh Lake could therefore be an underwater cousin of odd craters that have appeared in the Siberian tundra in recent years, suspected to have been caused by underground gas explosions.
If this is right, then Esieh Lake becomes a kind of hybrid — and a worrying one.
It’s not a pure thermokarst lake, though some thermokarst appears to be forming around the lake’s expanding edges, tipping shoreline trees as the ice in the permafrost melts and the ground destabilizes. But the thawing of permafrost at the lake bed might also have unleashed older fossil gases from a reserve that had been sealed — creating another kind of worrisome lake.
“This is an additional source,” Walter Anthony said.

TOP Katey Walter Anthony and her son Jorgen, 6, collect gas samples. BOTTOM LEFT: Methane gas roils the lake’s surface. BOTTOM RIGHT: Equipment rests in a “thaw slump,” where thawing permafrost caused the ground to give way.

Carolyn Ruppel, who leads the Gas Hydrates Project at the U.S. Geological Survey, said Walter Anthony’s theory makes sense. Permafrost thawing could indeed release ancient fossil fuels in areas where they intersect.
But it would take more study to prove that this phenomenon is leading to widespread emissions across the Arctic, she cautioned.
Nobody knows how long ago the seeps started bubbling or what the trigger was.
From a scientific perspective, the fact that these lakes are emitting methane rather than carbon dioxide does have an admittedly limited upside.
Methane hits the atmosphere hard and fast and then mostly dissipates after a decade or two — far different from carbon dioxide, which is less potent but lingers for centuries or even millennia. So while methane impedes climate progress and amps up the planet’s immediate temperature, it does not leave the same long-term legacy.
Meanwhile, some scientists say they’re not sure yet how bad Arctic lakes will be for the climate or whether they will indeed cause emissions from permafrost to double.
“It’s not the final number,” said Vladimir Romanovsky, one of Walter Anthony’s colleagues at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and a noted permafrost expert.
At this point, it would be premature to call Esieh Lake a sign of climate doom. It is a strange and dramatic site, but its message remains partly veiled.
The coming years will probably reveal what’s behind Esieh and whether it has many cousins across the top of the world.
By then, we may also see whether the Arctic’s great thaw will have thwarted attempts to stop global warming.

A rainbow shines over Esieh Lake, with the seep field of methane gas visible in the center. 

Links

• Scientists came to explore the fabled waters of the Arctic — but their work could also change its future.
• Warming of the Arctic is ‘unprecedented over the last 1,500 years,’ scientists say  
• NASA launches Satellite To Precisely Track How Earth's Ice Is Melting
• 'The Damn Thing Melted': Climate Change Sparks Scramble For The Arctic
• More Than 100 Organizations Call On Oil And Gas Industries, Banks To Opt Out Of Arctic Drilling
• Melting Arctic Sends A Message: Climate Change Is Here In A Big Way
• Extreme Winter Weather Becoming More Common As Arctic Warms, Study Finds
• Arctic Transformed Into Alien Landscape In Surreal Climate Change Photo
• Arctic Warming: Scientists Alarmed By 'Crazy' Temperature Rises
• Alaska's Bering Sea Lost A Third Of Its Ice In Just 8 Days
• Arctic Climate Change Being Felt Farther South, Scientists Say

What’s Causing Antarctica’s Ocean To Heat Up? New Study Points To 2 Human Sources

InsideCimate News - Sabrina Shankman

With help from floating data-collectors, a new study reveals the impact greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion are having on the Southern Ocean. 

The Southern Ocean, shown here from a ship approaching the coast of Antarctica, has been warming twice as fast as the world's other oceans. Credit: Oliver Dodd/CC-BY-2.0

The Southern Ocean around Antarctica is warming at an alarming rate—twice that of the rest of the world's oceans. Now, researchers have developed more powerful evidence pointing to the human causes.
Though warming had been observed in the past, there was little historical data to allow scientists to pinpoint the causes with much certainty.
In a new study, researchers used climate models, the past observations that did exist and data flowing in from new ocean-going sensors to show how greenhouse gas emissions and the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere have led to both a warming of the Southern Ocean and an increase in its freshwater content. The findings also rule out natural variability as a major source of those changes.
"The observed warming is due to human influence," said oceanographer Neil Swart, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada who led the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. "That may have been suspected or proposed before, but this is the evidence that really proves it."

Ocean-Going Floats and Climate Models
The Southern Ocean is notoriously inhospitable, clogged with ice and home to rough seas and weather. As a result, there weren't many measurements in the past.
In 2004, a partnership of 30 countries across the world launched the Argo program to improve what's known about the world's oceans, and now there are close to 4,000 programmable floats collecting data in the oceans worldwide. That is helping improve what's known, but the lack of complete data going back decades has, in the past, left researchers wondering if their conclusions were robust.



For this study, Swart and his colleagues used data collected in the Southern Ocean from 1950 onward, which showed the pattern of warming and freshening. Then they turned to computer models to try to replicate the cause.
"We sampled the model just the way the ships sampled the ocean so we could compare them," explained Sarah Gille, a physical oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a co-author of the paper.
So if a ship had taken a sample at a specific latitude and longitude on a certain date, the researchers could sample the model at the same location during the same month and year. Within the model, they were then able to turn off and on different influences, like natural variability (from solar radiation and volcanoes), the emissions of aerosols, greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion.
When they looked at natural variability and aerosol emissions, neither affected warming or freshening enough to explain what had been observed. But greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion did.
Because of global action under the Montreal Protocol, through which the world in 1987 committed to stop producing ozone-depleting substances that had been used in such products as refrigerants and aerosol sprays, it's expected that the role of ozone depletion will shrink. "That action—the Montreal Protocol—is often put forward as an example of, "Hey, as a society we can tackle these problems as they come up," Swart said.
The role that ozone depletion is playing in warming the Southern Ocean is far less than the role of greenhouse gas emissions, though, and so far, those emissions have been a stickier problem to fix.
"That signal of greenhouse gas emissions is just going to continue on intensifying as long as we keep emitting more and more," Swart said.

What's Causing the Freshwater Increase?
The study also suggested that most of the increasing freshwater content in the oceans is coming from precipitation, rather than melting ice from Antarctica.
Cecilia Bitz, a sea ice and climate scientists at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study, said she found the study's observations about the increased freshening particularly interesting. "According to their study, an increase in runoff of meltwater from Antarctica is not needed to explain the decrease in salinity in the upper ocean when considering the linear changes over the last 70 years," she said.
In the future, Gille said, the role that glacial melt is playing in the freshening of the Southern Ocean is "one of the enormous questions that the research community would like to address."

What Warmer Water Could Mean for the Ice
Another study published last week in Nature offers more insight into the future of East Antarctica's massive ice sheet.
David Wilson, a geochemist at Imperial College London, and his co-authors found that even 2 degree Celsius of warming above pre-industrial times had been enough to melt a significant part of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in the past.
During the Pleistocene era, roughly 125,000 years ago, sea levels were as much as 20 to 30 feet higher than they are now. Wilson and his co-authors focused on the Wilkes Subglacial Basin and how it responded to warming then. Unlike the land-based glaciers, the Wilkes Subglacial Basin is built up from the ocean floor, which can make it particularly susceptible to warming waters. Their findings suggested that 2°C warming now, if sustained over a couple of millennia, could begin melting that location.
"If we wish to avoid the worst consequences—and you can think, this can have effects on coastal regions, agriculture, island nations—clearly we need to make efforts to change our behavior patterns and decarbonize the economy," Wilson said. "This is clearly what it's pointing towards."

Links

• 'Extreme' Changes Underway in Some of Antarctica’s Biggest Glaciers
• Antarctica Ice Loss Tripled in 5 Years, and That's Raising Sea Level Risks
• These Climate Pollutants Don't Last Long, But They’re Wreaking Havoc on the Arctic
• Scientists Say Ocean Circulation Is Slowing. Here’s Why You Should Care.
• Sea Level Rise Is Accelerating: 4 Inches Per Decade (or More) by 2100

A Photographic Exploration Of The Cryosphere

The Guardian

When Records Melt is an exhibition by Project Pressure premiering at Unseen Amsterdam of artists’ interpretations of the cryosphere: the part of the planet’s surface where water is frozen into solid form

Amphulapcha Tsho, Nepal, 2016

Christopher Parsons joined forces with a research team to study glaciers and permafrost in the Sagarmatha region of the Himalayas. Water, sand and rock samples taken on location were analysed and cultured by a microbiologist in the UK. Parsons displays these microscopic elements alongside the Nepalese landscapes.
Photograph: Christopher Parsons/Project Pressure

Thjorsa River, Iceland, 2012

Ed Burtynsky explores the water storage and transport systems that can be found in glaciers, focusing on how they release water into the world’s river systems. The resulting images depict the beauty and monumental scale of the meltwater runoff. Burtynsky reminds us of what we are losing as glaciers continue to diminish across the globe.
Photograph: Ed Burtynsky/Project Pressure

In an attempt to preserve the Rhône glacier, as well as the ice-grotto tourist attraction that is dug into the ice every year, Swiss locals wrapped a significant section of the ice-body in a thermal blanket. In their collaborative work, Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann created images illuminating the glacier and its protective shield. The title Shroud sums up the dying glacier under its death cloak.
Photograph: Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann/Project Pressure

Mount Shuksan from Mount Baker Lodge Lakes, Washington, US, 2014

Peter Funch uses vintage postcards as a model for his images of Washington’s Mount Baker to capture the effects of glacial recession. These effects are highlighted through his use of RGB tricolour separation, in which individual colour layers are recorded separately and then merged into a single image. Through his representation of the landscape, Funch aims to address humanity’s influence on nature.
Photograph: Peter Funch/Project Pressure

Bone from 4000BC, Switzerland, 2017

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin show how the rapidly shrinking glaciers are suddenly revealing artefacts that have until now been perfectly preserved in the stable, frozen mass for thousands of years. Their images, created in collaboration with archeological institutions and glaciologists in Switzerland, hint at intimate and complex human stories buried beneath the ice.
Photograph: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin/Project Pressure

Rhône glacier, Switzerland, 2016

In order to mirror the shifting glacial landscape and make the changing environment tangible, Noémie Goudal constructed a large-scale photo of the glacier printed on biodegradable paper that disintegrates in water. As the image dissolves, the artificial landscape can be viewed against its natural form.
Photograph: Noémie Goudal/Project Pressure

Iceberg Calving in Antarctica, 1 March 2013

Michael Benson’s work is focused on the intersection of art and science, using a variety of image-processing techniques. Rifts extend across the Pine Island glacier’s shelf in this striking image of incipient iceberg calving taken through light cloud cover. Eight months later, a large iceberg of about 21 x 12 miles broke free from the glacier’s southwestern edge. The Pine Island glacier is thought to be responsible for about 25% of Antarctica’s sea ice production.
Photograph: Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures/USGS Earth Explorer/Nasa/Project Pressure

Still from Tarfala Valley film, 2018

For this film, Project Pressure developed a new way of visualising the changes in glacier landscapes through photography in collaboration with Dutch film company Post Panic and geologist Erik Schytt Holmlund.
Photograph: Project Pressure

Still from Tarfala Valley film, 2018

By sourcing images from 1946, 1959, 1980 and 2017 of the Tarfala Valley and Kebnekaise mountain in Sweden, the team created 3D models of these landscapes through photogrammetry. Throughout the film, viewers can see the landscape fade in and out with each year. As it progresses into more recent times, the devastating impact humans continue to have on the melting glacier landscape is undeniable.
Photograph: Project Pressure

Still from Tarfala Valley film, 2018

In 2018 the highest point in Sweden changed; excessive heat melted the south peak of the Kebnekaise mountain, making the north peak is now Sweden’s highest point.
Photograph: Project Pressure

Links

• Earth Alert: A Photographic Response To Climate Change
• 8 Artists Taking On The Big Global Challenge: Climate Changes
• 'Art Can Play A Valuable Role': Climate Change Installations Appear In New York
• Could Cli-Fi Help Inspire Real Climate Change Action?
• Rising Seas: 'Florida Is About To Be Wiped Off The Map'
• 6 Must-See Movies About Climate Change
• Margaret Atwood: Women Will Bear Brunt Of Dystopian Climate Future
• New Documentaries Bring Climate Change To The Big Screen
• ANU Presents Climate Change In Beer Coaster And Bracelet Form
• 7 Novels That Will Fire You Up About Climate Change
• The Art Of Climate Change Gallery 4: What Can We Do To Address Climate Change?

8 Artists Taking On The Big Global Challenge: Climate Change

Huffington Post - Laura Paddison

“We should (and may) die trying to render climate change issues accessible."

---

We are bombarded with evidence of climate change. We can see the impacts through scorching summers, wildfires and increasingly intense extreme weather events. We hear about it through terrifying scientific reports that say we have just a few years before we’ll have missed the boat on holding back our slide into catastrophic climate change. And yet few people act; most don’t even talk about it.
Increasingly, artists are trying to use their work to beat back a sense of apathy and inaction, to visualize the effects and threats of climate change.
For some, this means using empathy and emotion to try to reach people; for some, it’s turning to technology to engage people in a virtual image of what our future will look like if we don’t change course; still for others, it’s about making a brutal reality visible and tangible for people, even when their own hope in change has dissipated.
Here we look at eight artists taking on the ultimate subject: climate change.

‘Climate Signals,’ Justin Brice Guariglia

Climate Museum

 Ten solar-powered highway signs have appeared across New York City providing orange LED warnings of climate doom. The signs by artist Justin Brice Guariglia form an installation running in each borough of the city between Sept. 1 and Nov. 6 as part of a project for The Climate Museum.
The signs are located in areas particularly vulnerable to climate change and are in the languages frequently spoken in that particular neighborhood. They flash a number of messages including “Climate Change At Work” and “Fossil Fueling Inequality.”
“The arts are a critical vector for climate engagement,” Miranda Massie, director of The Climate Museum, told HuffPost. “Only 5 percent of us speak about [climate change] with any regularity. We need a cultural transformation to break that silence ― we need to offer diverse pathways into climate dialogue and action, including soft ones. Art is a crucial pathway because it works through emotion and the senses, and because it provokes without prescribing.”

‘Ice Watch,’ Olafur Eliasson

"Ice Watch", an art installation by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, on display in Paris in December 2015.
OEL SAGET via Getty Images

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s work involved transporting 12 blocks of ice that came from free-floating icebergs from the Greenland ice sheet, then arranging them in a clock formation to indicate the passing of time. The ice sculptures were left to slowly melt.
His first installation was in Copenhagen in 2014, the second in Paris to coincide with the United Nations climate change conference in December 2015.
He firmly believes art has the power to make a difference. “There is a tendency today to feel untouched by the problems of others, to shut down at the immensity of an issue like climate change,” he told HuffPost. “Just informing people, giving them knowledge, often leaves them feeling overwhelmed and disempowered.” But a piece like “Ice Watch,” he said, “offers people an immediate experience of the reality of climate change ... It makes the larger world felt. It is my hope that this encounter and the feelings it evokes can spur action and move worlds.”

‘Unmoored,’ Mel Chin

Pedestrians walk past artist Mel Chin's mixed reality climate change themed art installation,
"Unmoored," in New York City on July 11, 2018.
Lucas Jackson / Reuters 

New York City is one of the world cities most vulnerable to sea level rises – by 2100, scientists predict sea levels could be up to 75 inches higher than they are today along the city’s coastline and estuaries.
Artist Mel Chin’s Times Square multimedia installation, “Unmoored,” sought to show New Yorkers what their city might look like deep under water. A 60-foot high sculpture of a shipwreck sat in the square, while viewers used smartphones to see the underside of virtual ships floating far above their heads.
“It is a surreal experience invented to connect us with our reality,” Chin said at the opening of the installation.
“We should (and may) die trying to render climate change issues perceptually accessible as a means to reactivate wonder and rekindle empathy,” he told HuffPost,

‘The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm,’ Allison Janae Hamilton

"The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm," by Allison Janae Hamilton.
Jerry L Thompson

On an island at Storm King Art Center, in Mountainville, New York, are three vertiginous stacks of tambourines all painted white. They form an installation by Kentucky-born, Florida-raised artist Allison Janae Hamilton. The title – “The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm” – comes from a 1928 hymn, “Florida Storm,” written about the Great Miami Hurricane, which in 1926 devastated large parts of southern Florida, killing nearly 400 people.
Hamilton says the piece also references the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, which claimed between 2,500 and 3,000 lives in Florida and the Caribbean. Many of those in Florida who lost their lives in the disaster were black, migrant farm workers who were later buried in mass, unmarked graves.
“As climate change continues to threaten our environments, so increases the vulnerability of those already exposed to longstanding environmental injustices,” Hamilton told HuffPost. “Through the narratives in my artwork, I explore the changing climate as a palpable, human experience.”

‘What Future Do You Choose for Miami?’, Miami Murals/Before It’s Too Late

A viewer uses their smartphone to view ‘What Future Do You Choose for Miami?’,
an augmented reality mural in the city.
Before Its Too Late 

A group of artists and technologists, anxious to better engage people in the threats posed by climate change, have banded together to create an augmented-reality mural in the city under the banner of an initiative called “Before It’s Too Late.”Miami has been called the ground zero of climate change. By 2030, Miami sea levels are projected to rise by six to 10 inches above 1992 levels. Extreme weather events have battered the city – 2017′s Hurricane Irma swept through Florida leaving a trail of devastation in its wake and claiming more than 80 lives in the state.
The 96- by 14-foot mural features a canary, designed to symbolize the city’s status as a “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to climate change.
Viewers download an app that allows them to point their smartphones at the wall and see it come to life by way of an augmented-reality film. The film shows two future realities for the city. In one, no action is taken and the city becomes unliveable – flooded, decaying and dirty. The second shows a hopeful future powered by renewable energy.
“Our message is in order to create change for a better future, we have to first be willing to shine the mirror on ourselves as we are each participants who help create the moral and cultural values of this world,” “Before It’s Too Late” founder Linda Cheung told HuffPost.

‘Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas 2017),’ John Gerrard

Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas 2017), a virtual art installation by Irish artist John Gerrard,
 uses a haunting image to symbolize our complex relationship with oil.
Courtesy John Gerrard Thomas Dane Gallery London and Simon Preston Gallery New York

The focal point of his work is a towering, computer-generated flag belching out black smoke. The flag runs as if in real time: The landscape turns dark when the sun goes down in Texas and is lit during the daytime.
Spindletop, Texas, is the site of the world’s first major oil discovery, made in 1901. Where once 100,000 barrels of oil were extracted in one day, the land is now barren. Irish artist John Gerrard flew a drone over the area, taking 10,000 to 15,000 photos, to recreate it virtually for his artwork Western Flag.
Gerrard wanted to take on oil as something that is central to our reality, a material that has become essential to the way we live our lives both in terms of the advantages it provides and the climate damage it causes.
The flag aims to make manifest this uncomfortable dichotomy. “One of the greatest legacies of the 20th century is not just population explosion or better living standards, but vastly raised carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere,” Gerrard told HuffPost. “This flag gives this invisible gas, this international risk, an image, a way to represent itself.”

‘Cascade,’ Alexis Rockman

Cascade, 2015, oil and alkyd on wood, Collection Grand Rapids Art Museum.
Alexis Rockman Collection Grand Rapids Art Museum

Alexis Rockman has been tackling climate change through his art since 1994, when a paleontologist described the danger heading our way and why he was frightened about it. Rockman decided to used his position as an artist “to visualize these things that were very abstract and remote in terms of people’s life span and comprehension,” he told HuffPost.
“I realized that art was one of the few places where you don’t have censorship pressure from capitalism from powerful industries,” he added. “They don’t have a say if you decide to focus on ideas that might challenge their business model.”
Many of his images show landscapes ravaged by climate change and environmental destruction. “Cascade” is part of his “Great Lakes Cycle,” a series that explores the past, present and future of America’s Great Lakes. These lakes form one of the most important ecosystems on the planet, holding over 20 percent of the world’s freshwater reserves. But they are exploited and vulnerable to climate change. Rockman depicts both their beauty and the devastating threats they face.
When asked if he thought art can spur change when it comes to global warming, he replied: “No. When there is open warfare on empirical facts my feelings include rage and disgust to go along with despair.” But, he added, “Part of the reason to be an artist is to get yourself out of bed every morning and try to do something about it, or at least cope. The thing about being an artist is that it’s so self-motivated and self-determined that it has to be an act of defiance to get through it.”

"Rococo Remastered," by Noel Kassewitz. Kassewitz Kassewitz Productions 2018

"Rococo Remastered," by Noel Kassewitz.
Kassewitz Kassewitz Productions 2018

Washington, D.C.-based artist Noel Kassewitz makes “climate change ready” art. Using found flotation devices and color palettes from different periods of art history – such as rococo – she makes pieces that aim to bring attention to climate change with humor.
“Today, we are facing unprecedented levels of chaos with our climate,” Kassewitz told HuffPost, “While there are myriad ways the change is occurring, one most concerning to me – an artist and Miami native – is rising sea levels.”
She has been floating down the Potomac River on her artwork, showing its buoyant abilities as well as trying to send a message to those who ignore the problem.
“Humor catches people off guard, and through my current bodies of work I am often able spark conversations with people otherwise reluctant to engage with the topic. As for my own amusement, I imagine some day in the flooded future an art collector will be safely sitting on top of their floating artwork exclaiming, “Thank goodness we bought a Noel Kassewitz!’

Links

• A Photographic Exploration Of The Cryosphere
• Earth Alert: A Photographic Response To Climate Change
• 'Art Can Play A Valuable Role': Climate Change Installations Appear In New York
• Could Cli-Fi Help Inspire Real Climate Change Action?
• Rising Seas: 'Florida Is About To Be Wiped Off The Map'
• 6 Must-See Movies About Climate Change
• Margaret Atwood: Women Will Bear Brunt Of Dystopian Climate Future
• New Documentaries Bring Climate Change To The Big Screen
• ANU Presents Climate Change In Beer Coaster And Bracelet Form
• 7 Novels That Will Fire You Up About Climate Change
• The Art Of Climate Change Gallery 4: What Can We Do To Address Climate Change?

Opera House Goes Carbon Neutral Five Years Ahead Of Schedule

Fairfax - Helen Pitt

The Sydney Opera House was notoriously behind schedule on most things during the 14 years it took to build but on Monday it will be five years ahead of schedule when it meets its target to reduce emissions and become carbon neutral.
This move puts it up there with New York's Empire State building and Paris's Eiffel Tower as global  architectural icons which are actively working to become world symbols of energy efficiency, its Environmental Sustainability Manager Emma Bombonato said.

Officials at the Sydney Opera House have been working to increase its energy efficiency and decrease its waste for the past decade. Photo: Supplied

To celebrate the fact it has achieved certification against the Australian Government’s National Carbon Offset Standard (NCOS), its famous white sails will turn green on Monday night at 6pm. Melbourne's Pixel building was Australia's first carbon neutral building in 2011.
Officials at the Sydney Opera House have been working to increase its energy efficiency and decrease its waste for the past decade. In 2014 it replaced incandescent bulbs in the Concert Hall with custom LED lights to achieve a 75 per cent reduction in the venue’s electricity consumption. In 2017 it introduced a new building management control system to monitor energy and water use and manage climate control. It also optimised the heating and cooling of the building by replacing chiller units connected to the Opera House’s pioneering seawater cooling system in that same year, resulting in a 9 per cent energy reduction.
"One of the biggest benefits of changing the incandescent bulbs to LEDs, means that instead of changing them in the Concert Hall once a year, now it is needed only once every nine years," she said.
By becoming more energy efficient and streamlining day-to-day operations, it reduced its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and offset its remaining emissions for the year 2017-2018 with help from its major partner EnergyAustralia. To reduce its carbon footprint, Australia's most recognisable building invested in renewables, tree planting and biodiversity projects to offset its greenhouse emissions. The 2015 Paris Agreement set a goal of limiting a rise in world surface temperatures, and last month the mayors of 19 cities, including Sydney, put in place regulations requiring all new buildings to be carbon neutral by 2030 and all existing ones to reach the same goal by 2050.
Each year the Opera House hosts 1800 events, serves 2.6 million food and beverage orders – producing 5000 cubic metres of waste and uses electricity equivalent to 2500 households (16 gigawatts). A new waste management program, including the introduction of new recycling streams and transferring food waste that would have otherwise gone to landfill to an organics facility to be turned into energy last year, improved the waste recycling rate from 25 per cent to 60 per cent. An educational program on waste management for staff and contractors also helped reduce waste.
"It’s the Opera House’s responsibility to find innovative solutions to reduce its carbon footprint and inspire the community to do the same," Opera House CEO Louise Herron said.

The Opera House goes green, Monday night at 6pm. Photo: Fiora Sacco 

When designing the Opera House, Danish architect Jørn Utzon was inspired by nature
and integrated features now recognised as sustainable design which included an innovative seawater cooling system that continues to efficiently power the Opera House’s main heating and air-conditioning. An early interpretation of the "chilled ceiling" design (in wide use today to reduce energy consumption) remains in the Drama Theatre to help control the venue’s air temperature.
The building was designed with durable materials to meet a 250-year lifespan, much more than the 80-year standard of the day. Utzon’s requirements for minimal finishings on building materials reduced resources used and maintenance requirements such as the white shell tiles of the sails which are self-cleaning.
The Sydney Opera House has also pioneered the use of green cleaning practices, rare for a public building, which include using baking soda for concrete cleaning, olive oil for bronze restoration, ozone-treated water for disinfectant, Lux soap flakes used in Western Foyers and a mixture of clay and Lux soap flakes used in the Uzton room.
“Sustainability is in the Opera House’s DNA," Ms Herron said.

The Concert Hall will go green this Monday. Photo: Prudence Upton

"Architect Jørn Utzon incorporated sustainable design into the fabric of the building in the 1960s. We aim to honour and enhance this legacy by embedding sustainable thinking into everything we do. I’m proud to announce that thanks to long-term focus, creativity and the support of our partner EnergyAustralia we’ve become carbon neutral five years ahead of target," she said.
The next step in the Opera House’s Environmental Sustainability Plan (2017-2019) is to reduce its energy use by 20 per cent, achieve 85 per cent recycling of operational waste; achieve a 5-star Green Star Performance Rating (it is currently 4-star); and maintain its certified carbon neutral status year-on-year in time for its 50th anniversary in 2023.
"By slashing energy use and ramping up recycling the Opera House has truly set the stage for others to follow," NSW Minister for Energy and Utilities and Minister for the Arts Don Harwin said.

Links

• Sydney Opera House to go carbon neutral by 2023
• Empire State Building Awarded LEED Gold Certification
• Paris Has Turned the Eiffel Tower Into a Wind Energy Machine
• National Carbon Offset Standard
• 19 Global Cities Commit to Make New Buildings “Net-Zero Carbon” by 2030

Climate Change Must Be Dealt With Before It Unleashes Millions Of Global-Warming Refugees

South China Morning Post - Mike Rowse

Mike Rowse says mass migration, driven by war and politics, has already fuelled social discontent in Europe and America. But things may get much worse if climate change continues unchecked and leaves millions in at-risk countries homeless

Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar arrive at the border of Bangladesh in 2017. War and politics are common factors in mass migration, but soon climate change may be too. Photo: AFP

Millions of people around the world are being forced from their homes by violent circumstances. Many more aspire to move to another country in search of a better life for themselves and their families. These twin drivers of mass migration are already triggering political trauma in destination countries. And now there’s a third factor with the potential to cause human suffering on a massive scale: climate change.
There are two broad groups of reasons why people up sticks and move to a different country: the necessity-push and the opportunity-pull. Up until now, probably the most common push factors have been war and politics. During the violent partition that accompanied the birth of India and Pakistan in 1947, millions scrambled to get on the “right” side of the new borders. Closer to home, the Vietnam war ended with hundreds of thousands of those associated with the losing regime fleeing from the south, many stopping over in Hong Kong on their way to safety in a sanctuary country.
More recently, the appalling civil war in Syria has displaced millions of its citizens, mostly to adjacent countries such as Turkey and Jordan, though about a million flooded into western Europe, and many settled in Germany. A military crackdown in Myanmar has forced over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh. A question mark hangs over the residence rights of four million people in India, who have been left off a citizens’ register on suspicion of being illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
The pull factor in migration has undergone a step change in recent years, thanks to technological progress. The possibility of a better life somewhere else has historically been uncertain because of a lack of reliable information about what life “over there” was really like. It took time for news to filter back and it was safer to maintain the status quo.

A Canadian immigration officer interviews a Vietnamese family in a refugee camp in Sham Shui Po in 1979. Photo: C.Y. Yu

 But with the prevalence of mobile phones now, everyone can see for themselves pictures of what life is like in wealthy countries. The certainty of misery in poorer parts of the world can now be contrasted with images of well-fed people living more comfortable lives overseas.
The most desirable destination countries have struggled to cope with the throngs of arrivals both practically and politically. Recent election results in Europe have shown conclusively that anti-immigrant feelings run high. Italy’s new government has taken a hard line against would-be migrants from Africa, even turning ships away.
In Sweden, an anti-immigration party finished a close third behind two established middle-of-the-road parties in recent elections. German politics is still affected by the arrival of a million migrants in 2015 and 2016, mostly from Syria; the hard-right Alternative for Germany is now the main opposition party.
In Denmark, Austria and Hungary, to name a few, general public sentiment is against large numbers of people being allowed entry and settlement. Some analysts believe that immigration was a major factor in the Brexit vote in Britain, and in the election of Donald Trump in the United States. In Australia, the treatment of asylum seekers is a hot-button issue.

One of Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to build a border wall between Mexico and the US. Photo: AFP

In all of the cases, the exact causes vary, but cultural differences, religious beliefs and sometimes naked racism play some part.
Into this tricky mix, let us add climate change. The world’s climate has always varied through the ages, as the deniers never cease to point out. But the scientific community has reached a high degree of consensus that human activity – in particular, the widespread use of coal and other carbon-emitting fuels since the modern industrial era began – is causing global warming.
According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2018 is on track to be the fourth hottest year on record. Just three other years have been hotter: 2015, 2016 and 2017.
We in Hong Kong have just experienced the strongest typhoon on record. Scientists say there may be fewer – but bigger and stronger – such storms in future. At a global level, a real danger is that melting polar caps will cause sea levels to rise and leave several countries under water. Already, the government of the Maldives has held a cabinet meeting underwater to highlight the threat.
The islands’ population is under half a million – perhaps they could be squeezed into Sri Lanka. What about Fiji and other islands at risk in the Pacific? Maybe New Zealand could take them in. But what are we going to do if Bangladesh should slip beneath the waves? Where do we expect 163 million people to go?

An aerial view of an atoll in the Maldives, which faces dangers such as rising sea levels and more intense storms. Photo: Reuters

The world knows what it has to do to avert tragedy. The problem is the costs of coping with climate change, which have to be paid right here, right now, and which voters must be persuaded to cover. But in such a critical hour, the leader of the free world has abdicated responsibility.
Not content with pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord, Trump has put new emphasis on the coal industry in America. At his age, he might not need to worry about the long-term consequences of his pro-coal policy changes. But as a father and grandfather, he should be. His grandchildren in particular – like the rest of the world – will not forgive him.

Links

• Australia’s new PM ditches plan for climate targets law
• Why Malaysians need to adapt to harsh realities of climate change
• How climate change can cause more super typhoons
• Death by heat is real: here’s how Hong Kong can save itself
• Typhoon Mangkhut’s message to Hong Kong: rethink reclamation
• As typhoons wreak greater havoc, what is the link to climate change?
• Our ruined planet: land decay set to unleash mass migration