Famous paintings help global warming experts track climate change over the decades

James Maynard in Tech Times: Paintings from J.M.W. Turner and other artists are being used to track how pollution levels may have changed over time. Investigators are examining what vivid sunrises and sunsets painted by artists could tell us about the environmental effects of volcanic eruptions.

William Turner was born in England in 1775, and lived until 1851. He is best known as a landscape artist, including a wide variety of sunset paintings. The Lake, Petworth sunset, fighting bucks by the artist is one of the paintings investigators examined to clues to ancient eruptions.  In 1815, the Tambora Volcano in Indonesia erupted, spewing thousands of tons of debris into the air. Much of this material traveled around the road, making sunsets and sunrises redder and more dramatic.

Christos Zerefos, from the Academy of Athens in Greece, led the investigation.  "Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists. But we have found that, when coloring sunsets, it is the way their brains perceive greens and reds that contains important environmental information," Zerefos told the press.

Researchers studied 554 paintings of sunsets created between 1500 and 2000. A total of 181 artists created the art works, including Rembrandt, Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Rubens.  "We found that red-to-green ratios measured in the sunsets of paintings by great masters correlate well with the amount of volcanic aerosols in the atmosphere, regardless of the painters and of the school of painting," Zerefos explained.

Greater than normal levels of red predominated in areas affected by volcanic ash, study says. This allows a way of measuring the aerosol optical depth, a total of all the dust, ash and other particulate matter in the atmosphere at a given time....

Turner's "Petworth Park"

Louvre plans to evacuate works from Paris due to flooding risk

Gareth Harris in the Art Newspaper: Officials at the Louvre hope to establish a storage facility in the north of France that would house most of the museum’s vast 460,000-strong collection. The Louvre’s holdings are currently stored in the basement of the museum building on the banks of the River Seine and could be damaged if the city ever floods. Around 35,000 works are usually on display at the museum.

The culture minister Aurélie Filippetti has announced plans to transfer works from the Paris museum to a special storage facility located around 200km away near the Louvre-Lens satellite branch in the northern region of Nord-Pas de Calais. The government has commissioned a feasibility study on the project.

...The proposed venue was due to house the collections of three Paris museums at risk from flooding: the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée du Quai Branly and the Louvre. But the idea was abandoned because of uncertainty over costs. Representatives from the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée du Quai Branly declined to comment on the Louvre’s new storage plans....

An aerial view of the Louvre, shot by MatthiasKabel, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

What happens when we dodge a thunderbolt? A further Tim Prentice update

Weeks after Hurricane Irene came and went, I followed up with the brilliant sculptor down the road, Tim Prentice, on how he protected his kinetic outdoor sculptures. His preparations were small, it turns out. He moved a caged lobster made of sheet metal named Fred into his barn, even though Fred demanded to face the gale unassisted. Tim's prudence turned out to be unnecessary. The storm was a non-event in Cornwall, if you ignore the power being out for two days. Some of our neighbors did get walloped, but nothing like the devastation to the north in Vermont.

Tim said, "We lost a few branches here and there, but that just means we have plenty of firewood for the winter." Fred has since moved out of the barn back to his usual post.

Were all the warnings about Irene justified? Luck steered the storm away from Carbon Based and our neighbors. We could have skipped all the preparations. We know that now, but we can't be sure what will happen the next time. Had the storm followed a slightly different track, we could have experienced Vermont-level destruction.

A risk that doesn't happen doesn't mean that the warnings were unnecessary. Of course, psychology being what it is, the next mega-storm may get short shrift because people will remember that Irene wasn't so bad in their neighborhood. They will think that way, even though Irene resulted in some $3 billion in losses.

This gap between direness of the warnings and the actual outcomes is endemic to discussions of long-term risks. How do we stay prepared for chronic dangers that will be around for decades-- like climate change? The classical environmental campaign, at least in caricature, involves scaring as many people as much as possible, to spur citizens' willingness to act. But in the long term, this is counterproductive. Most of us quickly get exhausted by overused alarms.

Climate change demands that we maintain our willingness to act for decades. We have to find ways of staying vigilant without triggering resistance in all of us, and without getting tired of the Cassandras.

In short, we have to learn to hover in the breeze like one of Tim's sculptures, and learn when to ask to be taken inside.

Above, Tim Prentice's open-air porch, with one of the worst-insulated windows ever. Below is Fred, the wimpy lobster. Photos by Brian Thomas

Don't blow me down! The sculptures of Tim Prentice menaced by the hurricane

On the Friday before Hurricane Irene reaches the northwest corner of Connecticut, I paid a call on Tim Prentice, a neighbor who is best known as a kinetic sculptor. Tim and his team create mobiles. These delicate structures of wire, Lexan and other materials hover in the air, or are attached to vertical surfaces, where they spin or wave in the breeze. Some move slowly, others are more intricate. Tim's house and shop are a compelling attraction, since his yard teems with startling mobiles unlike anything you'd expect to see on a road in rural Connecticut.

His work has been installed in hundreds of venues, from embassies to corporate headquarters in the United States and around the world. On his website he says, " I take it as an article of faith that the air around us moves in ways which are organic, whimsical, and unpredictable. I therefore assume that if I were to abdicate the design to the wind, the work would take on these same qualities. The engineer in me wants to minimize friction and inertia to make the air visible. The architect studies matters of scale and proportion. The navigator and sailor want to know the strength and direction of the wind. The artist wants to understand its changing shape...."

With nonstop hurricane porn blaring from the media, I thought, how are Tim's fragile-seeming sculptures going to fare in a high wind? I paid a call on him to find out. I found Tim in his barn wrapping a video shoot for a presentation. I asked him whether he was going to bring any of his pieces inside to protect them.

"I don't know," he said. "I'm curious to see how they perform in a high wind. I had one commission that was out in the open, and the client called me before a nor'easter wanting to know if it would hold up. I told them to leave it out so we could see how it would do. But they chickened out and brought it inside."

Tim noted that some of his pieces could handle a 70-mile-per-hour wind, but was dubious about anythng stronger. He never takes the outdoor sculptures inside. "Sometimes after a tough winter we find squares of Lexan lying on the ground, and we have to fix them back up a little bit." With a shrug, he added, "I don't have to decide today. We'll see what the weatherman is saying tomorrow."

As his wife Marie Prentice (a noted poet in her own right) pointed out, Tim was philosophical about the fate of his sculptures because his shop is right there, and he can fix anything that gets too badly chewed up.

The fate of art subjected to climate change impacts rarely comes up in your average climate discussion. But maybe it should, especially when the art exists to make use of the wind, the way Tim's art does.

All photographs by Brian Thomas, which you can use under the Creative Commons license of your choice

Adaptation doings in the Philippines

GMA News (Philippines): For eight months, photographer Jose Enrique Soriano visited key areas in Surigao and Southern Leyte to interact with communities whose livelihood and ways of life are under threat due to severe flooding, drought and changing rainfall patterns. The photo exhibit "Visage: Portraits of Filipinos Facing Climate Change" is Soriano's first in four years. The elusive photographer was sought out by climate policy think tank Institute of Climate and Sustainable Cities (iCSC) to capture images of people directly affected by climate change.

Meanwhile, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile renewed his call to pass the People's Survival Fund (PSF), a milestone measure which will dedicate climate change adaptation financing to local governments and communities. Enrile made the call after touring the Visage photo exhibit, saying that Soriano's photos "are haunting reminders of our urgent obligation to extend support to communities living on the frontline of the climate crisis."

Senator Loren Legarda, chair of the Senate Climate Change Committee and author of the Climate Change Act of 2009, echoed Enrile and said the PSF bill is "One significant step our country can take towards climate change resiliency is passing the People’s Survival Fund Bill," said Legarda. "The PSF intends to create a special trust fund that would finance adaptation projects and programs for the most vulnerable among us—such as those whose portraits are found here," Legarda explained.

The PSF bill intends to fund the adaptation programs of local governments situated in particularly vulnerable areas. Activites that can be supported include supporting innovations in irrigation in regions where drought or intense rainfall conditions are expected to become the annual norm. Others include support ecosystem based risk management...

Not from the photo exhibition, unfortunately. This is a US Navy shot of a field in the Aklan is flooded after Typhoon Fengshen hit the region in 2008

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has a new exhibit of keen interest to everyone in the adaptation business (March 24 through October 11): MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center joined forces to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation’s largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Though the national debate on infrastructure is currently focused on “shovel-ready” projects that will stimulate the economy, we now have an important opportunity to foster new research and fresh thinking about the use of New York City's harbor and coastline. As in past economic recessions, construction has slowed dramatically in New York, and much of the city’s remarkable pool of architectural talent is available to focus on innovation.

An architects-in-residence program at P.S.1 (November 16, 2009–January 8, 2010) brings together five interdisciplinary teams, including Architecture Research Office (ARO), to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive “soft” infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology. These creative solutions are intended to dramatically change our relationship to one of the city’s great open spaces.

This installation presents the proposals developed during the architects-in-residence program, including a wide array of models, drawings, and analytical materials.

Sunset over New York City. In "Flug und Wolken" (Flight and Clouds), Manfred Curry, Verlag F. Bruckmann, München (Munich), 1932. Image from United States Coast and Geodetic Survey