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Image Politics: Picturing Uncertainty. The Role of Images in Climatology and Climate Policy

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Climate Change and Policy

Abstract

Pictures are linked to contradictory expectations. On the one hand, good and successful pictures are meant to reveal knowledge at first sight; according to popular opinion they should be clear, undistorted and concise. Pictures are thought of in contrast to texts. These expectations for images are summarized by the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”. The axiom articulates the notion that pictures have a pedagogical ability to show complex connections in an easy and understandable way—to “condense” knowledge into a form that is easy to digest. In general images are thought to be “a more easily accessible medium of communication than (conceptual) language” (Hüppauf and Weingart 2009, p. 14; quote translated by the author).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A theoretical reaction to the increasing usage and consumption of images has thus been the ‘pictorial turn’ (Mitchell 1992, 1994; Boehm 1994).

  2. 2.

    Visualization strategies for climate data are broadly discussed in the field of computer graphics, where “uncertainty visualization” is a key phrase (for an overview see Nocke et al. 2008).

  3. 3.

    For the concept of visualisation (Hacking 1983; Rheinberger et al. 1997; Snyder 1998).

  4. 4.

    In German this difference is embodied within the words darstellen (represent) and herstellen (create, produce).

  5. 5.

    This is what German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) did in 1817, when he outlined the first set of isotherms—statistical lines of average temperature—on a map structure. By introducing isotherms he was able to give an idea of climatic zones (Humboldt von 1817; Monmonnier 1999).

  6. 6.

    For the relationship between texts and pictures see Nelson Goodman as well as Horst Bredekamp and Sybille Krämer (Goodmann 1968; Bredekamp and Krämer 2003).

  7. 7.

    Scientists had raised this argument themselves, but did not add the level of today’s CO2 concentration to their graph of the ice-core record (Canadell 2007).

  8. 8.

    Eric Wolff elucidated his power point slide with the sentence “This is the planet’s heart beating” (Wolff 2008, Chart 32).

  9. 9.

    The conjunction of present average values of global temperature and CO2 concentrations can be also found in graphs published in popular climate atlases (Dow and Downing 2006, p. 34).

  10. 10.

    For his first study Michael E. Mann and his team reconstructed the Earth’s climate history since 1400 (Mann et al. 1998). In the next study they reconstructed 1,000 years (Mann et al. 1999).

  11. 11.

    Because of the relevance of the graph’s message, the US Senate eventually ordered a detailed study to assess the meaning of Mann’s reconstruction of climate history (National Research 2006).

  12. 12.

    These new scenarios replaced the IS92 scenarios used for the IPCC Second Assessment Report of 1995 (see also Chap. 2 of this volume).

  13. 13.

    That the public does not react more strongly to the threat of climate change when faced with graphic images of catastrophe is shown by a study published in 2006 by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. In this work experiments were carried out to find out whether watching films such as The Day after Tomorrow produces in individuals a greater reaction to the potential dangers of climate change than scientific texts with the same content (Lowe 1998).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Arts and Media, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Birgit Schneider

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  1. Birgit Schneider
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Correspondence to Birgit Schneider .

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  1. Inst. Philosophie, FU Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, Berlin, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Gabriele Gramelsberger

  2. MPI für Meteorologie, Bundesstr. 55, Hamburg, 20146, Germany

    Johann Feichter

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Schneider, B. (2011). Image Politics: Picturing Uncertainty. The Role of Images in Climatology and Climate Policy. In: Gramelsberger, G., Feichter, J. (eds) Climate Change and Policy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17700-2_9

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