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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."
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.
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.
That was the first painting that came into my mind when I read the summery. I did not know the back story on it either.
We get it, you are climate change believers.... can we move on.... please.
...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.”
Paraphrasing the summary: 'Volcanic eruptions make sunsets more red, therefore, redder sunsets in paintings reflect man-made pollution.' WTF?
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
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.
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.
The natural events are not forgotten. In fact they let a modern painter paint while they KNEW there had been a volcanic eruption.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
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.
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?
If it weren't for Seurat, we wouldn't have known that 19th century people were made of tiny dots.
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.