Stop Global Warming
Peggy White
Ultrachrome print, 2009
Kansas City, Missouri
29188
Peggy White
Ultrachrome print, 2009
Kansas City, Missouri
29188
The unfolding disaster in the Philippines is evoked by CSPG’s Poster of the Week. Super Typhoon
Haiyan, aka Yolanda, one of the strongest storms in recorded history to make
landfall, slammed the Philippines, killing an
estimated 10,000 people in the city of Tacloban alone. Sustained winds
of up to 195 miles per hour
with gusts of up to 235 mph, generated huge, tsunami-like
waves—from 10 to more than 30 feet high (some reports say up to 45 feet
high)—that battered the island, destroying 70-80% of the buildings and roads.
1/6th of the entire population is without food, clean water and
shelter.
Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground,
said, “Typhoons take their energy from the heat of the oceans, and they convert
it to the energy of their winds. In a storm like this that gets wound up to
Category 5 status, it’s going to pile up a huge area of water that will then
come ashore with it as it makes landfall. And that’s what happened in Tacloban.
The wall of water that came in, probably at least 10 or 15 feet high, was
pushed by these Category 5 winds right into the heart of this downtown area…
rising sea levels caused by global warming increased the size of the storm’s
surge, while the heating of the oceans threatens more extreme storms that could
form into typhoons.”
Peggy White appropriated Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic The
Great Wave off Kanagawa (1832) to call attention to global warming. Hokusai’s Wave, one of the best known
Japanese art works in the world, has been used to denounce pollution of the
air, land, and seas, and relate this to global warming, flooding and other ecological
disasters. In the Hokusai, nature is the primary power; in this
adaptation, human interference has caused nature to become even more
destructive.
Poster artists have used Hokusai’s wave for a variety of topics
since the 1970s if not earlier, but its use has increased over the last decade
as awareness of climate change continues to grow. Unfortunately, as long as
governments and corporations put profits over people, the environmental
pollution that causes climate change continues to escalate.
SIGN
PETITION To UN Climate negotiators
Governments are meeting in Warsaw the next
two weeks for the annual UN climate negotiations. This ritual has dragged on
for years without conclusion, largely because the great powers have done so
little. On days like these, their inaction amounts to mockery. So Bill
McGibbons and 350.org setup a page— http://act.350.org/sign/haiyan/ —where you can add your
name to a petition that their staff will hand-deliver to negotiators at the UN
climate summit. In short, we need to let world leaders know that their inaction
is wrecking the world, and the time is long past for mere talk -- we need
action, and we need it now. Please
sign and pass the page on.
Sources:
