ABSTRACT
Photographs of cracking ice shelves, eroding coastlines, and billowing wildfires dwarfing miniscule firemen, taken by expert photographers who know how to balance a shot and use light conditions to produce a visually stunning image, often provoke a strong and emotional viewer response. The 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, while hailed as a major achievement in international climate negotiations, has virtually no chance of preventing the 2 degree warming which climate scientists agree is a threshold beyond which dangerous impacts will be experienced. Even if the Paris Climate Accord were signed and ratified by all countries, and its provisions carried out, scientists warn that dangerous warming beyond 2 degrees will inevitably occur by 2050. Metag et al. offered a sweeping meta-analysis of the available literature on prevailing photographic depictions of climate change in mainstream media. According to Doyle, “[T]he photographs of a changed landscape due to global warming worryingly position the viewer as looking onto a landscape before climate change and after”.
