From Lighthouse to Light Buoy. Mixed technics on canvas W 30cm x H 40 cm by Shaharee Vyaas (2023)

Human history and folklore are riddled by tales of sudden climate changes: the Biblical flood that caused Noah to build his arch and Plato´s tale of the city of Atlantis who disappeared into the sea are among the best-known legends. Noah built an arch filled up with stock he would need to start over again. The location of Atlantis was a long-time mystery, till some scientists located in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park in southern Spain a multi-ringed dominion in some mud flats, swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago. Atlantean residents who did not die in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there. These tales contain indications of the previous ways people dealt with a sudden climate change
Because climate changes can run over millennia, the idea that human activities could influence that cycle seemed to be farfetched. Till in the 1820s, French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier proposed that energy reaching the planet as sunlight must be balanced by energy returning to space since heated surfaces emit radiation. But some of that energy, he reasoned, must be held within the atmosphere, and not return to space, keeping Earth warm. He proposed that Earth’s thin covering of air—its atmosphere—acts the way a glass greenhouse would. Energy enters through the glass walls, but is then trapped inside, much like a warm greenhouse.
This greenhouse effect is at the center of the debate how CO2 pollution of the atmosphere is causing an abnormal and steep rise of temperatures around the planet.

The Bull and the Bear in this painting illustrate both sides of the climate debate. On one hand the established industrial lobbies and their shareholders, on the other the environmental consequences of their actions. The almost inundated lighthouses draw attention to the raising sea-level.

PS. Kiribati may be one of the first nations to become extinct due to this phenomenon. As an island nation, the islands are vulnerable to climate change and tsunamis. In 2013, President Tong spoke of climate-change induced sea level rise as “inevitable”. “For our people to survive, then they will have to migrate. Either we can wait for the time when we have to move people en masse or we can prepare them—beginning from now …” In early 2012, the government of Kiribati purchased the 2,200-hectare Natoavatu Estate on the second largest island of Fiji, Vanua Levu. At the time it was widely reported that the government planned to evacuate the entire population of Kiribati to Fiji. In New York in 2014, per The New Yorker, President Tong told The New York Times that “according to the projections, within this century, the water will be higher than the highest point in our lands”.