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Using Generative Art to Convey Past and Future Climate Transitions

Using Generative Art to Convey Past and Future Climate Transitions

Published on: March 31, 2023

Environmental catastrophes, climate change, and attribution.

Elisabeth A Lloyd¹, Theodore G Shepherd²

¹Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

|February 12, 2020

Summary

This study integrates biological and physical sciences to explain extreme weather events and their ecological impacts. It proposes using detailed event descriptions and the "storyline" approach for better causal accounts of environmental disasters.

Keywords:

attribution climate change ecology ecosystems environmental catastrophe extreme weather events

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Area of Science:

Environmental Science
Ecology
Climate Science

Background:

Extreme weather events cause significant environmental and ecological damage.
Understanding these disasters requires integrating biological and physical scientific perspectives.

Purpose of the Study:

To develop joint causal accounts of environmental disasters by uniting biological and physical understandings of extreme events.
To explore methods for describing ecological and extreme weather events with fine-grained spatial and temporal detail.

Main Methods:

Reviewing and integrating disparate biological and physical literature.
Applying "storyline" and probabilistic "risk-based" approaches for event attribution.
Utilizing a forensic approach common in ecological literature for analyzing causes and mechanisms.

Main Results:

Both "storyline" and "risk-based" approaches are useful for describing extreme events.
The "storyline" approach aligns well with the ecological literature's forensic methods.
Preliminary examples demonstrate the potential for detailed causal studies.

Conclusions:

Integrating biological and physical sciences is crucial for understanding environmental catastrophes.
The "storyline" approach offers a robust framework for detailed causal analysis of ecological impacts from extreme weather.