How did this get past the editors at science journal Nature:
“Any public campaign benefits from having an iconic image – something that captures the essence of the message and engraves it indelibly on our memories. But it is almost impossible to predict which images will actually stick, so creating one on demand is
extraordinarily difficult. For instance, who could have forecast that of all the news photographs emanating from the Vietnam
war, it was Nick Ut’s photograph of a napalmed child screaming naked on a road that would become the canonical image of innocent suffering during that unhappy episode in history?Even so, finding an iconic image was one of the goals of a meeting, ‘Changing the Climate’, held in Oxford, UK, on 11 and 12 September (http://kron1.eng.ox.ac.uk/climate).
Researchers and practitioners of the visual,literary, musical and performing arts came together to publicize the predicted perils of climate change, and there was much talk about a memorable image that would encapsulate the initiative.
The challenge is considerable. Any icon inevitably involves condensation and simplification, but the
issues surrounding climate change are extraordinarily complex. Can an image be found that is both simple and good science?”
(Nature, Vol 437)
The meeting came up with this:
I don’t get the relationship between ENSO and global warming?
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
How did it get past the editors? Perhaps we need take a look at the editors. Wasn’t it Nature that published a paper that pretended to prove a foundation for homeopathy a few years ago? And took a right bollocking for it too.
My stereotypical environmental campaigner is of a leftish persuasion, and is disrespectful of the free market, and disapproves of the use of simple slogans to flog gullible consumers garbage they don’t need to impress people they don’t like. (Can’t remember who to attribute that one to.)
Consequently, it is apparently a teensy bit inconsistent for environmental campaigners to resort to the use of slogans and iconic images to persuade people who couldn’t give a toss to take up a belief that they could do without to create the illusion within their own minds of a meaningful existence.
And it’s not like the said campaigners try to hide the fact that they are using dumbed-down slogans to garner our support, they brag about it. The tree-huggers did this in WA a few years ago; after they successfully wrecked the native forest industry, they then got a piece in the local rag boasting about how they used a public relations consultant to produce some nice short slogans that we could all chant together. “4 legs good, 2 legs bad, 4 legs …..” Like in Mother Russia, it worked a treat.
I am troubled by my own reaction to Jennifer’s “Climate Icons” example. It’s not that global warming is of no concern to me, and I do worry that fossil carbon may be a major variable, but when these clowns fabricate something as shallow as a fast food ad to attract my support, they actually lend credibility to the global warming sceptics.
“Researchers and practitioners of the visual,literary, musical and performing arts came together to publicize the predicted perils of climate change.”
The results of subsidised art!
I like this one better (Tim Blair in the Bulletin).
“Tens of thousands of people ignored frigid temperatures Saturday to lead a worldwide day of protest against global warming.”
Here’s what they came up with.
“It’s hot in here,” chanted a group of drummers, heedless of the stinging cold. “There’s too much carbon in the atmosphere.”
Actually the Hockey Stick was an icon. Too bad it was fake.
Jen,
ENSO and Global Warming has no connection – and the only fossil carbon is lignite or brown coal, as mined in Morwell. Bituminous coal and hydrocarbons above methane are not derived from fossils.
Those who assert so are, however, in possession of fossilised brains.
Not much to add here.
Nature perhaps did not know that the Vietnam War iconic image was fraudulent and that the picture as publised had been cropped so that the considerable assistance on hand was not shown thereby over-dramatising the situation. Nature does however seem keen to over-dramatise the global warming situation.
Well the motivation for the graphic might be a bit dubious – fair cop there. However I would have to say that Nature were pretty explicit in what was being presented. No attempt to hide anything nor the origin.
But Hockey Stick far from over or being “fake”. At last return serve it was back with Mann I recall. (Hey let’s do 50 back and forths on Hockey Stick) OK – I’ll start – the Hockey Stick is 100% correct !!
ENSO issues may be related to global warming – jury is out – never never say never. Of course some of us may not know an ENSO from a running average. And why would you even believe in ENSO if you hate anomalies ??
The issues in the Nature graphic are all quite reasonable concern issues for investigation.
It is evident from the contorted bizarre ramblings on CO2 whose cranial cavity has fossilised. Knowledge of physics and statistics zero.
What’s a Tibetan altitude change? Salinity valve?
Where’s the Atlantic Conveyor?
These questions need answering!
I think you’ll find it’s “albedo”. A darker albedo resulting from melting snow?
Noun: albedo
1. The ratio of reflected to incident light
Conveyor – missing … pity
Salinity valve – difference between salinity of two water bodies at a pinch point.
Guardian has a nice little grab on both issues:
************************
Tibetan plateau
Spanning one quarter of China’s entire landmass lies the Tibetan plateau. Because the region is permanently under snow and ice, it behaves like a giant mirror, reflecting the sun’s rays back into space.
The effect is to keep a lid on global warming, at least locally, as the darker soils are unable to bask in the sun’s radiation and increase in temperature.
In a warmer world, the white of the Tibetan plateau will slowly turn to brown and grey as the snow retreats to reveal the ground beneath. As the ground warms, melting will accelerate. Tibet will become a much warmer place.
Salinity valves
In some parts of the world, local geography conspires to pinch the waters between adjacent seas into separate bodies of water. If one is saltier than the other, a flux of salt, nutrients and oxygen can be set up across the gap, producing what scientists refer to as a salinity valve.
Arguably the most significant salinity valve is the Strait of Gibraltar, acting as a pinch between the Mediterranean and the north Atlantic Ocean. The gradients across the valves give rise to unique ecosystems that are highly adapted to local conditions.
As global warming is expected to disrupt ocean currents, by warming the seas and diluting the surface waters that drive other water circulations, marine life around salinity valves could in turn face major disruption.
Of course the Nature graphic may not even be an original see
http://www.igbp.kva.se//uploads/NL_50.pdf
See Fig 1 page 7
And sorry Paul – Conveyor is missing but Atlantic Deepwater Formation isn’t – that the bit that might affect the Conveyor.
These articles are saying these are things we want to avoid.
See also http://europa.eu.int/comm/environment/climat/pdf/final_report2.pdf Sep 2005 report
Yes, albedo makes more sense.
“Whatta we want?”
“More albedo”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!!”
Nah, I think those Montreal drummers have got this one sewn up.
“—local geography conspires to pinch the waters—-”
Hey Hey Hey, we got us a (another) conspiracy.
To get a higher albedo, just clear the trees and replace those solar panels on the roof with mirrors should be more effectve than many other aproaches.
For those interested in creating propaganda icons by the extreme green movement this boastful extract from one of their books is worth a read.
THE REST OF THE WORLD IS WATCHING
GREEN IMAGES
Richard Flanagan and Cassandra Pybus
Innovation has been a hallmark of the Tasmanian Green movement, not only in its political orientation, but also in its appropriation of the marketing methods of capitalism to win its battles. Long before any other radical movement in Australia, the Tasmanian Greens were using market research, sophisticated advertising techniques, direct-sell catalogues and photographic images of the highest quality to sell their message. “We have grabbed ideas from wherever we could,” Bob Brown explained in a 1983 interview. ‘We looked at the way other people who sell cheese and paper tissues, how they do it, and thought that if that sells an idea then how much more important that [it] be grafted by us into saving wilderness’. In an era vaunted as the age of communications (and all the contradictions that this implies) the Tasmanian Greens have been a measure of their time.
A Romantic interpretation of the Tasmanian wilderness begins with the European invasion in 1803. In the period following the European war against the Aboriginal inhabitants and the removal of all tribal people from the island, images such as those produced by the Tasmanian-born painter, W.C. Piguenit (1836-1914), were as comforting as they were historically false. Piguenit’s pictures of the south-west show the area as being full of sweeping dramatic vistas but quite empty of people.
Although some other painters followed in Piguenit’s tradition, the Romantic vision of the Tasmanian wilderness was to be popularised by the practitioners of the new art of photography, notably S. Spurling and J.W Beattie.
Beattie in particular was indefatigable in popularising Tasmania. Although often presented as a father figure of Tasmanian conservation, Beattie had a keen utilitarian perception of the worth of the Romantic landscapes for a tourist industry being developed in Tasmania in the late 19th century. His photographs were reproduced nationally and internationally, and he personally gave countless lectures, illustrated with glass lantern slides of the Tasmanian scenery. He arranged repeats of his lantern shows in Britain, where in one year over 200 such lectures were delivered. With Beattie the tradition of propagandist photography begins in Tasmania.
The campaign to protect Lake Pedder brought forth a range of aesthetic responses which drew from the Romantic tradition and also the newer modernist abstract aesthetics. The most potent expression of the beauty of Pedder was in the work of Lithuanian-born bushwalker, Olegas Truchanas, who regularly packed the Town Hall with his slide shows. Truchanas’ magnificent collections of photographs of the Tasmanian wilderness had been lost, along with his home, in the 1967 bushfires. He determined to rebuild his collection to show people just what it was that would be destroyed by hydro schemes in the south-west.
Truchanas returned again and again to the south-west. In 1972 he lost his life in the Gordon River he wished to save. ‘He had been destroyed by biblical simplicity by two of the elements: fire and water,’ wrote his friend, artist Max Angus. ‘Classical mythology affords no stronger example of the drama of the incorruptible man who passes into legend.’
Olegas Truchanas became the Greens’ archetypal hero: the man who returns from of the wilderness with an aesthetic and a political vision which challenges the established order, and then is returned to the wilderness in the most profound and final way. It is a reincarnation of the great Romantic figure: the artist as hero, the essence of which is starkly captured in Ralph Hope-Johnstone’s photograph of Truchanas taken days before his death.
The posthumous publication of Truchanas’ seminal work in The World of Olegas Truchanas (1975) was an impressive beginning to the Greens’ role as a major cultural interpreter. Books, films, photographic ephemera poured out of the movement during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These were the nub of a political-commercial-aesthetic nexus which the Tasmanian
Greens skillfully nurtured, creating their own national distribution through the very successful Wilderness shops. The Greens made wilderness a commodity whose commercial nakedness they clothed in the Romantic aesthetic borrowed from Piguenit and refined by the wilderness photographers who followed in Truchanas’ footsteps.
The leading exponent of this school was Truchanas’ student and disciple, Peter Dombrovskis. The political Romantic vision has its apotheosis in his photo of Rock Island Bend, the most famous photograph ever taken of the Franklin River. It was used to illustrate a full-colour supplement in all major newspapers on the eve of the 1983 federal election. The ALP judged the Franklin issue to have been critical in the outcome of that election. In 1990, when once again Green issues looked to determine the federal election outcome, Rock Island Bend was prominent in glossy advertising promoting the ALP as the environmentally responsible choice.
Amanda Lohrey has suggested that in Tasmania the Greens have fused the Utopian and Romantic visions of Tasmania into a new vision that is greater and different from both of them. This new vision finds eloquent expression in a well-publicised photo of Christine Milne taken at the height of the Wesley Vale controversy. This high Romantic image — a solitary woman on a blasted heath — became charged, in the context of a highly charged environmental and political battle, with a whole new array of rich meanings.
In this image is also the idea of the Green leader as a solitary prophet, remote from the movement which creates and sustains such leaders. Images of mass action, such as the 20,000-strong rally in Hobart in 1983, have never fascinated the media in the same way as the image of a messianic leader.
Long-time Green strategist, Chris Harries, has written of the problems and contradictions of using the media during the Franklin campaign. Faced with a media ‘which demands superstars and which has conditioned society to think in terms of hierarchies and heroes . . . Bob Brown played out The Life of Brian. His pre-eminence in the media campaign was always understood as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and he was painfully aware of the contradiction’.
A media that creates a messiah must logically have its tale told in full, replete with a crucifixion. When forestry workers at Farmhouse Creek dragged Bob Brown (one of many protesters) away from the bulldozer, they were enacting their set roles in a passion play cum photo opportunity par excellence- The powerful image of this photo, shown over and over again across the nation and across the world, is full of falsities, not the least of which is the idea of the prophet being destroyed by a stupid and vicious common people.
The Farmhouse Creek photo does also point to a change in the political aesthetic in Green promotion in the late 1980s. Forests do not lend themselves to Romantic vistas in quite the same way as do wild rivers, but images of the violence done to majestic native forests do, and these became more prominent than the images of the forests themselves.
Stark monochrome vistas of burnt-over clearfells became the staple of Green publications throughout the forestry battles. Likewise, as the forestry industry and government strengthened their armoury against the Green protest, images of confrontation loomed large, both in the media and the Green press. The workers, not the bosses, are portrayed as the enemy in graphic close-ups of chainsaw-wielding forestry workers or alarmed police cordons.
April 1990