Burning worlds of cartography: a critical approach to climate cosmograms of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Climate science today makes use of a variety of red globes to explore and communicate findings. These transform the iconography which informs this image: the idealised, even mythical vision of the blue, vulnerable and perfect marble is impaired by the application of the colours yellow and red. Since only predictions that employ a lot of red seem to exist, spectators are confronted with the message that the future Earth that might turn out as envisaged here is undesirable. Here intuitively powerful narrations of the end of the world may connect. By employing methods of art history and visual analysis, and building on examples from current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and future scenario maps, this article explores how burning world images bear -intentionally or not -elements of horror and shock. My question explored here is as follows: should 'burning world' images be understood as a new and powerful cosmology?

Burning embers: towards more transparent and robust climate-change risk assessments

“…Yellow was used to indicate negative impacts for some systems or low risks that could become evident at the denoted increase in GMT. While red was used to indicate negative impacts or risks that could be more widespread or greater in magnitude 55 .…”

Visualising the global environmental: new research directions

“…Indeed, the highly traditional field of landscape studies, concerned with landscape not as a mere scenic representation but as active producer of spatio‐temporal relations, may benefit from the productive tensions which arise in the confrontation between different disciplinary lineages. This is evident when combining for instance art history and models developed in physical geography (Regnauld and Limido ), or when amalgamating German media studies with Anglo‐Saxon science studies to provide innovative tools for accounting for the crucial role of technology in the meaning making of the global environment and the cultural production of spaces (Grevsmühl ; Höhler ; Schneider ). Finally, French cultural studies can provide critical arguments for effectively engaging in a political analysis of dialectic and symbolic forms which shape the cultural politics of images and thus spatial order.…”

“…Most papers gathered in this special issue confirm these tensions and findings. Schneider's () essay on climate ‘cosmograms’ (a conflation of ‘cosmos’ and ‘diagram’) shows that the global maps published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are part of a scopic regime of ‘whole Earth’ imagery. This contributes to the objectification of Earth, while at the same time naturalising these views, obscuring the fact that they are always highly constructed views, infused with political and cultural presuppositions that are difficult to control and predict.…”

“…The creation of blind spots is of course only one aspect of a broad range of political processes revealed by the essays. Others include processes of ‘typification’ in climate change photography by ‘offering only a simplistic, racialised politics of space’ (Mahony ), the use of colour in climate change images introducing an ‘aesthetics of fear’ (Schneider ), or the visual promotion of ‘beautiful’ landscapes and ‘perfect’ landforms for conservation policies (Regnauld and Limido ). In sum, since there is no unmediated access in knowing the global environment, many important lessons are to be learnt by engaging in a process of re‐politicisation of global environmental images.…”

The politics of zoom: Problems with downscaling climate visualizations

“…The totalizing, disabling effects of global synopticism are particularly apparent in synoptic climate visualizations. “Burning Worlds” and other global maps depict warming as so extreme and ubiquitous that they overwhelm the possibility of individual localized action (Schneider, ). Meanwhile, synoptic graphs of global warming, such as those authored by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), seem dislocated from viewers’ experience, thus failing to make them feel connected to and effective regarding the problem of climate change (Sheppard, ).…”