Artists, sunsets, volcanoes, and climate science
The Guardian reports on an interesting scientific paper: ‘How old masters are helping study of global warming’.
The article in question, ‘Atmospheric effects of volcanic eruptions as seen by famous artists and depicted in their paintings’, authored by a Greek team headed by Professor Christos Zerefos of the National Observatory of Athens, is based upon a study of paintings depicting sunsets produced between 1500 and 1900. Computer images were scanned to measure the degree of red and green depicted in the atmosphere of each scene, the redder skies indicating a greater presence of atmospheric particles.
I haven’t read the paper itself carefully yet, but it seems to me that there is a danger in taking an artist’s depiction of the colours in the sky too literally as a direct indication of what the atmospheric conditions actually were, that pigments change over time, and that using electronic images of the pictures rather than analysing the paintings themselves adds another level of unreliability. And I hope, as they are looking at Turner, that they will also be reading Ruskin, who was as apocalyptic about the weather as any modern-day global warming zealot.
Happily, the journal in which the article appears, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, is open-access, and can be read by anyone, by following the links below. The article itself is a PDF file.
C. S. Zerefos, V. T. Gerogiannis, D. Balis, S. C. Zerefos, A. Kazantzidis, ‘Atmospheric effects of volcanic eruptions as seen by famous artists and depicted in their paintings’, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, vol. 7, no. 15 (August 2007), pp. 4027-4042.
