climate | Terezakis

OART – UT 1058
Abrupt Climate Change is offered through the Open Arts Department at NYU Tisch

Statement of Purpose

On June 23 1988, NASA’s Dr. James Hansen testified before Congress in his capacity as a scientist that the earth’s climate was changing due to anthropogenic effects. Since that time the scientific community has come to a consensus that Earth’s climate is changing. The consensus is that this change is linked to the burning of fossil fuels and their concomitant release of gaseous by-products into our atmosphere. What is not known is the rate of acceleration of the change which is increasing. All literature references positive feedback mechanisms that will increase our warming climate in the years to come.

In 2004 a US Senate Committee defined abrupt climate change to be, ”a change in the climate that occurs so rapidly or unexpectedly that human or natural systems have difficulty adapting to the climate as changed.” Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica possess distinct layering where seasonal snowfalls compress to form ice with distinctive chemical and physical characteristics. This data indicates that there have been at least twenty instances where the earth’s climate has changed 15˚ Fahrenheit (8˚ C) within a 10 year period before recorded history.  As of October 9, atmospheric carbon dioxide measured 408.55 ppm (parts per million), on January 26, 412.96 ppm. This measurement is the highest concentration of critical greenhouse gas in three million years. At that time our planet was nearly five degrees Fahrenheit warmer and sea levels were thirty-two to sixty-five feet higher than they are today. Governments and human beings neither possess the experience or technology to successfully sustain life as we have come to know it during a period of rapidly changing conditions whose sustained new global normal is without historical precedent.

Scientists are not artists. Sanguine reporting of painstakingly gathered information is the realm of the scientist. It is the artist who is able to — and who must — bridge the divide between science and the public through creative story-telling.

Abrupt Climate Change (ACC) is offered to students who are interested in understating the impact of a radically altering climate upon their lives and communicating this information to society through artistic media of their choice. To better prepare for their increasingly uncertain future, students will hear from academic experts in business, law, mathematical, physical and social sciences and then create artistic responses to humanity’s greatest existential threat.

If you are interested in learning how to think about and prepare to succeed as the earth’s climate changes during your lifetime, this class could be for you.

This is the second in a series of related courses that are unique to Tisch and neither compete with or replicate existing classes.
Abrupt Climate Change is open to all NYU students.

Peter Terezakis
Associate Arts Professor, Tisch NYU
January 28, 2020

Failing to Prepare is Preparing to Fail. — Benjamin Franklin, 1706 -1790

Green World (OART-UT 1057):

Globally 6.5 million people will die prematurely this year due to air pollution. The air we breathe kills more people each year than HIV/AIDS, auto accidents, cholera, malaria, and war combined. A changing climate, loss of open spaces, deforestation, increasing consumption of fossil fuels, global shortages of drinking water, population growth, changes to the basic chemistry of our air, food, and water, along with the campaign to distrust science, are only some of the more critical problems which we are facing today and which will continue into our future.

Active denial of these issues has become the de facto cultural standard with only a fraction of the public taking action.

This course examines environmental issues through discussion, experimentation, field trips, lectures, and speaker presentations, as well as celebrating key individuals — who have helped to shape local, regional, and global environmental discussions for the better.

Our class’s challenge is to encourage artist-storytellers to focus their passion and skill into an existing environmental narrative of their choosing. Your challenge is to create a final project which you will share with the public as a method to help create meaningful, positive social change.

Green World is open to all NYU students interested in helping to improve and preserve the environment which sustains us all.

Examples of some work produced by students of Green World:

https://youtu.be/aIjILIBmD-Y

Climate Refugees:
“Inspired by the work of Garth Lenz to educate about the disastrous extraction of oil through the Alberta Tar Sands, which we viewed in class, I decided to structure my presentation around the wealth of powerful photojournalism exploring the impacts of climate change and utilize the arresting power of the visual medium. Something about the profound depth of Garth’s photography and his patient willingness to walk through the myriad of questions inevitably evoked by the images struck me as so effective, and the influence in my own presentation is clear.” — Parsa Taheripour

A POEM INSPIRED BY CLASS:

we sit around and talk

with empty faces and shallow expressions

of concern, fear, and sadness

circular speaking on powerlessness

as an excuse for our complacency

in agreement, aware,

we’ll go home

and we’ll come back again tomorrow

and do it all again

talking, feigning, concerning, speaking, excusing

powerless, complacent, aware, in agreement,

home

after many many many days

of the same

when the ending is imminent

we’ll find comfort

in how powerless, concerned, fearful, sad,

and unaware we were

and for the last time,

we’ll go home

— Marcel Werder

Terezakis

Tag Archives: climate

Abrupt Climate Change

Green World

Green World (OART-UT 1057):

Peter Terezakis, MPS • Faculty: Collaborative Arts BFA, NYU Tisch • terezakis@nyu.edu