ABSTRACT
Ever since climate change became a major focus of public debate and international affairs, media news, literature and policy documents in industrialized countries have almost inevitably contained scientific graphs and images. We have become accustomed to a range of related visual representations: among them – mostly taken from the third and fourth reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the “hockey stick” showing the sharp rise of mean temperatures since the middle of the twentieth century; images from the climate simulation models; and also photographs that point to the imminent threats of global warming such as shrinking glaciers or threatened polar bears. For the most part, people do not appear in such pictures. At first sight, humankind seemingly agrees on these graphs and images as
viable representations of global warming. However, when one considers nonwestern media sources such as Chinese or Indian sources, one is puzzled by the fact that it is difficult to find those IPCC graphs at all. Instead, pictures showing people, mostly suffering or hard-working, serve to visualize climate change. The Chinese magazine Beijing Review (Lan 2007), for example, published a photograph under the headline “Curbing Global Warming,” showing farmers in a field. Here, nature is neither wilderness nor reduced to objective graphs strictly separate from human beings, but a concrete category in the everyday life of ordinary citizens. The Indian government used a child’s painting as the cover picture for its report “India: Addressing Energy Security and Climate Change” (Government of India 2007) of a hand holding a drop of water, backed by a friendly sun shining on urban housing, a wind generator and solar cells. Again, the topic is embedded in a concrete form of daily life, yet, unlike the picture in the Beijing Review, it seems change-oriented. This implies an interesting divergence of visualization choices, which it is worth considering at length.
