Art for more than Art's sake?

[dogjones]

Check this out:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/01/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange

Snip

The scientists are analysing the striking sunsets painted by Turner and dozens of other artists to work out the cooling effects of huge volcanic eruptions. By working out how the climate varied naturally in the past they hope to improve the computer models used to simulate global warming.

snip

Writing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the scientists say the redder sunsets seen in paintings "can be tentatively attributed to the volcanic events, and not to abnormalities in the colour degradation due to age, or other random factors affecting each painter's colour perception".

snip

Prof Zerefos's team is now talking to the Tate in London about repeating the study with 40 paintings from the 20th century, to see whether artists have captured the effects of pollution on sunsets since the industrial revolution.

What I'm thinking here is that this endeavour seems a little circular. Do the paintings give evidence on climate change, OR does what we know about climate change already give evidence for the 'accuracy' of the artists? The article seems to say both.

 

[Naughtyhippo]

As far as I understand the article (the Guardian piece that is, does anyone have access to the original) says the following things:

1) The scientists already have a model for climate change. They wish to analyse whatever date they can extract from paintings of sunsets and use it to tweak their model.

2) The climate change they have looked at/analysed in these paintings is the global dimming/cooling caused by the amount of crap spewed into the atmosphere. More crap in the atmosphere = redder sunsets seems to be their hypothesis here.

3) To quantify 'redder sunsets' they chose to look at red/green ratios. They claim to have found significantly high ratios in paintings by some artists in the years immediately after large volcanic eruptions.

4) They claim that the amount of crap in the air calculated for these ratios is similar to amounts shown by ice cores and similar. They do not say how they get x red/green ratio means y amount of crap in air. Perhaps this is in the actual paper.

5) They then go on to speculate about using this to quantify air pollution in the 20th C from red/green ratios in modern paintings.

I don't see anything on how they have used these results to improve the computer models on climate change, however there doesn't appear to be any circular reasoning going on. If I have misunderstood, please enlighten me as I prefer to learn from my mistakes rather than insist my version is always right.