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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...
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.
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.
"King Edward I of England banned the burning of sea-coal by proclamation in London in 1272, after its smoke became a problem."
So how far back to you think color photography goes?
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
We get it, you are climate change believers.... can we move on.... please.
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?
I'm pretty sure that 80 % of all the world's total happiness is achievable with 20 % of the world's resources, or something like that.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
im pretty sure 90% of statistics on the internet are simply pulled out of peoples asses 73.7% of the time
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
If it weren't for Seurat, we wouldn't have known that 19th century people were made of tiny dots.