The Volcanoes and the Paintings

How historical atmospheric change shows up in art

I wonder what it would be like if we had never figured out why and how the climate is changing. What if we had a vague sense that the weather is getting warmer and weirder — there sure do seem to be a lot of floods and droughts! Were there quite so many back in our childhoods? — but no sense of the causes and trajectory of those changes? What would we think about what’s happening to the world around us? How would those changes show up in our culture?

The fact of the matter is that we do know, all too well, about climate change. We have a very good sense of what is happening, why it’s happening, and what is likely to happen in the future. We’ve been simultaneously gifted with the ability to do something about the problem and burdened with the necessity of witnessing what happens when we haven’t done enough.

People in the past usually didn’t know why, or whether, their climate was changing. Because they didn’t know, we haven’t known, until recently. It’s only in recent years that scient…