Heat and water

The charts of ocean surface temperature spikes and the extreme heat in Southeast Asia and on Indian subcontinent as well as in the southwestern US are astonishing and worrying. There is a limit to what our infrastructure can handle and what we and other species can survive.

I tend to only skim comments because the cesspool is too deep, but one striking think is the willingness of less vitriolic commenters to explain away the unprecedented temperature spikes with theories ranging from the fact that this is just normal because it's been hot before, to pseudoscientific theories of solar activity, to clandestine geo-engineering, to blaming decrease in sulphur emissions (that bit is at least partially true) for the whole thing. Anything really, but human-caused climate change. I think it's fear. I see it here, too. It takes a different form. So we talk about green jobs and transition to net-zero economy and ethical clean oil. Anything really that looks like something that's already here. But everything will need to change - how we move, how we work, how we relate to each other and to other species, where we live, how we govern ourselves and what we think the economy is actually for.

In the meantime, stories from India, Pakistan and Myanmar are already prompting United States Institute for Peace to write stories outlining a fairly comprehensive list of impacts people in those countries are already facing and the rest of us will face soon enough.

To bring this back to photography, interestingly, we don't have a visual language yet to show us what climate change means outside of the usual disaster news photos. The visuals dealing with the global nature of climate emergency are science charts and heat maps at the moment. Photo organizations like VII are very much aware of the need to figure out how we visually talk about climate change and their series of webinars on Visualizing Climate Crisis is a start. Here is a link to the first one looking at ocean acidification and the second one looking at virtual water.

So much work to be done...