Depicting global warming

Environmental History

Volumn 10, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 770-775

  Weart, Spencer ^a  

^a AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 30744446718     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/10.4.770     Document Type: Note

References (22)

1. 8 × 24 feet, oil and acrylic on wood, 2004. See Maurice Berger, "Last Exit to Brooklyn," in Manifest Destiny, ed. Alexis Rockman (New York. Brooklyn Museum, 2004), 4-15.
2. After opening at the Brooklyn Art Museum, the mural has been touring. Sites have included the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio; the Rhode Island School of Design; and the Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. Portions of this essay, expanded and with references, maybe found in my essay "The Public and Climate Change," available online or as PDF or CD-ROM at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Public.htm.
3. View online with remarks by the artist at http://www.genomicart.org/ rockman-pn.htm (accessed 3 June 2005).
4. See Alexis Rockman, Alexis Rockman, with Essays by Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathan Cary, David Quammen (New York: Monacelli Press, 2002);
5. and Alexis Rockman, Wonderful World (London: Camden Arts Centre, 2004).
6. Linda Yablonsky, "New York's Watery New Grave" (Arts and Leisure section), New York Times, 11 April 2004.
7. Mark Stevens, "Boro Hell," New York, 10 May 2004.
8. "Manifest Destiny," New Yorker, 12 April 2004, 14-15. Gothamist website with interview: http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2004/07/14/ alexis_rockmans_flooded_brooklyn.php (accessed 7 June 2005). Disclosure: by coincidence, my daughter was one of Rockman's assistants while this painting was made. I would have noted the painting anyway, as the first major art work on a topic whose history I have been studying for two decades.
9. Alice Thorson, "Alexis Rockman: Science, Politics, History, Fantasy-and Prophecy," Kansas City Star, 23 January 2005. Online at http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/columnists/ alice_thorson/10684200.htm (accessed 3 June 2005).
10. Atom Bomb Hits New York (oil on artboard), cover illustration for the 5 August 1950 issue of Collier's, with a related interior illustration.
11. Thorson, "Alexis Rockman."
12. See also "Alexis Rockman: Our True Nature," Greenpeace International, http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/ alexis-rockman-our-true-natur (accessed 7 June 2005).
13. For ruined cities see Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 19-20, 220-221;
14. see passim on pollution and other nuclear themes. The masterpiece of the genre is Max Ernst's Europa nach dem Regen (Europe after the Rains, 1942), in which monsters overlook dissolving ruins.
15. Lee Wilkins and Philip Patterson, "Science as Symbol: The Media Chills the Greenhouse Effect," in Risky Business: Communicating Issues of Science, Risk, and Public Policy, ed. Wilkins and Patterson (New York: Greenwood, 1991), 159-76.
16. The difficulty of arousing interest has also been noted, for example, by New York Times science writer Andy Revkin ("It's a century-scale story, and newspapers are dealing with a day or hour kind of scale," on "Living on Earth," distributed by National Public Radio, 9 October 2004)
17. and environmentalist Bill McKibben, in "Imagine That," Grist, 21 April 2005, http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2005/04/21/ Mckibben-imagine/index.html (accessed 7 June 2005).
18. "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004), directed by Roland Emmerich, was his third "blockbuster" in which New York City is wrecked, respectively by aliens and Godzilla and the climate.
19. Anthony Lane, "Cold Comfort," New Yorker (7 June 2004): 103. The polar ice caps melted to set the scene for "Waterworld" (1995) including a submerged Denver, another action epic obvious as sheer fantasy. The Stanley Kubrick/Steven Spielberg "AI," (2001) set its final scenes in a far-future drowned city but chiefly dissected a decadent near-future society.
20. John Immerwahr, Waiting for a Signal. Public Attitudes toward Global Warming, the Environment and Geophysical Research (New York: Public Agenda, 1999). Online at http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/ attitude_study.html (accessed 7 June 2005).
21. See also suggestions by McKibben, op cit.
22. The history of the science and politics as well as public awareness is described compactly in Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) and in much greater detail on my website of the same name, http://www.aip.org/history/climate