Picturing Climate Change: “It’s the Apocalypse”

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-206
Author(s):  
Miles Orvell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Time Lapse ◽  
Ecological Awareness ◽  
Gulf States ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Climate Disaster

Ecological awareness goes back at least to Henry David Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is only in the late twentieth century that a broader awareness emerged, centering on the effects of a changing climate on the Earth’s surface. The cataclysmic terror of Hurricane Katrina was most vividly photographed by Robert Polidori, among a dozen other New Orleans photographers, and his work is examined in this chapter. A different approach is taken by John Ganis, who has concentrated on the coastal regions of the East and Gulf states and has provided the perspective of a long-range view. Both photographers reveal the fragility of material structures, in which the movement from order to chaos can create shocking images of our disrupted environment. Yet another perspective is taken in the work of James Balog, whose time-lapse photographs and movies have disclosed the melting of polar glaciers at a speed that has startled scientists, even while it has confirmed the worst fears of climate change and the ruins it entails. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the way two popular climate movies by Roland Emmerich have imagined climate disaster, and the ambiguities of such representations.

scholarly journals Near-Surface Salinity as Nature’s Rain Gauge to Detect Human Influence on the Tropical Water Cycle

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 958-977 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Terray ◽  
Lola Corre ◽  
Sophie Cravatte ◽  
Thierry Delcroix ◽  
Gilles Reverdin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Cycle ◽  
Internal Variability ◽  
Human Influence ◽  
Surface Salinity ◽  
Near Surface ◽  
Salinity Changes ◽  
Tropical Water ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Abstract Changes in the global water cycle are expected as a result of anthropogenic climate change, but large uncertainties exist in how these changes will be manifest regionally. This is especially the case over the tropical oceans, where observed estimates of precipitation and evaporation disagree considerably. An alternative approach is to examine changes in near-surface salinity. Datasets of observed tropical Pacific and Atlantic near-surface salinity combined with climate model simulations are used to assess the possible causes and significance of salinity changes over the late twentieth century. Two different detection methodologies are then applied to evaluate the extent to which observed large-scale changes in near-surface salinity can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Basin-averaged observed changes are shown to enhance salinity geographical contrasts between the two basins: the Pacific is getting fresher and the Atlantic saltier. While the observed Pacific and interbasin-averaged salinity changes exceed the range of internal variability provided from control climate simulations, Atlantic changes are within the model estimates. Spatial patterns of salinity change, including a fresher western Pacific warm pool and a saltier subtropical North Atlantic, are not consistent with internal climate variability. They are similar to anthropogenic response patterns obtained from transient twentieth- and twenty-first-century integrations, therefore suggesting a discernible human influence on the late twentieth-century evolution of the tropical marine water cycle. Changes in the tropical and midlatitudes Atlantic salinity levels are not found to be significant compared to internal variability. Implications of the results for understanding of the recent and future marine tropical water cycle changes are discussed.

Building Trust through Social Media in Times of Crisis: Cultural Persuasion, Citizen News, and the Cultural Affordances of Blogs

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Ostertag
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Building Trust ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Mass Migration

Research on trust and news tends to focus on professional news (agents, organizations, institutions), ignores the content of news, and takes place during relatively settled times. This article seeks to remedy these gaps by examining how citizens used blogs to make and share news during a natural disaster and its aftermath. It draws on a case study of blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and examines the perspective of blog users to understand how they built trust in each other and in their shared realities of the recovery and rebuilding periods. It draws on cultural sociology to illustrate how civil and anticivil cultural codes, embodied in culturally specific referents, were drawn upon to construct news messages and messengers, and by extension, trust in each other and a grounded ontological understanding of reality. It argues that the cultural affordances of the blog platform were helpful in users’ ability to build both forms of trust. It concludes with implications for emerging crises of climate change, global pandemics and the mass migration these produce.

Historical Perspectives on Climate Change

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Early America ◽  
Temperature Changes ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

This intriguing volume provides a thorough examination of the historical roots of global climate change as a field of inquiry, from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. Based on primary and archival sources, the book is filled with interesting perspectives on what people have understood, experienced, and feared about the climate and its changes in the past. Chapters explore climate and culture in Enlightenment thought; climate debates in early America; the development of international networks of observation; the scientific transformation of climate discourse; and early contributions to understanding terrestrial temperature changes, infrared radiation, and the carbon dioxide theory of climate. But perhaps most important, this book shows what a study of the past has to offer the interdisciplinary investigation of current environmental problems.

What Is Culture For?

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshihisa Kashima
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Environmental Niche ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Intergroup Conflicts ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What is culture for? What functions does culture serve? This chapter traces a historical background to these functionalist questions and examine their contemporary relevance. Although functionalist perspectives arose from Darwin’s evolutionism in social science and psychology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their theoretical implications were thoroughly criticized and gave way to the emergence of a newer, neo-functionalist thinking in the late twentieth century. A neo-functionalist perspective is discernible in a variety of theoretical approaches in culture and psychology. Its basic tenet suggests that culture is often, though not always, helpful for its adopters to adapt to their local environmental niche, meeting different types of environmental challenges, both natural and human made (built, economic, intergroup, intragroup, psychological). The chapter concludes by advocating that research on culture and psychology can play a critical role in helping humanity meet the twenty-first-century challenges of climate change and intergroup conflicts.

Living with Water in the Era of Climate Change: Lessons from the Lafitte Greenway in Post-Katrina New Orleans

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billy Fields ◽  
Jeffrey Thomas ◽  
Jacob A. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Public Land ◽  
Infrastructure Project

The research examines the shift from flood-resistant policies and plans to flood resilience. We use a case study of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina to illustrate this unfolding process and the emergence of a “living with water” approach to green infrastructure. The article highlights the challenges of this shifting policy landscape through the case of the Lafitte Greenway, a green infrastructure project that transformed a three-mile corridor of underutilized public land into a linear park running through flood-prone neighborhoods. Through the experience of creating this greenway, planners in New Orleans learned valuable lessons about US disaster rebuilding policies and how to implement green infrastructure in urban neighborhoods.

Rivers and Oceans

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-98
Author(s):  
Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd ◽  
Shawn Sobers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Civic Dialogue ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Abstract This two-part article is a comparative analysis of two late twentieth-century works of art: John T. Scott’s Ocean Song (1990), an abstract, large-scale public art sculpture in New Orleans, Louisiana in the US, and Sold Down the River (1999), a major, self-portrait-centered painting by the Bristol, UK-based artist Tony Forbes. As outlined in both sections, contemporary artists have produced works that ensure a continuing civic dialogue about, and commemoration of, site-specific histories of enslavement. In examining and placing these two works in their social, political and cultural contexts, the article highlights the role that artists may play in offering pictorial counter-narratives that question “official,” often tourist-driven, narratives that tend to romanticize and/or mollify colonial and/or imperial initiatives, including enslavement and other legacies marked by trauma.

scholarly journals Sounds Real and Imagined:

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Denise Ruth Von Glahn
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
First Century ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Libby Larsen ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In a career spanning more than four decades, American composer Libby Larsen has turned to the natural world for inspiration on dozens of occasions: her piece Up Where the Air Gets Thin is just one of the results. Unlike many of her nature-based works which provide primarily aesthetic responses to the sights, sounds, feel, and smells of the natural environment, this 1985 duet for contrabass and cello comments on the limits of non-verbal communication and the impact of climate change. It is simultaneously reflective and didactic. “Sounds Real and Imagined” considers the ways Larsen marshals minimal musical materials and a sonic vocabulary that she associates with stillness and cold, in combination with her commitment to environmental awareness and advocacy. It situates the historic 1953 ascent of Mt. Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay within the context of late-twentieth-century artistic responses and an early twenty-first century musicologist-listener’s consciousness.

scholarly journals Short-term climate change and the extinction of the snail Rhachistia aldabrae (Gastropoda: Pulmonata)

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 581-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Gerlach
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Rainfall Patterns ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Stable Habitat

The only known population of the Aldabra banded snail Rhachistia aldabrae declined through the late twentieth century, leading to its extinction in the late 1990s. This occurred within a stable habitat and its extinction is attributable to decreasing rainfall on Aldabra atoll, associated with regional changes in rainfall patterns in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is proposed that the extinction of this species is a direct result of decreasing rainfall leading to increased mortality of juvenile snails.

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