Art may be one tool to help bridge ideological splits over climate change in the United States, a new study in the 31 May issue of the journal Nature finds. Its five authors say that art offers an accessible way to engage with and understand climate change, and that artistic visualisations of data appeal to viewers’ emotions more than standard data graphs. This engagement has the potential to reduce the polarising effects of graphs, which may heighten scepticism and actually exacerbate political division on climate change.
The peer-reviewed study offers what its authors describe as “pioneering evidence” of this impact. “Such emotional experiences may motivate spectators to reassess the visualised data that contradicts their beliefs and reduce the perceived distance to climate change,” they write. “Our findings not only inform ongoing conversations about how science and art can work together to reckon with the impending environmental crisis, but they also suggest new opportunities for practitioners and researchers in climate science, communication, environmental humanities, psychology and sociology to continue collaborative, interdisciplinary work in this area.”
To test the efficacy of artistic representations of data, the researchers conducted two experiments in which they showed participants in the US artistic and scientific visuals of the Keeling curve, which records the accumulation of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. The 671 total adults were asked to report their political ideologies, pre-existing concern with climate change and levels of interest in art. The artwork chosen, titled Summer Heat (2020), by the painter and photographer Diane Burko, depicts an abstracted map of Europe against a backdrop of melting glaciers, accompanied by a simplified version of the Keeling curve.
