Extreme Gray Literature - Famous Paintings As Evidence For Earth's Climate Past
Tuesday, March 25, 2014 - 11:31
in Earth & Climate
Tree rings don't lie but if you trust temperature readings before 1980, you are not using a rational approach to science. There are too many cases where the official reader is a thermometer of unknown quality or a television report that used what a farmer who called in from his house said. if you can't trust old thermometers, can you trust old paintings? A paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics used the colors of sunsets painted by famous artists to estimate pollution levels in the Earth's past atmosphere. They found that the paintings reveal that ash and gas released during major volcanic eruptions scatter the different colors of sunlight, making sunsets appear more red. read more