Studying global warming through old masters' paintings
Researchers are studying the painted sunsets by artists like Turner, Rembrandt, and Rubens to get a sense of how volcanic eruptions may have impacted global warming. The National Observatory of Athens scientists look at the colors the old masters used in their depictions to suss out the amount of volcanic ash was in the atmosphere. The historical data will then help populate computer simulations of global warming. From The Guardian:
The results will feed into the scientific study of a phenomenon called global dimming, which is caused by air pollution blocking sunlight. Some experts believe this has acted as a brake on global warming, and that climate change could accelerate as air pollution from industry is reduced.Link
Professor (Christos) Zerefos and his team looked at natural global dimming caused by volcanoes, the results of which can be severe. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 threw out so much material that it triggered the notorious "year without a summer", which caused widespread failure of harvests across Europe, resulting in famine and economic collapse.
The team found 181 artists who had painted sunsets between 1500 and 1900. The 554 pictures included works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Gainsborough and Hogarth. They used a computer to work out the relative amounts of red and green in each picture, along the horizon. Sunlight scattered by airborne particles appears more red than green, so the reddest sunsets indicate the dirtiest skies. The researchers found most pictures with the highest red/green ratios were painted in the three years following a documented eruption.
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Wasn't the unusual red sky in Munch's Scream reported to be the effects of the Krakatoa eruption in the Northern hemisphere?
Red sky at night, sailors' delight,
Red sky at morning, global warming.
I wonder how they're accounting for the effects of painting decay. A friend of mine, who dabbles in painting and other arts, told me that different kinds of paints, and in particular bright colors, degrade with age. All of them also degrade at different rates. I'd like to see how these guys managed to account for that.
"Some experts believe this has acted as a brake on global warming, and that climate change could accelerate as air pollution from industry is reduced. "
Wait, what?
#4;
I think it's like the way they said that global temp raised by a degree when all the planes stopped flying for that period after 9-11. Less contrails = more sunlight hitting planet = warmer temps?
I like your screenname, btw. On my rotating list of 3 wishes one of them has always been "a really good sandwich."
I really had to laugh at this when I read it. Either these "researchers" don't know any artists, or have never painted a picture in their life. If your going to look at an artists interpretation of reality for "scientific" insights, you really should have your "science license" taken away from you. I HOPE they don't look at Dali's painting of the melting clocks... It's gonna throw all their calculations out the window!
yeah, that was my second WTF about this one. They either have a really smart way of getting accurate atmospheric information from 400 year-old paintings, or they must have a lot of faith in the photographic accuracy of these painters.
Either through aging pigment or subjective coloring, I can't imagine how they could get useful information this way.
that is interesting that they can do that from a painting...
There's also the fact that the team seems to have worked from reproductions of the paintings, and color is the hardest thing to reproduce accurately.
You'd have to have a large margin of error built into even the simplest of comparisons, like the ratio of reds to greens or blues - probably so large as to render the comparison just about worthless from a scientific point of view.
It's an interesting approach, though, and similar but more rigorous studies have been very useful in the past. It takes a lot of ingenuity to dredge up information about things like climate from times before people started keepng records like we do now.
The year without a summer was 1816.
It'll be interesting to see how results correlate with volcanic dust layers. If some of the money goes toward restoration then it's not a total lark.