the greycat blog

A mere two months after it was featured in The Guardian (and right here on this blog), the Zerefos et al analysis of paintings depicting sunsets between 1500 and 1900 has turned up on the Discovery Channel’s news pages: ‘Art as a window to climate change’.

The article quotes some skeptical responses to the Zerefos approach from, among others, Kevin Trenberth of the Climate Analysis Research Center, who points out that ‘Painters are not scientists trying to do an accurate picture of nature’, and James Hamilton, biographer of J. M. W. Turner, who comments that ‘It’s very hard to tell when artists are being absolutely accurate and when they’re using vivid sky as a platform to more vivid painting’.

I agree with those reservations, and have my own doubts about the study, which I noted in my original post, but it’s still an interesting approach and, if nothing else, provides some illuminating insights into the interaction between artists and nature (however they saw that nebulous concept) over a long period. This is a direct link to the Zerefos article (PDF) in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, August 2007.

What do caring environmental campaigners do at Christmas? Frighten and intimidate children, of course:

A grim Christmas message for kids from the mayor of Seattle. Greg Nickels told small children he’s launching ‘Operation Save Santa’ to protect the big guy from global warming. At a Christmas tree lighting, Nickels warned the kids they had to use energy efficient light bulbs, or climate change could melt the North Pole — and drown Santa, his elves and all his reindeer.

Find out more about the kind of man who is capable of telling children not only that Santa, his elves and all his reindeer are going to drown but that it is all their fault by wallowing in his smugness here.

Found via Tim Blair.

Brothels struggle, mountains grow, cats invade, sheep shrink, ice sheets expand, ice sheets contract. Yes, it is just as we feared: global warming has run entirely out of control and is now causing everything.

For all the above hotness calamities and many more (600 or so, in fact) visit Dr John Brignell’s ‘complete list of things caused by global warming’. And while you’re at Dr Brignell’s site, take a little time before the coming eco-catastrophe to read his ‘Global Warming as Religion and not Science’.

My favourite piece of warmy-alarmism: ‘Climate change “could be fashion disaster”‘. Example here.

Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year (gosh), is constantly on the look-out for signs of global warming’s terrible effects. As a result he finds them, all the time, and sometimes in the most surprising places:

The Samburu circumcise their youths in grand ceremonies, which are held every seven years or so, when enough cattle and other foods have accumulated to support such celebrations. Circumcision represents a transition to manhood, and until a youth has passed it he can’t marry. But it’s been 14 years since a circumcision ceremony has been held here. There are now 40,000 uncircumcised young men, some in their late 20s, waiting their turn. All of the eligible young women, tired of waiting, have married older men (multiple wives are allowed), so there are no wives for the new initiates.

I could never have imagined that climate change would have such an effect on an entire society. On reflection though, cultures such as the Samburu are intimately linked to their environment, so as these pressures increase it becomes more difficult to maintain long-held traditions.

I can’t sleep for thinking about those 40,000 foreskins, just left hanging around. For more on the Flannery phenomenon, Tim Blair is your man: try this Google search of his blog.

‘Conservationists’, writes Peter Wilson in The Australian, ‘are questioning the value of protecting “celebrity animals” such as pandas and tigers’. He reports on the views of Chris Packham, a British conservationist, who is arguing that we should get beyond our obsession with the cute and cuddly (pandas), the glamorous and exciting (tigers) and the big and blubbery (whales) and take a more pragmatic view of how the conservation movement/industry best spends its money. ‘I would eat the last panda if I could have all the money we have spent on panda conservation put back on the table for me to do more sensible things with’, he says; ‘The panda is possibly one of the grossest wastes of conservation money in the last half century’.

The underlying issue behind all this is that conservation is driven by a thoroughly anthropocentric worldview shaped by how we would like the world to be rather than how it actually is: hence the quasi-religious worship of whales and the lack of interest in bugs and bacteria. Extinction is a thoroughly natural process, whereas conservation is the ultimate artificial intervention. As Packham puts it, if current conservation priorities had been applied ‘during the last great global warming, we would probably have been throwing our money at the woolly mammoth instead of doing things that might actually work’.

A very interesting chap, Chris Packham. His website is here.

Still at The Times, one wonders if those who think up the headlines there ever actually read the results:

UN chief Ban Ki Moon skates over Antarctica row

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.

Link to journal issue | Direct link to article (PDF)