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Famous Paintings Help Study the Earth's Past Atmosphere
houghi (78078) writes "From European Geosciences Union: 'A team of Greek and German researchers has shown that the colours of sunsets painted by famous artists can be used to estimate pollution levels in the Earth's past atmosphere. In particular, the paintings reveal that ash and gas released during major volcanic eruptions scatter the different colours of sunlight, making sunsets appear more red.' The original paper can be found here. In the last 150 years, the sunsets have become redder, likely reflecting increased man-made pollution."
the paintings reveal that ash and gas released during major volcanic eruptions scatter the different colours of sunlight, making sunsets appear more red.
It's a good thing we have these paintings, or we wouldn't know this kind of thing!
At least, according to Van Gogh.
Because we know they never used artistic license to paint something that is less than realistic...
"Pollution" is what happens when living things do stuff. Pollution is not bad, per se... it is a fact of life. Demonizing "pollution" is the way of the intellectually unsophisticated or lazy. It is how we deal with pollution that is ever the issue.
Surely photography would be a better reference - I'm assuming that the vast majority of 'globally influencing' pollution would have occurred after colour photography became popular.
Never happened. True story.
Let's not discount natural events either. A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about the deep reddish and orange hues of the Oslo sky in Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream - they were a manifestation of the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruptions (http://bobyewchuk.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/the-scream/).
Starry Night is proof that that stars were once much closer together!
The climate debate is pretty much settled: humans are responsible for (at least) most of the current climate shock.
But this is just silly. Art is subjective, even for the artist. And even if all artists always painted with perfect colours that don't change over time, artists don't paint sunsets on a regular basis, but rather irregularly, such as when they're extra pretty.
This sort of study makes AGW proponents look desperate, and that's not a good way to convince people who prefer to stick their heads in the sand.
We get it, you are climate change believers.... can we move on.... please.
atmostfear is the color of our sky now? http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=weather+weapons&sm=3 our legacy & leavings for our kids..
...it's Instagram filters.
I guess either way the planet is going to end up uninhabitable - we may not choke to death on smog, we'll be overrun by hipsters. God, what an awful way to go.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who has written: “I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see.”
When I read the title I thought to my self "That's a clever way to word something, so people will be outraged, read the article and then find that it's really about them sampling paint and finding pollutants there." But no, it was as ridiculous as the title suggested. Can we revoke their science card?
In other news, researchers examining medieval paintings announced that they believe walking skeletons were much more prevalent 700 years ago than they are today. Bruce Campbell was unavailable for comment.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
he has no motive to lie about anything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CKpCGjD8wg&list=PL456D453B409DF8D1
This is by far the stupidest "climate" story published on slashdot this week. And as you can imagine, that's up against some pretty stiff competition.
Red fades. Was this accounted for?
I am happy to have my views and data tested and confirmed by others, are you? You post is laughable. Go get into your Prius, drive to Whole Foods and buy some free-range-non-GMO-fair-trade-organic food that only elitists can afford...
the climate has never been "stable" on this globe. We are not in an "ice age", you'll notice the lack of kilometer or two of ice over N. America. We are in an "interglacial" that is 12,000 years old, and that has nothing to do with humans. All that time the sea level has been rising, and if you look it up charts you'll see even the rate of rise for much of that time has been much faster than today's rate
Really, get a grip on your imagined phobias.
It get's farther away every day.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Setting aside artistic license, and the possibility that any artist may well have had chromatic aberrations in their vision, didn't we JUST have a story in the last month or two specifically discussing the changing of colors used in rennaissance paintings, and how displaying them in different colored lighting environments would likely allow us to see the pictures in (something more like) their original hues?
Seems like another effort to "prove" how the sky is falling, climatologically speaking.
-Styopa
It's how it is with so many things. Grains of truth may be there, but those who protest the loudest always have to go too far and come off with ridiculous crap like this so people like you and I just end up being disillusioned to the entire movement. It's like the "Woman in the Refridgerator" comic book stuff - sure, could women be better represented in comics? Of course. But when every little thing is brought forth and used as de facto evidence of something, it just makes you shake your head and walk away (for example, you cannot complain that too many female villains are too pretty and then complain when the "ugly" one is evil).
The folks that perpetrate this type of rhetoric think they are serving the greater good (think: Al Gore) but in the end they make even open minded people turn off totally because they think they have to overstate and inflate things to get our attention. According to Al Gore's statements a decade or so ago we are only what, five or six years from Manhattan being under the ocean? Please.
It has reached these religious levels where you cannot even have a rational discussion about it. It's also hypocritical - not to beat on Al Gore again, but how many private plane flights has that guy taken? I don't see him using a bicycle to get everywhere and he's probably one of the folks that drives an electric car and doesn't realize the environmental impact of the limited-lifespan batteries in them are no better for the overall environment than burning fossil fuels (the pounds of nickel in the batteries is devastating, dangerous, and rare to mine, usually by child labor).
Interglacial periods are part of an ice age - note the thick year-round ice caps on the poles? A sure sign we're still in an ice age, and one that estimates are will be gone within a few centuries at most if we don't drastically reduce fossil carbon emissions very quickly.
No, the climate has never been stable, but it seems to have two meta-stable states around which it oscillates - ice ages, with their associated deep-freezes and temperate interglacial periods, and "hot Earths" where deserts and tropics battle for domination of the globe. Tropics we could live with, but planetary deserts would devastate our population, and are hardly a rare scenario under hot-Earth conditions. More importantly the unstable centuries of transition to a hot Earth will be extremely hard on agriculture of all kinds, and the speed of transition, which appears likely to be one of the fastest in geologic history, will usher in a new mass extinction, just as all the previous transitions have done. The climate line is already moving at an average of 1/4 mile per year, considerably faster than even the fastest-spreading plants can reliably "travel", and things are only just beginning to get moving. Combine that with what is already one of the larger mass extinctions the planet has seen due to human predation, pollution, and environmental destruction, and it may take the biosphere millenia to recover, even with all the help we can give it. And if the planetary carrying capacity were to fall precipitously we've got the added risk of global warfare as nations struggle for survival. But hey, at last all that nuclear fallout should boost mutation rates dramatically, so biodiversity may have a chance to return on a faster timetable. It'll kinda suck for the individuals dealing with it though.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Absolutely. Now show me some serious research that suggests we aren't responsible for global warming and perhaps I'll take you seriously. Because the overwhelming consensus among the actual researchers qualified to have an opinion is that we are in serious trouble. The opinions of engineers, doctors, biologists, english literature professors, etc. are irrelevant. Much less the opinions of industry-sponsored talking heads barely qualified to wipe their own asses.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We take a painting of a sunset from someone that died 500 years ago, maybe we have several paintings to remove some variation, but still this is where they start. Now they have to account for the shifting of the color due to aging of the paint. They they have to account for the paints that were even available to the artist.
Presumably they can determine date, time, and location from the scene begin depicted but I recall that some of these artists at that time would paint a single scene over the span of a month. It's not like they were taking a photograph, the time to paint the image could take a considerable amount of time. Then maybe I know nothing about painting, perhaps they did this in one sitting over the span of minutes, or even seconds.
What do the people studying these paintings know about the vision of the person that painted it? I recall hearing of several famous artists that were colorblind. A colorblind artist could paint a very detailed paining of a fruit bowl, for example, and it would look completely natural to someone with normal vision. The painting may show red apples but the real ones used for inspiration may have been green. The oranges, bananas, and grapes could all look equally natural in the painting but also have obvious deviations from the real fruit if placed side by side.
I want to know who is paying for this so called scientific analysis. This research does not seem to be driven by someone with a deep understanding or respect for science.
I recall some interesting studies of paintings in the past where people would look for scenes depicting times and places for clues of climate change. They'd look for things like plant life, when snow was on the ground, and so on, where the color accuracy would not be a significant matter. One particular example I recall was of people ice skating on the River Thames, this is significant because the river does not typically freeze in modern times. There were also images of grapevines growing in places where they do not today. These paintings can give some very interesting and quite conclusive evidence of the climate in historic times and not rely so much on the interpretations, visual acuity, and materials available to the artist at the time.
This study does not sound like science to me.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This has nothing to do with climate change. Climate change is focused on CO2. This study is focused on dust (aerosols) and other things that we know are in the air.
Really, 'air pollution' is not equivalent to 'climate change.' The pollutants mentioned here will actually cool the earth.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Have gnu, will travel.
Don't enrich the rothchilds with their schemes anymore:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdqNds9pNuI
Well, when I was a 5-6 years old child, we used to have -20 C (-4 F) every frigging winter morning, and +24 C in the summer. As of late it became -5C in winter and +35 C in summer. I don't need nobody's propaganda to tell the difference, and I am not alone. You can ask ski resourt owners about receding snow line, or use the new shipping lane Canada to Russia via the North pole. How about you educate yourself first?
We get it, you are climate change believers.... can we move on.... please.
That's an awkward turn of phrase - 'climate change believer' , like calling someone who drives a car an 'oxidation believer' or someone who is careful on a ladder a 'gravity believer'.
In any case, no, we won't stop discussing an important topic just because it makes you uncomfortable. And it will continue to have import for hundreds of years, although I suspect if we bit the bullet and did something now the discussion later would be less fraught - like pulling a painful tooth.
Ironically of course, the reasons this topic appears so often on Slashdot are (a) because it's science and we left brainers tend to be interested in sciencey things (b) Because the efforts of major vested interests to generate discord + some curious psychology has created a community of people who think climate change is a conspiracy , and the discourse between this latter group of conspiracy theorists and those that accept the science makes for many page views.
So, somewhat ironically, it's the remnant controversy that makes it a popular topic for slashdot editors.
The fact that you must resort to ad-hominem attacks directed at people that disagree with you, only further reinforces my central thesis; that it's impossible to differentiate man-made climate change (if it exists) from any normal cyclical event.
Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time, you silly wiper of other peoples bottoms. *raspberry sounds*
In the last 150 years, the sunsets have become redder, likely reflecting increased man-made pollution.
It's also possible that red pigments break down, decompose, fade, and become less brilliant as decades and centuries go by; especially red pigments that were manufactured before colorfastness and other chemical properties were well understood.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
How embarrassing. And this exercise in art was payed by taxes.
If they examine religious paintings (iconography) they will 'discover' that people were smaller when the world was colder. Surely a sign of the calamity to come.
No wonder those pesky mammoths looked so big.
Ha ha. LOL
You are quite correct, except for one key detail - I said "the overwhelming consensus among the actual researchers qualified to have an opinion"
That is to say pretty much *everybody* who has spent the tens of thousands of hours of time and energy necessary to actually understand the issues in question agrees that we have a problem. Just about the only people arguing against it are those who have major business interests in protecting the status quo, or are being paid to come up with pseudo-scientific bullshit to cloud the issues among the masses. And of course all the arguing among armchair intellectuals such as ourselves, none of whom are actually qualified to have an independent opinion on the subject.
Could the researchers all be wrong? Certainly. But on one hand we've got the combined mass of the vast majority of the researchers in the field, people who've spent their careers exploring the details of a complicated system, who are armed with mathematical models capable of describing the Earth's climate for as far back as we have data, and reams of data showing that their predictions of planetary changes have been accurate for several decades. On the other hand we've got a bunch of business tycoons yelling "Nuh-uh!". I know which group I would bet on being correct.
Check out this video series - the first couple are concerned with stripping away all the bullshit spouted by the "cheerleader squads" on both sides and exposing the actual scientific climate debate - which bears precious little resemblance to what the media portrays. Then he goes on for many more specifically trashing the various major lies and propaganda campaigns that have been drummed up around the science. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The god shiit isn't science. A Holy Grail reference, really?
It is god come to smit man for all his sins, Repent while there is still time (or pay your carbon tax while you still have money)
when climate scientists study old paintings and take the colors they find there as both accurate and, in effect, "literally true" this is SCIENCE and must be respected as such.... but when religious people take their "holy book" (which, whether it's "Holy" or not is at least a written document whose many chapters can be documented to be unchanged over thousands of years) seriously in the field of archaeology to aid in the interpretation of things like the locations of ancient cities and the identification of objects etc (not even the religious claims of the book) this is ANTI-SCIENCE and labelled as "dubious" because "everybody KNOWS" the document is just allegory and artistic and should "obviously" not be taken literally... hmmmmmmm...
I would like to submit another piece of art to demonstrate that climate was much better in the 1980's (in the super-polluted days of the evil Reagan) than it was in 1912: Consider Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and compare with, for example this example of 1980's art. Clearly the climate of the 1980's, even with all of its corrupt capitalist pollution was far better for the health of female humans.
Climate science has become the state-sponsored religion of the left. We must all listen to the preachers, our children must all attend the state-run seminaries and recite the liturgies. We must all pay a portion of our incomes (both in direct taxes and in increased costs of goods and services), some of which fund the scholars, scribes and keepers of the holy texts. We must restrict our behaviours to obey the required moral codes (gay sex may now be OK, but don't you DARE toss a log on the fire! i.e. we've not reduced the religious rules, only changed them to conform to the new religion). Anybody who dissents will be labelled as a heretic and be driven from the public square, whilst the more-earnest follwers call for them to be jailed, "re-educated", or killed. Oh, and given that most people are never going to do any of the climate science themselves (just as most never became theologians in the old religions), for the vast majority of adherents this "new" religion (which is really only the newest form of earth-worshiping paganism) is taken on blind faith.
This is an ACTUAL paper, not some farce piece... these ARE climate science people.
The problem is NOT that the press reported on it and that the press, therefore, is to blame for destroying "public trust".
The PROBLEM is that the climate scientists themselves are whackos who are taking an axe to SCIENCE and destroying credibility
To the extent that the people in this narrow and highly-political field do anything that impacts the trust of the public in ANY other field of ACTUAL science, the fault for THAT lies in the way that actual highly-qualified and meticulous people in the "hard sciences" have allowed these quacks and charlatans into the tent with them, thereby conveying legitimaxy onto them where it was never earned. The "climate science" community does not play by the same rigorous rules that the hard sciences do (you never caught Einstein or Saulk hiding data, rigging the peer review process, rigging the paper publishing process, etc) and therefore never earned that embrace and borrowed legitimacy. The "climate science" people are the only ones in science I can think of at the moment who have gotten away with a massive game of apples-and-oranges data and instrument mixing that would be tolerated in none of the hard sciences; they are trying to predict the future, in part by claiming to be able to accurately measure events and conditions in the distant past with high precision (which is IMPOSSIBLE). The problem they are encountering, and which will only get worse for them, is that fraud never withstands the passage of time
I can't even print a decent photo from my Epson printer, WTF are they thinking looking at paintings?
I'll tell you what, it's probably our tax dollars paying for the study.
Climate change has now officially reached rock bottom.
The old masters painted "striking sunsets" because the sunsets were 'striking' - unusual, not your average ordinary sunset.
Could some statistician or philosopher of science please supply the appropriate term for the bias not recognised by TFA.
--
Intelligence is realizing that nobody knows what they're talking about. Wisdom is realizing that you don't, either.
Dude, sorry, there isn't any "bs" being spouted. But good try. You just keep digging your hole deeper.
Ummm Patent Lover, please uninstall your browser. I was using "logic", something the apparently eludes you. How did your comment score get so high? Oh that's because Slashdot reviewers are mind-numbed liberal zombies.
My mistake - politicians, corporations, and the media always discuss the unvarnished truth without hyperbole or hypocrisy. How could I have forgotten?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Witness the SHEER INTELLIGENCE (lol - NOT) of Sardaukar86 http://news.slashdot.org/comme... & http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Witness the SHEER INTELLIGENCE (lol - NOT) of Sardaukar86 http://news.slashdot.org/comme... & http://news.slashdot.org/comme...