Artists Envisioning Climate Change: Come Hell or High Water

A 21-meter-tall high tide in Bristol, England? It’s projected to hit the city if the Greenland Ice Cap melts completely and no mitigation is put in motion, as this installation dramatizes

Following up on a link to yesterday’s post about climate-change denial among U.S. citizens, I discovered an intriguing blog about the arts and the environment.

RSA Arts & Ecology blog reports on an outdoor arts project in England that forces viewers to confront the future impacts of climate change on their own city:

Tomorrow evening at dusk Chris Bodle’s Watermarks Project comes to life in Bristol city centre. The artwork takes the conjectures about the effect of global warming on sea level rise and projects them onto various buildings around the city….

 What’s nice about Bodle’s project is that it has absorbed the uncertainty of the effects of climate change. Though science is broadly in agreement about the fact of man-made global warming…how much and how quickly levels are going to ascend is the subject of much debate. The Watermarks Project turns the varying projections into, well, projections. Pictured above is a visualisation of where sea levels would be in the worst-case-scenario of the total Greenland icecap melt; the speed of that melt and the mechanism by which the ice is projected to disappear is one of the most hotly debated issues in climate change. 

(Read full blog post here.)

As Arts & Ecology mentions, Bodle is among a growing group of artists worldwide who are using their visual talents to help the rest of us imagine what our immediate environment would look like if no efforts are taken to mitigate the effects of global warming.

Such projects are necessary in temperate regions where the effects of climate change aren’t being felt as directly yet as they are in Africa, Asia and the Andes. (You don’t need to dramatize the future impacts of climate change in the Andes, where glaciers are melting in front of everyone’s eyes, GLOFs are washing away farmers’ crops, and rural people are going hungry.)

I wish some artists in Florida would take a cue and start creating installations to show the worst-case-scenerio waterlines for coastal areas there. That effort might make more of an impact than the Florida sea-level-rise maps issued by NRDC, which scare the pants off experts but which seem abstract to most ordinary people.