I can remember, a quarter century ago, when photographers would call me fairly regularly to ask where they should go to take pictures of global warming. (I’d written an on what was still often called the greenhouse effect.) In those days, it was hard to say: the danger of climate change remained mostly prospective, something that scientists assured us was coming but which had not, in its most obvious forms, really appeared.
I’d suggest an Alaskan village, where the loss of sea ice had led to ruinous erosion, or one of the South Pacific islands, where “king tides” were beginning to cause problems, but in those days it was hard to actually see global warming. The creative photographers at the time who figured out strategies to document the change deserve great respect: James Balog, for instance, whose pictures ended up in the Library of Congress this spring, and who is most noted for his time-lapse images of collapsing glaciers, which required herculean technological perseverance to obtain. Now, with rapid increases in temperature powering a never-ending stream of fires, floods, droughts, and storms, it’s easy to capture images—perhaps too easy, in that we’re so inundated with inundation and conflagration that, at some point, we seem to shut down.
Last year’s , featuring the hottest temperatures in a hundred millennia, feels barely remembered; the this spring that carbon dioxide has taken a record leap didn’t make the front pages. Those of us in the eastern U..
