If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination

November 28, 2023 11:29 AM

This year's U.S. 5th National Climate Assessment Report opens with a poem by Ada Limón, features an Art + Climate Gallery and an Atlas with 15 national maps that show changes in extreme heat & precipitation.

More resources: a podcast, and roundtable talks. Link to the works of all included 92 artists.

posted by spamandkimchi (8 comments total)

If you're a big fan of this sort of climate change action theater, remember that COP28 is starting in two days! In Dubai! And it's being led by Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company!

COP28: UAE planned to use climate talks to make oil deals

Does anyone else get the feeling that the wealthy and powerful can't actually stop climate change, but they have to pretend to in order to keep their wealth and power?
posted by MrVisible at 1:28 PM on November 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

My impulse after reading MrVisible's comment is to make this thread about COP when it should not be.

I have not consumed the actual links in this FPP, but I urge anyone thinking to respond in THIS thread about COP28 to rethink and maybe consider making an FPP about COP28 so this FPP can be about this particularly interesting intersection of art and climate stuff.
posted by hippybear at 3:29 PM on November 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

For me, the poem is flat

The words do not connect with me, I'm looking for urgency. Anger. Grief and terror. Those words seem to arrive at "we're all one with nature" and I've read those poems, better versions of those poems, and I'm struck by how those words seem so irrelevant.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:15 AM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

the maps are really fascinating. they definitely did not entirely fit my ideas/assumptions about where the biggest changes might be, nor what they might be. there sure is a correlation, though, to which states seem to have the least in prep/abatement action going on...
posted by supermedusa at 11:05 AM on November 29, 2023

Looking through those maps, the one that I feel I can most directly feel in my life is the one about cold high temperatures. The area I live in has definitely had many fewer days where the high temperature was particularly cold than when we first moved here 20 years ago. Winters are getting warmer and that map confirms what I've casually observed.
posted by hippybear at 1:04 PM on November 29, 2023

*clings even tighter to living in the Bay Area*
posted by kirkaracha at 1:34 PM on November 29, 2023

I've recently come across maps and data showing how New Jersey's weather has already changed. Our yearly precipitation is almost 10% higher than previously, and we're getting more intense precipitation as well. These changes have occurred in the past 15 years or so. While there have been cycles of higher and lower precipitation on decadal scales before, it paints a pretty damming picture that climate change is here already when taken together with all of the other factors such as temperature changes and onset of spring.
posted by mollweide at 1:49 PM on November 29, 2023

We should've more threads about art & climate. We'd a fun thread about climate & ecological songs in 2022.

I asked my PhD advisor about climate fiction once, given he reads a substancial fraction to vote in the Hugos. He said "One certianly notices when that aspect is absent." Ain't surprised sci-fi writers are years ahead of the other arts here.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:03 AM on December 4, 2023