A shocking statement, truly.

(The irony may be lost on you if you’ve never heard of Stanley Kubrick’s satiric film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.)

For I do not. Love climate change, that is.

I have spent not a few years consumed by this topic... freaking out to my therapist, faithfully recycling, occasionally protesting, lamenting the lost future to like-minded friends. Recently my mind has wrapped itself around climate change in a different way, imagining how the inevitable catastrophe may unfold in the years to come. Having passed through Denial, Anger, Bargaining and Grief, I have now unhappily arrived at Acceptance. My work attempts simply to illustrate our coming world from a viewpoint of its possible beauty (though I am under no illusion that it will shock us out of complacency).

Blah, blah, blah we say collectively.

There are copious charts and graphs documenting the changes that the 1,300+ scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have produced over the last several decades of sustained study. The climate.nasa.gov website features images that project the horror (and sometimes the incidental beauty) of rapid, man-made climate change as it occurs in real time, despite the ability of an entire political class - the one in charge, unfortunately - to deny this reality and actively dismantle their predecessors’ efforts to slow down the damage.

This, from a recent 2-part article in the New York Times about the decade during which the government realized there was a problem but did nothing to stop it:

Industry scientists reviewed the problem and found good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they act when almost nobody within the United States government - nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement - seemed worried? Besides, as the National Petroleum Council put it in 1972, “changes in the climate would probably not be apparent until at least the turn of the century.” Why take on an intractable problem that would not be detected until this generation of employees was safely retired? Worse, the solutions seemed more punitive than the problem itself. Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth - the more fossil fuels we burned, then better our lives became.

As it happens, the Don Cesar hotel (the famous Pink Palace in St. Petersburg, FL) was the setting of a 1980 conference attended by scientists, economists, legislators and policy experts - as well as representatives of Exxon - at which it was agreed that the only logical conclusion for preventing a climate change apocalypse would be to stop burning coal altogether, a conclusion that seemed politically untenable to the attendees, and so absolutely nothing was done... they couldn’t even agree on how to write a policy paper.

The fact that the hotel’s cloying pink color is the same one I used to represent sea level rise in these paintings is purely coincidental (in fact, I had been inspired in my color choices by the abstract artist Alma Thomas). This shade of pink also symbolizes the magical thinking that has characterized our collective paralysis in the 40 years since this information first came to light. If we continue on this trajectory, the Pink Palace, along with Miami Beach and most of the state of Florida, will likely be underwater in another 40 years.