In the Heat of the Moment

How do climate scientists, working on the front line of a problem that’s invisible to most of us, respond to it as human beings, as citizens of this planet?

Feeling the Heat is presented as a visually spectacular triptych featuring rare thermographic imagery of natural and built environments and, in between, climate scientists interviewed with their own thermal imaging equipment. They’re literally feeling the heat of the moment.

The work explores a new approach to climate change communication, freeing normally objective professionals to talk to us in a subjective, even passionate manner. How do the disturbing implications of climate change affect the scientists tasked with studying it on a personal level? Despite the existential dimensions of their research they’re usually expected to eschew emotion, adhering to detached, dispassionate modes of the scientific method lest it taint their empirical assemblage of evidence. But even when they do so, they may find themselves targets of those who would rather not hear their rationalised conclusions.

The artwork forms part of Adam Sébire's PhD research into aesthetic visual representations of climate change. His collaboration with climate scientists uses a thermographic imager normally employed to measure leaf temperatures during heatwaves. The infrared thermal interviews “cloak” the scientists visually as heat data, allowing them to speak candidly and personally, whilst engaging a wider audience.

There is increasing literature documenting scientists’ despondency (climate-related depression). Clive Hamilton describes them as “modern-day Cassandras” whose warnings go unheeded. Their research often requires them to think the unthinkable as they venture to the far end of probability curves. Their recommendations follow the Precautionary Principle – hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. Yet the science of climate change is all too frequently eclipsed by its politics and the temptation of some is to shoot the messenger. Any expression of an emotional response to a problem which threatens to make the planet unliveable for many of its species therefore remains taboo, and climate science communication is largely confined to probabilities, tables, graphs and data.

Scientists, for their part, often assume that given enough of the right information people will modify their behaviour accordingly. However climate change is proving that a response takes more than knowledge of the scientific consensus. Psychology research suggests an emotional connection is necessary. For a problem with such major implications, a dispassionate presentation of evidence may not help its societal acceptance. And so this work offers viewers a different point of entry.

Sébire is interested in the everyday (im)perceptibility of global warming to those of us living typically hermetic existences in the West. Insulated from the vicissitudes of weather it’s easier for us to ignore looming climatic upheavals when there’s little or no direct experience of them to confront.

The effects of climate change are furthermore displaced from their causes both in time and in space, creating a cognitive dissonance in our ways of thinking about the problem. Its difficult spatio-temporal dimensions lead philosopher Timothy Morton to conceptualise global warming as a vast hyperobject, demanding new aesthetic approaches which straddle the visible/invisible, here/there, and past/present/future.

And so Sébire uses thermography (infra-red heat photography) to explore the sensory imperceptibility of anthropogenic warming. ‘As part of my search for an aesthetics for the Anthropocene I struggle with these extremely cumbersome and low-resolution, yet fascinating scientific instruments. My models and I must shoot at night: the camera is uninterested in visible light, and in the lower temperatures after sunset I noticed that human bodies “illuminate” the surrounding environment with their radiant heat, a metonymic visualisation of how some members of our species are rapidly warming the planet.’

This photographic series (Lambda prints on Endura Metallic paper) is part of an ongoing (2015– ) interdisciplinary science-art project. ‘The artworks are created with a high-resolution thermal imaging camera loaned from scientists at the Climate Change Cluster (C3) and School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney – to whom I’m enormously grateful for their advice, trust and generosity.’ We’ll hear again form Sébire in Viewing Room III.