All maps stake propositions: as much as embody geographical information, they make arguments about how a landscape is inhabited. But climate change maps that model future scenarios of warming, increasing dryness, sea-level rise, or glacial melting are propositions in a strict sense, as they construct frames of reference that orient us to, in the very ways Wittgenstein described propositions, “a world as it were put together experimentally.” Shoreline change can be mapped in deep historical time, or over the past century, in interactive ways that reveal and allow us to zoom in on individual sites of sensitivity–

–but the processes of mapping such change cannot rely on contour lines drawn on a base map. For to do so is to abstract a static photograph from a global process that they only compel one to try to better visualize and comprehend. The processes of change are extremely complex patterns of causation that exceed most map-viewers competencies, despite the wide diffusion of claims and counter-claims about global warming and climate change in public discourse, which has effectively increasingly threatened to dislodge the preeminence of any position of expertise on the issue, demoting the actuality to a theory and removing many public statements on its existence from the map of coastal change, or the relation of the land to submerged territory. We are in danger of adopting an increasingly terrestrial or land-locked relation to how climate change affects shores, because we map from the boundary of the landform, as if it were fixed rather than a frontier of interchange and exchange, both above an under ground.

Far more than other maps, maps of climate change demand unique training, skills, and education to unpack in their consequences. And when the propositions staked in maps of climate change have increasingly come under attack for political implications, as if the scenarios of climate change are formed by a cabal of data scientists and climate scientists to advance independent agendas, or a poorly articulated and politicized climate research, it seems that the special skills used to interpret them and the training to view them have come under attack for not corresponding to the world.

Real fears of the danger of the delegitimization of science run increasingly high. But attacking the amazingly dense arrays of data that they synthesize seems to suggest an interest in shutting down the very visualizations that allowed us to conceive and come to terms with climate change. The open suggestion that digitized scenarios of climate maps were only designed to terrify audiences and advance interests not only undermines discussion and debate, but seems a technique to destabilize the emergence of any consensus on climate change. Although the fears of an immediate loss of climate data may be overstated for the nation, the loss of a role in preserving a continuous record of global climate data is considerable given fears of reducing space-based remote sensing. Such observation provide one of the only bases to map global climate data, ranging from aridity to water temperature to temperature change over time. The hard-line stances that Trump holds about climate sciences are expressed in terms of the costs they generate–“very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit,”–but extend to denigration of climate scientists as a “glassy-eyed cult” by science advisor William Happer–who in George W Bush’s Dept. of Energy minimized the effect of man-made emissions on climate change.

Both bode poorly for the continued funding of the research agenda of NASA’s earth sciences division. And the need to preserve a more coherent maps of man-made climate change grow, choosing the strategies to do so command increased attention. The dangerous dismissal of climate sciences as yet another instance of “listening to the government lie to them about margarine and climate change” or prioritizing the political impact of their findings to draw attention to global warming and climate change seems to minimize the human impact on climate and recall the censorship of climate science reports from government agencies by governmental agencies and political appointees from a time when de facto gag orders dissuaded use of the term “global warming” over a period of eight years, a period of the harassment and intimidation of climate scientists. The term of “climate change” seemed agnostic of human agency–unlike Al Gore’s conviction that “global warming” was a global emergency. As well as actively destabilizing ties between human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases with global warming, Bush asked government agencies investigate “areas of uncertainty” which his successor tried to clarify through explicit research goals.

Yet the role of maps in making a public case for climate change and its consequences seem to have made the project of climate tracking and earth observation under increased attack, as the project of mapping climate is in danger of being removed once again from scientific conclusions about global temperature rise, subsurface ocean temperature rise, or glacial melting–as the ways that climate change maps embody actual environmental risks is effectively minimized.

This post is less concerned with such destabilization than to ask how we climate maps may respond to the hostility to the propositions advanced in climate change maps–and suggest the need for more compelling tools to map and visualize local consequences of climate change. For as maps of climate change make fewer demands to engage their observers, their persuasive nature is being developed in new directions that seem extremely profitable to exit the misleading charges and countercharges about maps as evidence-based. The prospect of the depletion of data of earth observation could eliminate one of the most powerful tools of persuasion–maps–of the dangers climate change and global warming pose to the increasing instability of our national shores.

Many maps as the above show oddly unchanging shorelines, as if a template of global geography will endure without widespread changes over time. A specific problem in advancing these maps may be in moving from the global–by now quite well-documented–to the local effects on specific places, all the better to concretize their meanings to best orient viewer to the possible future scenarios we might face. For the problems of articulating the internal relations within climate change maps–and the complex webs of causation that they presuppose–may have unwittingly increased the gap between the highly expert visualizations that data maps synthesize and the projections of future climate scenarios that they stake–all too often registering, without, perhaps, figuring out how to create maps that encourage viewers to explore the creation and consequence of climate change, and perhaps even the metrics of drought, warming, soil moisture, glacial melting, CO2 concentrations, and ocean-temperatures they render. Indeed, the development and currency that existing remote mapping technologies have already won to synthesize an unprecedented breadth of climate information suggest a basis for using maps to tell compelling narratives of the dangers of climate change.

The increased literacy of reading climate maps has perhaps set the stage for involving viewers in much more sophisticated–and compelling–interactive narratives on climate change. But recent denial of data provided from remote observation rests on the mistaken belief that data rich maps are not means of making judgements, so much as arguments and attacks. The suggestions of the “unfair politicization of science”–so similar in its accusatory tone to the politicization of judges–is hardly new, but seems a new sort of public shaming: it obscures how all science is politicized but the word “politics” seeks to tar federal agencies by a form of public shame by striping them of the illusion of objectivity. Both intentionally destabilize the coherence of pictures of climate change, as if to deny its occurrence or actuality. The deflation of accumulated expertise not only deeply discouraging but maddening to the very scientists who have painstakingly collected and correlated accurate earth observation data to make it available world-wide.

The radical skepticism of “climate change deniers”–the very term reduces science to the level of opinion and belief–rejects the maps that are created as records of the accelerated progress of climate change. For one of the fiercest objections to the collection of the data of global temperatures, sea-level change, coastal or polar melting is not the data alone, but the increasingly apparent judgement is that shifts in temperature, moisture, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases are caused by human activities: earth observation provides a shadow-mapping of the human impact on the global atmosphere, mapping sites of habitation to climate change. Indeed, the sort of maps of shores that they create are unlike the coastal hydrographic surveys used for nautical navigation that images of coastal change they provide are still being devised. Whereas coastal surveys were designed for record-keeping, the research-based mission of NASA earth observation has been unfairly made a target of politicization by discrediting the formal properties of climate maps as if they were intentionally misleading persuasive tools. In ways the mirror image of academic studies of cartographical design–“all maps are arguments,” as Denis Wood and others remind us–the most sophisticated studies of climate change are attacked as reflecting arguments of scientists rather than actuality.

The increasingly prominent status of climate-change maps as statements about warming trends, from Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth to Gore’s influence on the release of the feature on Google Earth’s 3D mapping program, offering viewers to explore abilities for mitigation of climate change parallel to the United Nation’s Climate Conference (COP15), by visualizing the disastrous effects of climate change through 2100. Such compelling tools–including most recently free ArcGIS shape files to map climate change by layers showing both climate change and renewables–to grasp the enormity of dire situation we face on a global scale. But the persuasive ends of convincing viewers of the dangers of climate change and local impact of emissions are diluted in the global scale of many maps. But with more CO2 present in the atmosphere than ever before in the past 650,000 years–to judge by ice samples and the physical record–earth observation also provides the only possible way to continuously synthesize the rising temperatures consequences of a concentration of CO2 in the global atmosphere, whose modeling of drought severity offers an opportunity for diagnosing climate change and is potential consequences of reduced precipitation world-wide by 2099–of potentially great economic impact for human activities on the globe–using a Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), incorporating both temperature and precipitation data to calculate water supply and demand and suggest soil moisture.

Scenario of Reduced Precipitation World-Wide in 2099, using Palmer Drought Severity Index

–to the increased impact of polar melting as a consequences of rising temperatures, as able to be visualized and embodied in the shifting shorelines created by sea-level rise.

Yet to tell the clearest narratives of such potential changes, the flat nature of the map runs the risk of masking local details by the very dramatic image of an arid landscapes that it conjures. the most dramatic narratives of global warming that are captured in such maps are rendered in specific detail. Remote observation has recently revealed by the growth of an individual crack in one Antarctic ice shelf, monitored from space, at such unprecedented speed as rising seawater temperatures have prompted the shelf’s retreat, potentially altering the glacial structure of the entire Antarctic peninsula, as the dislodging of such a huge iceberg but a collapse or retreat in Antarctic ice shelves that stands to provoke the melting of glaciers that it has retained in West Antarctica that could be globally perceived, effectively destabilizing the relations between land and sea globally.

The primary difficulty of shifting perspectives to a new form of continuity–less rooted in the visual field of the map’s frame, and able to synthesize a broader relation between local and global that signified significant complexity, Yet many such global maps of climate change unfortunately depict a flatland, less suggestive of the complex dynamics of climate change, and removed from human agency: while invaluable to document warming and climate change, their risk is an inability to communicate the complexity of climate change, and to depict the different sorts of continuity that climate change maps demand. Even as the addition of graphs attempt to escape from a cartographic “flatland” that erases the dynamics of climate change, and offer a data-rich synoptic shot of the dangers of climate change, they are often oddly removed from local context in ways that render them less powerful as images. Such visualizations have been contested by a newly vocal contingent climate change deniers in recent years.

1. The proposals that are embodied in maps of climate change scenarios have of course entered political discourse with new immediacy, in an environment of political contestation akin to a blood sport, and reflect the discrepancy that while among Democrats some 85% accept human caused climate change, of Republicans only 38% do so–and the proposals in maps have become forms of stirring up the political base. And the current concerting erasure of data on climate change–and outright removal of the Climate Action Plan and any federal roadmap to address climate change that the Obama administration developed have been erased, as has, of course, the public announcement of national commitment to the United Nations climate negotiations, a subject of particular opposition in the incoming Trump team.

While the regulations that have been framed from such maps–regulations on carbon emissions; greenhouse gases; industrial pollutants of extractive industries–were justified by these maps, the maps themselves become a bête noire of that new breed of climate deniers, not known best for the niceties of their arguments. For undermining broad scientific consensus that identifies human activity as the primary engine behind the advancement of global warming seems a principle in the proposed restructuring of the place of earth observation in NASA and the relation of earth observation and the Environmental Protection Agency. (It isn’t surprising @RogueNasa has become an “unofficial resistance” team and a radical site of tweeting needed information–with the assurance that “if the time comes that NASA has been instructed to cease tweeting/sharing info about science and climate change, we will inform you.”) Even as “climate change deniers” have filled Trump’s administration—from Pence and Bannon to Michael Flynn, Nikki Haley, Elaine Chao, Mike Pompeo and Rick Perry, as well as Scott Pruitt, Rex Tillerson, and Reince Preibus–climate change denial seems something of a litmus test of an administration that cedes unprecedented influence to proponents of extractive industries. Even as ocean-surface temperatures relentlessly and rapidly accelerate, the “climate change deniers” who contrast themselves to “believers” in climate change, as if the issue were a matter of debate–have centrally attacked how expert measurements are incarnated and embodied in maps.

All maps are indeed arguments, but there’s great danger in reducing these climate maps to arguments about climate change designed to mislead. For in dismissing maps of recent or future shoreline change as creations, whose data of earth observation needs to be silenced, we approach something tantamount to “cartographic silencing” that is particularly dangerous–if not toxic–to democracies and a scientific debate, which will only prevent best understanding the consequences and extent of environmental change and blindside the investments in understanding climate change. There is some irony here: perhaps since Donald Trump and company have greatly hugely benefitted and openly profited from the big data, grinning all the way to his surprising electoral victory based on psychometric profiles compiled by sifting through Facebook profiles to model their probably political affiliations and sympathies in a MyPersonality database, the organizing of earth observation from continuous climate monitoring by governmental agencies was quickly recognized as dangerous to prove industry. For the maps led the increasing importance of climate monitoring by government agencies to be identified with an abiding interest of the current government to prevent the sort of carbon emissions whose accumulation were treated as the primary cause of man-made causation of advancing climate change.

The extreme language of climate change deniers was once cast as crimes against humanity. But the pushback of anti-regulatory groups is extremely strong on data-maps that embody climate change, because the subtraction of such maps from public domain would be perhaps the greatest source of destabilizing debates on the scope and anthropogenic causes of climate change. Recent media blackouts on scientists working at regulatory agencies as the EPA terrify. They do more than hint at a culture tantamount to cartographical silencing, of Orwellian proportions. The threat to to subtract data maps sketching future climate scenarios from public debate that are sought by climate change deniers, hoping to erase the transit of greenhouse gases across the world and weaken the compelling case that they make for anthropogenic climate change, seem a fantasy of taking the image as the only vehicle for argument about climate change: and engaging the map, rather than the question. For while dismissing climate change as a reflection of urban heat islands or groundcover change–both of which offer contributing factors, but don’t capture the danger of locking the climate in to cyclically rising temperatures as CO2 concentrations ineluctably rise toward 400 ppm–the deniers seem to think that the datamaps of scientific outreach, made for public consumption by NASA and JPL among others, provide propaganda for an arguments advocating environmental regulations, even as the intensity of meteorological irregularities will not be erased.

The disinformation created by silencing maps of future climate-related dangers may hamstring NASA research scientists and future earth observations in unprecedented ways. The increased fear of disengaging United States mapping systems of remote earth sensing from global climate problems–analogous in its short-sightedness to disengaging the United States from global refugees–in ways particularly dangerous to integrating global warming within our spatial imaginaries. The climate of the current administration seems to encourage and allow rogues from EPA nominee Jeff Pruitt to assert rather duplicitously scientists can “disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind;” Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary Rick Perry to claim “the science is not settled” on climate change; and Trump’s nominee for Interior Department to equivocate that global warming is “not a hoax, but it’s not proven science either.” Such statements are broadsides, designed to distance viewers from scenarios of climate change that are mapped, and even to erase the evidence data maps present. Are the current suggestions of restricting information about climate possible in an era when so much is not only out there but the amnesiac electorate must bump against the stored databases of climate science? Despite the dangers of placing a gag order on EPA employees, or instructions of the agency to eliminate climate-related webpages is a form of disinformation that will disappear years of data on climate change, removing climate change data ranging from greenhouse gas emissions to Climate Change indicators from future mapping and from open debate, the maps that have already been made, and interactive mapping technologies that seem destined to grow on the coasts, suggest the resilience of the climate map in ways that will increasingly engage viewers with new narratives of the scope, detail, and dangers of climate change.

The climate change deniers have perhaps seized on the very question of earth observation because climate maps have been so long promoted as reminding us of the dangers that climate change pose to the world. Perhaps the preeminent target of attack on maps as misleading evidence has roots in the attacks on Al Gore’s slideshow on climate change–subsequently made into an award-winning film. While An Inconvenient Truth may have changed the map on climate change, such maps are being being openly re-written by a Trump administration sowing disinformation about origins of changing carbon-levels in our atmosphere and wind-borne greenhouse gas emissions swirling in our skies,– by effectively eliminating the global monitoring from which they derived, and removing maps such as the below from public science museums.

The open dismissal in which Bannon was instrumental of dismissing the famous slide show Al Gore took on the road after his narrow 2004 defeat, showing Gore posed before a backdrop not of mapping the spread of greenhouse gases but targets in the US economy–

–openly sowed disinformation by mismapping the dangers depicted in rasters of climate change maps.

The data organized by geographical criteria is familiar as a way to better orient us to its distribution—from the presentation of election results in every congressional district across the United State; the racial breakdown in each census tract; to carbon emissions or population change–the lack of clear questions of geographical relations that they pose may run the risk of creating a snazzy shape-file with less meaning as an actual geographical distribution we can get our minds around. Most often, they demand digging deeper into the datasets.

2. Our nation has long been committed to the survey and measurement of our coastlines, from the creation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–not a research body, but an organization long commited to the measurement and analysis of hydrographic surveys and shoreline change that has roots in the charge to survey our shores and coasts and that has grown to include the measurement of national precipitation and fisheries surveys, as our notions of the anthropogenic effects on the complex ecosystems of our shores have grown. In contrast to the broadly detailed if flat images of coastal surveys in the past, current images of coastal hazards from climate change project pictures of the dangers of dramatic changes in coastal habitats and for coastal populations due to projected sea-level rise that describe a picture difficult to comprehend in the abundance of data they synthesize or multiple narratives they contain.

The insets included in this data rich map suggest the importance of creating a more interactive, zoomable online version that would take advantage of online tools to create a tool for exploring local questions of coastal change, and indeed creating an image that might be navigated across different future scenarios of climate change. While the process of coastal flooding and sea-level rise is based on conjecture, the power of such a more immersive and more concrete map would be particularly significant and compelling

Question of coastal management and abatement have increasingly suggested limits for future building and the construction that provide much more immediate stories of specific sites, but the broad mapping of risk of coastal flooding, king tides, and ocean pollution are all too often left overly abstract in national maps, and demand more distinct visualization against a detailed terrain view to be best processed and comprehended.

But as our ability to combine local detail with broader stories of climate change grow, the future of the climate map and its relative resiliency will be less likely under such broad attack. From images of climate change from shifting shorelines to greenhouse gas emissions in the global atmosphere, maps of warming and climate change have been increasingly accused of being massaged to make greatest visual impact on viewers: the problem of making the immensely complex causation behind climate change concrete in their global scale concrete. But the sort of questions that can be asked about the geographical distribution of flooding cannot tell us more about the producers of emissions, or the so much as the areas most sensitive to a changing climate that is increasingly changing by degree–the mechanics of climate change are not apparent in a geographical map, but alternate scenarios of the consequences of climate change on changing shorelines can be made more concrete, and rendered in forms more clearly able to be grasped.

The recent curtailing of public speaking by climate scientists in federal employ–in blogposts, articles, or editorials–is akin to the more disturbing cartographical silencing that climate change deniers appear ready to propose. For while rejecting the propositions of maps outright is a way to evacuate them of persuasive value,– even as mankind is busy creating the greatest crisis in global history. Indeed, maps that are created from satellite monitors to further earth observation allow the complexity of climate change to be understood through the specifics of what “global warming” entails, even if the concept may be far too complicated to be sufficiently grasped in all aspects. The question of what might be the new climate norms of a world of rising sea-levels and shifting shorelines.

The image in this post’s header focusses on the nation–and the security of groundwater along the nation’s shores–in ways not linked to global warming or climate change. But the image of a nation increasingly permeable to saltwater pollution and whose pollutants leach into the surrounding seas with increasing consistency cannot be understood save in light of climate change. If the image in the header to this post doesn’t tell a story of the rise of ocean levels that is an impending catastrophe of the anthropocene, it cannot be seen but as a creature of the era of sea-level rise, when the stability of the shoreline is increasingly erased, and it exists as a threshold of eventual crossing that could even appear on the scale of a national map, rather than being confined to local tide tables: the dizzying proportions of unprecedented sea-level rise are challenging to map, but maps provide the best way to orient viewers to its impending occurrence. And maps provide the only effective way to synthesize or model the consequences of the distribution of an uptick of tides that is feared to be but a prelude to the possible eight foot rise of sea-level by the century’s end. Indeed, by translating such a map into the potential local impacts that future water-levels may bring to our shores–as this map by Green Info Network–future water levels can be viewed and embodied against the watersheds, shorelines, estuaries and beaches that they would compromise with a gloriously specific detail, including the infrastructural changes as we will confront projected shoreline change in roads, rail, and parks.

3. The maps that are modeled after and based on remotely sensed data are rich with information that has the ability to clarify complexity of causation in ways that are increasingly relevant to how we interact with our lived environments–and the habitats of endangered species worldwide. The extent of information that is compressed into the most useful maps of shoreline change depict a changing relation between land and sea particularly important to capture to understand the global scope of planetary warming. The very propositions of climate change are so complex and multi-causal, with cascading effects producing rising temperatures, sea-level rise, and higher king tides, that they are difficult to map–and yet we need maps to give voice to the rich datasets of sea-level, surface-temperature, groundwater, and glacial thickness and density that is not possible on a national or global level–but may provide the best means of communicating the effects of climate change. The map of the permeability of shorelines to saltwater invasion in the header to this post stands as a surrogate for the impending disasters of climate change, as the offshore pollution from run-off that is tracked in blue marks the parallel leeching of pollutants into the sea.

The data-rich result is an image of the porousness that shore lines increasingly destined to face in an era of rising temperatures: while most of these maps don’t include charts,– whose increasing presence in most maps may remain implicit in climate maps of shoreline change, which aim to trace the changes in in the coastal barrier over time. For the harvesting of data to measure shoreline change, polar melting, and glacial erosion derives largely from remote measurements of earth observation long ago codified into NASA’s charter in surveying hydrographic records for mariners and boats–

–but remotely surveyed records of temperature, rain, humidity, soil-moisture and ice thickness create a perspective of data-abundant information that demand to be translated into a compelling–and explorable–visual language.

Such maps have served to make the case for measuring and calling attention to climate change in particularly useful ways, as the image of regions now vulnerable to saltwater pollution can help manage groundwater sources. But they are misleadingly understood or cast as tools of professional advancement, as the large-scale changes that they so successfully register compellingly reveal. And the research commitment of NASA to the earth sciences helps continue to develop innovative methods of remotely monitoring of coastal change that effectively embody the complexity of climate change in persuasive ways.

The continuous data from NASA remote sensing maps provide the global coverage that allow this complexity to be grasped, and maps provide the best tools to describe the local impact of global warming. Cartographers face increased challenges to register such changes–even as many are working to adapt new conventions to charge climate change, it is also true maps are at risk for being increasingly alienated from their audiences in their relative sophistication and expertise, in part because of the ability to synthesize an increased amount of huge quantities of data on climate observation has exposed them to rejection–and indeed led them to be attacked. The fear of reducing the purview and charter of NASA’s remote observation, and indeed trying to downshift earth observation to agencies without a research mandate of their own, promotes a dangerous down-grading of the role of public communication of scientific knowledge from government agencies, embodied in the improbably advocacy by the firebrand Republican congressman Daniel Webster to eliminate government funding of the American Community Survey, based on his interpretation of its randomized sampling of three million households as a “random survey” not deserving of federal funding: indeed, rather than focussing so much on the internal divisions of the nation’s recent voting preferences,

–we may be neglecting the danger of the rapidly increasing vulnerability of our shores.

4. Imminent dangers of defunding such a mission of earth observation, to be sure, suggest a cartographical silencing in the attempt to end discussion of the effects of man-made activities on climate change that is terrifying, and difficult to confront or process in itself. As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump denied the contribution of industries to global warming, despite the high rank of the United States in the global emission of greenhouse gases. Trump sees the production of such maps as tantamount to an assault on corporate regulation. Indeed, the refusal to map the changes in shorelines onto human actions and to remove them from human agency–either to naturalize these changes or remove their imminent danger for human settlement–is especially acute. But the proliferation of mapping technologies, and advances in detailing shoreline change, save in the unlikely chance that they are entirely eliminated and defunded, working to provide more compelling narratives of global complexity.

As if to conceal the large contribution that the nation makes to greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, and the temperature rises on Earth’s surface consequent to their emission, without greenhouse gases, the recent decision to begin a purging all mention of climate change on the Trump-run website Whitehouse.gov–the new page promises that “for too long, we’ve been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry, while avowing to end “harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule“–mirrors the policy of the Environmental Protection Agency, according to its website, to suspend some $4 billion of grants and other assistance agreements that is directed to in part to state-led climate research and efforts to improve air and water quality to local projects of environmental justice, discrediting the notion of government involvement in climate monitoring that has been invaluable to understanding climate change and responding to its effects. Indeed, the Guerrilla Archiving Event’ to preserve EPA programs and datasets available online last December in Toronto–emulating the Internet Archive–responded to the potentially transient nature of such climate data.

For now, with funding is on hold, fears of a silencing of climate data suggest a continued destabilization of the picture of climate change it records. Yet the importance of affirming that coherence, and the place of climate modeling in mapping its consequences might allow, is a necessary basis to take stock of our shifting environment through he increased persuasiveness remote sensing offers. The makeover of websites and disappearance of data after the inauguration of Trump reflects not only a transition of White House URL’s; the migration of the Climate Change Page to the national archives diverts attention from climate change and for the environmental consequences–as well as the mapping–of climate change. Although average global temperature would be −18 °C (0 °F) without their presence, the global land-ocean temperature index has risen just shy of a full degree with the 40% increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from 1750 to 2015, in ways that stand to alter the current coastlines in ways we are slowly starting to map with satisfactory complexity.

The alarming trends of coastal endangerment–occurring because of a combination of rising sea-levels, erosion, and saltwater invasion–raise almost apocalyptic fears. But they need to be captured and registered as an ongoing process, in order best to express a dynamic driven by multi-causal and indeed recursive processes. As we struggle to comprehend the cascading effects of complex causation that comprise the concept of climate change, we increasingly rely on maps, and are beholden to them, but increased skepticism about their claims serve to support the corporate interests that the silencing of continuous data feeds able to document the extent of climate change. It’s perhaps no coincidence that so many of the recent protests in response to Trump’s anti-scientific pro-corporate policies, a movement led in the Trump cabal by EPA transition advisor Myron Ebell, have arisen on or near the shores–not only in traditionally “blue” states.

Women’s March Against Trump/NY Times/January 21, 2017

Or, to use an upbeat image of resistance in what promises to be a blogpost of far bleaker future scenarios,

Women’s March/Group Estimates/Map created by Eric Compas

But if we can be permitted to have such an exultant map of the national scale of resistance to Trump and his policies, the role of climate change maps is perhaps complicit in some sense in allowing climate change “deniers” to dismiss the findings that they embody, as if the scenarios of climate change were digitized illustrations were designed to delude.

The politicization of data maps might indeed reveal the effects of increasing coastal incursions. After all, lived experiences are far more powerful than even the most fearsome projections of the outcomes of ice-cap melts that chart sea-level rises of sixty-six meters –even as they insist such rises are “not a threat” and question anthropogenic causes of sea-level rise, the complexity of changes are elided or surpassed in the digitized images that imagine alternate scenarios of polar melting and sea-level rise in ways that stop from embodying their disastrous consequences or effects for coastal residents.

Wm. Robert Johnston

but address audiences with monitory images that are striking yet actually not data-rich–

Such monitory graphical renderings are sufficiently removed from actuality to lie only in the far-off future. Such fictional forecasting in digitized images of future scenarios may undermine their authority, indeed, by being not that effective, or actually data rich, and may even provoke skepticism from audiences as digital creations made in order to invite unsubstantiated fears by embodying possible worlds in deceptive ways, not rooted in actual observations.

But it is perhaps in the farther north, near the polar areas, where the widespread melting of permafrost threatens to release untold further greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the permafrost retreats and advancing thermokarst–areas of permafrost thaw–advances across the arctic, that the Arctic landscape has begun to collapse, and if one looks only at the twenty year period already measured by NASA’s earth observatory between 1990 and 2010–basically before the Obama administration began to monitor climate change and advocate adequate regulations in response to a broad environmental crisis in the world–the Arctic landscape has changed to a significant area of wetlands where permafrost once existed, as melted water has created an increasing number of lakes, both as regions of lakes, and lakes and wetlands, that have converted a fifth of permafrost regions to s. A thermokarst, remapping the range of lakes not only in the Canadian arctic–

–but in the erosion of an arctic landscape that can be documented by the surprising density of lakes found across much of the previously frozen circumpolar regions:

Nature Communications, D. Olefeldt et al.

The distributions of such rradical changes in these less populated–but nonetheless inhabited–regions, where the presence of newly emerging lakes can be classified loosely from ‘Low’ (10% or below), ‘Moderate’ (10-30%), ‘High’ (30-60%), or ‘Very High’ (60–100% regional coverage), by GTOPO30 data, we can see a shifting differentiation of land and sea focus attention on the new nature of landforms. Have such amazingly detailed data maps have come to successfully direct attention, interest, and observation to the local consequences and complexity of climate change in ways that have made them the subject of attack?

Ohio State/NASA-JPL/Caltech. “Continental Patterns of Submarine Groundwater Discharge

The commanding nature of such data-dense visualizations traces the confusion around our shores’ stability in an image almost dream-like in the porous boundaries of shores that it creates. In suggesting submarines water transit, the map disrupts one of the clearest and most familiar of cartographic conventions, after all, and replaces clear shorelines of a nation with a multi-colored perimeter that suggests the instability of shores. As climate change has created a drought in California that is the harshest in 1,200 years, the increased vulnerability of many coastal regions in the state to saltwater invasion is pronounced in coastal aquifers–especially south of San Francisco or much of Florida’s coastal areas in the south and north–as it is in the low-lying lands off the Gulf of Mexico and American South–at the same time as ocean pollution from submarine groundwater discharge has increased. If Rachel Carson long ago suggested the complexity of the intertidal zone as an intensely productive ecosystem for the development of life of particular sensitivity, the delicate nature of the coasts is more than ever made apparent in such a map, where strong participation increases groundwater discharge that may include fertilizers and industrial pollutants.

The global scale of climate change has provoked a cataclysmic confusions between land and sea with a greater complexity that cartography can help us to begin to grasp, far broader than on a single nation. The presence of underground flows of freshwater to the ocean, and the increased susceptibility of land-to-sea contamination described in a recent study of underground water exchanges and dissolved chemicals that leach from the edges of the North American continent itself changes both our notion of the shoreline. For the above map registers the dramatic changes of coastal water quality due to anthropogenic disturbances in the changing geometry of coastal drainage from farmlands and in inhabited areas, providing a new view of discharge previously largely limited to riverine flow by Submarine Ground Discharge, changing our understandings of the porous nature of the shoreline and the relation between land and sea on a continental scale.

5. Climate change maps stake propositions in increasingly pressing ways, but may in fact not make the case with sufficiently compelling persuasion, since they diminish the complex agency of climate change. Using continuous rasters based on data feeds, they orient us to the actually shifting nature of our shores, as much as the spatial continuity of land maps: indeed, the relation between such a change on global scale to local places–and the new relation between space and place created by climate change–is pressing but difficult to capture or express for a broad audience. For unlike land maps, the image that climate change maps provide may demand considerable expertise to read, even if they present themselves for immediate comprehension. For although their continuous rasters of climate change maps appear to be distanced from scientific expertise, the maps address and are presented to their viewer as ways to orient information without making many demands on interpretative skills. Condensing truly huge amounts of data and often modeling of future scenarios, the maps have frighteningly occasioned considerable skepticism, by those who cast their continuous rasters as illusory theoretically informed models and imagined creations of scientists who seek to advance an agenda–as if data from remote observations were massaged to frame an interested argument of an unsubstantiated agenda, rather than in hope to process information for viewers so that climate changes can be understood, by suggesting the permeability of previous geographical–and cartographical–constructs, such as shorelines and shores. With increasing sporadic dumping of water in much of the United States, the complex interchanges between land and sea have been increasingly mapped with greater sophistication and ability from remotely sensed measurements, creating a sense of the continuity of water exchanges across the coasts that will be increasingly important to define our country’s resilience to the 0ngoing process of climate change.

But such maps command attention precisely by revealing the considerable sensitivity across the nation to a range of hot spots of shoreline change–changes due to the man-made discharge of chemical contaminants and the incursion of salty water into wetlands and coastal aquifers that will be particularly sensitive to climate change. Indeed, the monitory value of such maps outweighs the doomsday scenarios that they might depict, for they provide the best ways of responding on an institutional level to the unknown consequences of climate change. By illustrating the remote measurement the levels of contaminants that reach the coast, and the incursion of saltwater across national shores, the map both assembles a set of nation-wide data not otherwise accessible, and helps localize dangers of saltwater intrusion and coastal pollution across the over 15 billion tons of freshwater flowing to the coasts in preparation for climate change. By providing a baseline for the changing coastal habitats by groundwater transfers that few recognize, the map effectively synthesizes a range of earth observations in a map of incredible richness and density, which tampering with the mandate for earth observation stands to seriously compromise.

The extremely rich and sophisticated datasets in such rasterized “images” derive from ongoing projects of global data collection that provide the most accurate basis to comprehend the complexity of climate change. Yet the remote sensing that undergirds them is now in danger of being shuttered or severely limited by the United States President Elect, who stands to curtail the availability of data on which much of the world has come to depend–as if the messenger is being thrown out for the interests that it allegedly advocates. Despite the increased evidence all around us of the effects of climate change, we run the risk of a collective disorientation by cutting off the data feeds, in a bizarrely calculated and self-interested manner. Indeed, the corporate interests that are designed to cut of regulation of land and ocean pollutants or greenhouse gas emissions seem designed to remove themselves from the map of climate change, or to curb the monitoring that has lead such maps to become such powerful ecological arguments. Even if a range of private firms that provide satellite imagery cannot provide a full accounting of polar regions–which result without geographic features from space–or the necessary geographic rectification that NASA remote sensing ensures.

Continuous earth observation is entirely dependent on remote monitoring. In order to map climactic changes, we depend on the generation of data from remote sensing that NASA has increasingly provided from the administration of George Bush. The targeting of very technologies and abilities to map climate change is a ‘cartographical silencing’ that is almost anti-modern, and steeped in a radical skepticism of scientific authority and empirical documentation. Bent by the primacy of economics, Trump has chosen environmental advisors apt to darken by eliminating the extent to which the government has greatly expanded a network of satellites orbiting the earth whose feeds monitor and calibrate changes in weather, ocean, and surface water, and ice-cover at the northern and southern pole, upending investments in visualizing climate by the United States since George Bush’s presidency, when emergency funding was arranged to preserve the archives of satellite imagery of earth from Landsat satellite, recognizing the importance of preserving continuous data feeds, until Landsat 7 was launched with multispectral imaging bands by April 15, 1999, supplying images and digitized data to all public users world wide at their own lowest possible costs. The creation of comprehensive and both spatially and temporally continuous maps of climate change central to NASA’s mission depends on remote earth observations from sources orbiting the planet.

Select NASA’s Earth Science Satellites (NASA)

The feeds of such a range of earth science satellites constitute a mine for data harvesting and earth-imaging to accurately calibrate environmental hazards to best diagnose and respond to their increasing occurrence. The data feeds providing a sense of temporal continuity that can communicate–and helps viewers grasp–the theoretical complexity the instability of globalized climate change, and the enormity of its effects on our national water supply and the dryness of our world even at a time of potentially rising seas and saltwater incursion of shoreline lands. Yet the information that such color-enriched maps are given is given an agency that has led them to be dismissed, as if the very difficulty to decipher in their saturated rasters leads them to be condemned as misleading creations, whose apparent remove from human experience is oddly troubling for many.

The complex basis for representing continuous rasters that are nt otherwise easily perceptible from remotely sensed data may oddly engender its own skepticism. Only from satellites can we map fluctuations in the seas and ocean shores, not otherwise seen by many offer a constructive form of critical cartography, or surveyors. For the continuous rasters they produce, unlike territorial maps, omit the fixed frontiers of nation-states or any sign of clear boundaries or noting of sites of human habitation,–in ways that may indeed make them emblems of a globalization that many climate change “deniers” seek to reject: as if the Paris accords recognized the cartographic image of an inter-dependent word we don’t want to accept. This post began from the questions of whether the question of whether the symbolic form of climate change maps encourages them to be so skeptically seen. For climate change deniers, the data richness of such visualizations and projections of climate scenarios have been taken as grounds for wild skepticism about their contents. Such skeptics claim to resist their presuppositions. The abrupt and blanket denial of what an incoming administration labels “politically correct science“–indeed, as not science, but politics, as if these could ever be separated–entails disrupting the very same remote sensing projects by which climate change was effectively visualized.

More satellites of remote observation are in the works, and in line with the climate science research projects that scientists at NASA are engaged. And it is difficult to believe that the prestige of NASA will be successfully targeted or diminished in a Trump administration, even if that seems to be the intention of the current President. The investments in projects already on the books–and the continuity of NASA research projects that are pencilled in for future years–provides the only guarantee of security in the somewhat conservative and necessarily long-term nature of plans of scientific institutions. Indeed, the recent decision to award a contract to launch a satellite designed to monitor world-wide surface water levels to SpaceX–SWOT, or the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite, seems to exemplify such investment in climate modeling–

NASA SWOT rendering

–seems trying to guarantee the survival of remote monitoring programs fundamental to tracking and understanding climate change, if it is not the final investment in a program many appointees to an incoming Trump administration plan to cancel entirely or defund.

Indeed, potential and seemingly inevitable cuts of the Earth Sciences budget of NASA threaten a very dangerous form of cartographical silencing never foreseen. The satellite destined to improve climate forecasting and prediction with a launch date of 2021 would be difficult to cancel. So would adequate detection of the anthropogenic nature of climate change–a lynchpin in the constraints on industrial power plants that are so desired to be cut by extractive industries. In classic Trump doublespeak, the public denial on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show of man-made global warming, repeated during the Presidential race, sought to focus attention of voters on increased energy costs he claimed that he could lower, and expanded as an attack on Barack Obama for agreeing to the Paris Climate Accords as a foreign imposition of constraints on the American economy, designed to serve “foreign interests” and not American ones, and discussion of climate change only as justifying “just a very, very expensive form of tax”–lest anyone thought it had a basis in scientific fact. The loss of remotely monitored information, however, if able to upset the construction of maps of ocean temperature rise, would come at severe costs of removing us from any orientation on climate change.

Although it’s increasingly vital to direct attention to climate change, lack of attention to communicating the complexity of climate change is belied by the illusion of solidity in the continuous rasters that track heat-trapping greenhouse gasses or oceanic salinity.

Rendering the processes or mechanics of climate change will remains extremely difficult–the intangibility of causation may be an underlying liability of the success of embodying climate change in maps. Yet the difficulty may encourage considerable skepticism and resistance to accepting that its mechanics have a human causes–in spite of the dramatic pace of ever-rising temperatures and need to try to address their danger in ways we have so tragically not been able to come to terms. So how can the persuasive power of the properties of such maps better serve to document the dangerously increasing growth of temperatures at land and sea, and increasingly insecure margins of our shores?

Even as climate change maps are attacked and devalued as if they were created and based on self-interest, foreclosing earth observation data suggests interests greater than a map could contain–and a form of cartographical censorship or silencing that is particularly dangerous and willful. Indeed, the registration of such data suggests one of the only ways to gain purchase on the momentous and accelerating changes brought by man-made activities that have come to define the era now called the anthropocene.

5. For as much as challenging the drawing of shores as a straight lines, the overlapping of the margins of the shores–the biologically crucial tidal zones and marginal ecosystems to which Rachel Carson called attention as dense biological laboratories for micro-organisms and coastal inhabitants–are threatened by the growing temperatures, rising sea-levels and king tides, in ways that lack tangibility in most weather maps or climate modeling: the relative invisibility on such large-scale maps of the impact of sea-level rise on estuaries, coastal wetlands, coral reefs, and ocean margin ecosystems that need to be more carefully scrutinized.

Much remote sensing of temperatures may fail–perhaps because its use of data sources has made a selective record of information so difficult to foreground. The rush of information of global climate is in part especially difficult to process for an untrained viewer. Indeed, even in the most recent data maps designed to show the rise in temperatures on land and sea in a map retain a stable boundary between land and sea–

–as do maps of the mean departures from average temperatures over the past year:

Despite extensive information about the detail and scope of temperature rise from remote sensing of the planet, we risk avoiding the sensitive and increasingly inevitable erasure of a clear boundary between land and sea, retaining a crisp delineation of the very coastlines whose erasure seems increasingly inevitable.

NOAA

The increased possibility of the dumping of huge amounts of water on formerly dry states like California trace the arrival of total accumulated rainfall with weirdly removed and abstracted process, leaving the coastline of the state crispy defined in an underlying base map on which to track the precipitation that arrived in the first week of January, 2016–

January 7-10, 2016/NASA Earth Observatory

–and rightly focusses on the anomaly of total rainfall as its subject, without suggesting the increased lack of clarity between land and shore in global warming weather patterns.

6. The increased insecurity of coastal regions demands better mapping to incorporate alarming shifts of sea-level to help us better to process our shifting relation to the oceans. And in an era when we are imagining a network of medical information that might instantaneously connect all patients of a specific cancer to one another and indeed to map the total number of cancers victims, the notion of plotting sea level rise in specifics and in relation to climate change demands greater work–if it has been an area of increased attention–rather than being deprived of necessary continuous data feeds that gain new coherence in geographical form.

EPA

Photo: Dave R/Flickr (Creative Commons)

We lose a sense of bearing on the eery rising king tides that we experience day to day in the California coast, however, without their data. Despite aspirations to recreate a sense of tangible presence in such maps, derived from the latest NASA data, revealed that temperatures in North America the second-hottest year on record, but seem removed from a concrete sense of place–despite the predominant trend to warming. Lest we treat this image of increased land and ocean temperatures as the “new normal”–to appropriate an over-used phrase whose monitory value sadly lacks. Yet the phrase seems almost destined to migrate to multiple zones in coming years, as it is difficult to grasp in what normalcy consists so far as temperature, rainfall, snowpack, and the dramatic changes of such rising temperatures,–if the rasters and enhanced colors of such data-based maps don’t appear with greater immediacy, the absolute shifts are all too apparent.

Despite the need to detect local effects of temperature change, such changes are easily lost among the overwhelming information overload of these carefully calibrated maps, which painstakingly assemble data culled from remote sensing, much as the climate change models receive inputs of temperature changes, wind direction, speed, and atmospheric presence of carbon gases that inform their underlying equations. The global compilation of multiple sites of record warmest temperatures, especially in Indonesia and Afghanistan, as well as Alaska and Siberia, suggest a dangerous flirting during a few months of a temperature rise of 1.5°C, with February coming it at 1.63°C above early industrial levels and March with an average increase of 1.54°C, driven by increasing carbon emissions. The narrative of meteorological projections that might accompany such a shift in of temperature–“coastal storms and hurricanes; king tides; widespread flooding; ten to twenty feet of rain expected“–are absent from such maps, but reflected in their content.

The dots are not easily connected for most viewers of the map, whose power seems hamstrung and to speak to few. Without imagining legends of forecasts of climate change models–“Heavy rains. Rising ocean levels. Intensifying desertification. Saltwater incursions in coastal regions.”–we might try to remedy how the flat maps lies as if at a cognitive remove from the impacts of climate change, viewed with suspicion that attempt to discredit their dire warnings as selective interpretations of evidence whose conclusions are massaged to terrify. Climate change deniers like to point to the continued presence of some cooler than average areas lead many to shrug and move on, given the difficulty of tying temperature increases to environmental disasters or to anything that lies within human agency. Despite monthly compilations of temperature anomalies against pre-industrial standards, perhaps the remove of pre-industrial society from our post-industrial world seems to remove the notion of any comparison–even if deniers might see them as lacking necessary historical context that would deflate their impact. Indeed, the current fears of curtailing or limiting access to data collection in coming years suggests that the Trump administration may attempt to curtail the creation of the necessary climate maps tracking earth observations, much as the administration of George W. Bush attempted to block access to the library of the Environmental Protection Agency or Canada’s former Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, did his best to silence scientists and block access to data sets that provided the basis for climate change maps.

In working to create such maps, we might begin by asking how their formal construction can best bridge the apparent cognitive remove to make them less resistant to critiques, if only to emphasize their power as the necessary guideposts of orientation to an age of increasing climate change. For as the data that is captured about the global climate from space as well as from sensors on the ground are becoming a measure of life and death, as well as of economic importance and potential losses of huge amounts of money and investment during increasingly extreme climate events. We will need data for the best maps possible of the global climate to gather and to materialize earth observation data; if NASA data may be supplemented in needed ways by non-profits who have launched impressive online data aggregation maps to help visualize potentially disastrous events of the global climate as World Resources Institute, using Carto mapping tools for detailed maps of carbon emissions and losses of carbon sequestration, and remote images of earth observation of much of the world on offer from Planet Labs, scientists depend on the systematic continuous coverage of global climate over time that NASA and NOAA have provided. Yet as NASA threatens to be best known by T-Shirts from Urban Outfitters, as much as they might raise some awareness of remote sensing work, it seems ironical that such a hipster acquisition may signal the demise of much needed global earth observation.

Yet continuous data feeds are necessary to create the most persuasive maps possible of climate change. And there is concern that despite the intent of ordering cognitive purchase on climate change, the maps are themselves often seen as just so alien as predictive creations to be dismissed out of hand–especially when they are observed from space or use models.

Although such changes often depend on the melting of glaciers and ice-sheets, not even shown clearly on the map, the results of expanding the amount of water in global oceans is quite challenging to map, even if a time-related slider bar offers on way–or noting sea level rising in oranges and yellows, and rendering islands of exceptional dropping sea levels in cooling waters by blue rasters, here displayed in a slightly different manner–but many of which seem remote from human experience, if only because global temperatures are so difficult to correlate or mesh with individual experience. The almost airbrushed images of hotter than usual sea temperatures below seem almost impressionistic, in ways that undermine the precision and painstaking detail that they collate and compile. Or, even worse, temperature anomalies are naturalized at a remove from the coastal habitats that they threaten.

NASA/Space.com

Even though the islands of cooling waters are isolated cirrus clouds in inverse to a sky, ruddy rasters near Indonesia, Madagascar, and Japan suggest a broad trend in warming of particular difficulty to conceptualize adequately for most viewers. The complexity of mapping the mechanics by which rising temperatures create an uneven rise in water levels–and the clear difficulty in explaining the variations for many regions in ocean levels, even in coastal regions, threatens to undermine the communicative value of a map that should be a cause for collective alarm–and placed quite a new premium on the need to define cartographical tools to convey accurate information of the serious nature of sea-level rise to viewers with anything close to a suitably corresponding level of alarm. The complexity of climate change that creates rising seas at rapidly increasing rates over the past or in the future raise questions of embodying the very complexity of its change.

In an era of rapidly increasing global warming, maps that chart climate change and of sea-level rise have failed to orient viewers to the local effects of the complex processes of climate change at considerable costs. Indeed, they’ve come under attack because of the implicit propositions that they are taken to make–as if they were false, deceptive, or purposefully misleading, if not intentionally deceptive.

7. When we turn to map the future of global climate, temperatures or carbon levels, we stitch together continuous images of the globe from 36 by 22 quadrants, to convincingly dynamic models of climate change whose global coverage runs over time: using data sets of temperature, we make a continuous model of earth’s surface in future times, smoothing out the model in ways to create images of the greatest stability, for a model of most reasonable results.

Yet we create models that are oddly removed from local effects or consequences, which fail to draw the relations between local situations of climate observations with the site-specific exactitude that might be expected from weather maps, but in an information overload that stands at a chiasmus from the claims of weather projections–and fail to deliver similar predictive claims or needed assertions, since they are contingent by necessity. Since we don’t describe if it will be rainy in Cleveland, or what temperature it will be in Miami, the relation of the local changes to the global changes become hard to grasp or obscured–or presented as predictions outside of the complexity theory of climate change and without mapping climate change to man-made activities in convincing ways.

Louisiana Coast after Seven Meter Sea-Level Rise/Geology.com

And hence lies the problem of persuading viewers of climate change’s actuality, and of the need for far more convincing–although not more detailed–maps of climate change. Even in the best maps of future shorelines, the scenarios of global warming and climate change are removed from the informational content viewers expect, dismissing their dynamic models as creations, created by manufacturing a false continuity, and even as based on presuppositions many reject. By dismissing the problems they raise–even if the outright flooding of the Sacramento Valley from Yuba City to Manteca that a twenty meter rise in sea level would bring would drastically alter the farming landscape and San Jose–the way maps seek to speak truth to power seems silenced, at least temporarily.

Sacramento Valley with Twenty Meter Sea-Level Rise

While powerful projections of the impact of variable levels of potential sea-level rise, such maps may elide or fail to clarify the mechanics of the anthropogenic origins of sea-level rise, or prepare the viewer adequately of the contingency of different possibilities of sea-level rise in dangerously low-lying regions that are particularly vulnerable to a rise in ocean levels.

Hence, the importance of NOAA’s valuable mapping tool to visualize the impact of climate change on coastal communities–although the focus on inhabited areas renders this impact mostly in terms of the lens of property loss along the shore.

Data maps try to embody climate change, by mapping of global waters, ice-density, and soil moisture. But they are dismissed as if they only embodied interests–rather than measure risks or command attention as marking the end of coasts as fixed separations of land and sea. Indeed, the target set at the Paris Accords to limit the current rise in global temperatures to but 2 C–and to hope for a rise of only 1.5 degrees–is perhaps best mapped to embody the dangers of shifting the increasingly uncertain boundaries of land and sea in crystal clear ways. Yet far more effective as arguments than such global maps of planetary warming or the data overloads that track the consequences of polar melting, local maps of the shifting boundary between land and sea offer the most convincing demonstration of its effects that we can grasp–affirming, as it were, the local knowledge of climate change in its global glory, and not an abstraction whose complex causation is hard to grasp. Is there a better way to tie the local to the complex global processes of climate change, outside of the increasingly banal–if widely viewed–idiom of the raster of a weather map?

Waves of King Tide in San Francisco’s Embarcadero/Burrito Justice

The complexity of mapping climate change is particularly difficult as a persuasive tool. Perhaps because we have become increasingly familiar with and inured to the colorized saturated rasters of weather maps by whose glosses we are regularly encounter as dense explications emanating from monitors and television screens, the colorful maps of future scenarios of climate change are almost emptied of scientific authority to communicate the complex causation of global waring; the odd familiarity of such maps may make them far less scary than they demand than possible alternatives that can be classified as theories, on which the journey is out or models that might play out in other ways.

The terrifying legitimacy granted to radical skepticism of climate change deniers–who cast their content as but a theory, and treat them as massaged images, rather than actual records–may reveal the problems of making a global argument in maps. Indeed, their power lies in relating the local and particular to the universal, as much as in their abilities for total synthesis. It may be that the deeply disempowering effect of such maps that seem far removed from human agency can become part of their weakness–indeed, their symbolic kinship to the colorized rasters of weather maps overwhelm the differences between charting cold fronts from Canada or storms from the Caribbean and permanent climate change. It’s as if the cognitive difficulties of tying their colorized content to consequences of human agency or the impact of carbon emissions provides cover for admitting that the massive changes in world climate are predominantly man-made. If so, the importance of tying the local to such global maps of climate change is of increasing rhetorical importance.

In an age when we have become accustomed to converting meteorological observations into a spectator sport, we seem particularly ill-prepared to adopt less passive positions in relation to global warming, or to process maps of climate change, as spectators of the weather even as the World Meteorological Organization found 2011-2015 the hottest five-year span in the existing historical record, and expressed concern about clear danger of the increased rising of sea levels resulting from the rapid rate of the melting of arctic polar ice, and of outsized Antarctic glaciers–whose mass stands not only to decline, but whose diminishment lessen their contribution to the cooling by the reflection solar light: the prospect of accelerating rates of polar melting and sea-level rise stands to create the warmest year on record, the human contribution to which climate change “deniers” seem apocalyptically destined to increase further with potentially catastrophic effects to be effectively embodied in maps in ways that their global data on temperature change must be more closely tied to its local impacts.

Yet the symbolic format of maps don’t best allow us to interpret the scope of such change.

Remote sensing–and climate modelling–almost inevitably echoes the conventions of weather maps. Such maps are constructed by similar material practices of organizing data, but embody quite different set of processes of environmental change, and indeed address their audiences in different ways as spectators, precisely by their contingency. In ways that echo how data is increasingly seen as a form of authorship, climate change deniers voice skepticism about scientists’ presentations, contesting the mapping of evidence of climate change as if to suggest their contingency: as if the input that shape raster images was only making a set of heuristic or theoretical claims of the moment, rather than suggestive of deep trends. Yet the fuzzy coastlines of the continent that reveals the vulnerability of the coast to saltwater incursion or ocean pollution suggest the sort of picture of the porous nature of coastlines as permeable boundaries that will be increasingly common in the continental United States. And while not measuring the consequence of climate change, the map may be salutary to habituate us to the growing pounding of shorelines, coastal flooding and increasingly common disturbances of ecotonal equilibria climate change seems destined to create, but which we are only learning to engage viewers effectively in maps–starting from maps of just how vulnerable the coasts of the nation are to saltwater invasion (here in violet) or pollution from the land (cobalt blue).

To be sure, the dangers of saltwater invasions produce the destruction of riverine ecosystems in many areas, from the Florida panhandle to Louisiana bayoux to the San Francisco Delta and beyond, but the relative abstraction of rendering invasiveness by violet blobs makes it difficult to perceive its consequences with sufficient alarm. For as coastal sea levels stand to grow further–beyond the eight inches that they have risen in the past century–the vulnerability of the land to the sea is in need of mapping in local detail in ways to make sense of the local narratives of climate change.

The Ohio State University/NASA-JPL/Caltech

Sea level rise has already created resulted in an unprecedented growth of coastal flooding–significantly exacerbated during king tides, as sea level has risen over the century by some eight inches. We might better track the increased coastal permeability to extreme floods, that have become far more pronounced in the sloping shores of the Atlantic coasts, in ways that alter landlubbers’ relation to the sea that increasingly approaches their businesses, properties, and residences, and dramatically alters coastal habitats in ways we are only beginning to come to terms.

Climate Central: Coastal Flooding on Atlantic Seaboard

8. Such cartographical embodiments are perhaps the clearest records of the effects of increased in temperature that are undeniably man-made, but the relation of the local to the inexorable rises of temperature that we’ve witnessed in the past thirty-five years have been less clearly concretized for many.

People once feared what lay beyond their village, down the road or across a forest; maps of the local knowledge of the effects of global warming is particularly powerful in communicating the proximity of fear. For as digitized maps of the United States are generated and proliferate online with unprecedented ubiquity, perhaps the scariest images we encounter are models of impending environmental uncertainties whose neon rasters intimate alternative scenarios of climate catastrophe that are indeed lying close at hand. And it is perhaps for the impact of the locally based knowledge of global warming–a point to which this post returns at its close–that the “Since the Paris [climate] agreement, the greatest level of action on climate reduction is coming at the state, provincial, and municipal level,” according to Ontario’s Environment Minister, precisely because the national level is both unwieldy disproportionate, and that climate change is most clearly concretized on a local level: maps of climate change have their impact on immediate settings and practices, not policy-level decision, in ways that might give heart to those who, faced with the preparations of a future Trump administration to roll back protections of the environment on a federal level, and affirm the potentially vital role of subnational jurisdictions to limit local emissions and engage in practices of cap and trade.

Currently increasing fears of silencing or reducing gathered data on climate change among many scientists–collectively scrambling to copy earth observations that have charted the changing atmosphere of the planet’s climate, pose the problem of keeping data of earth observations from space alive for future generations, and indeed converting them to readable and persuasive form as a record of the dangers of climate change. The very global maps that seek to persuade viewers of climate change are perhaps too daunting in their complexity–and removed from experience–to communicate the effects of climate change. Maps as the above are not of climate change per se, but suggest the increased fluidity of our shorelines in an era of increasingly disruptive coastal flooding, impending drought, destroyed low-lying habitat and ocean pollution from land erosion that leaches and runoff containing nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, sewage and industrial wastes. To map the complexity of climate flows, we increasingly depend on satellite-based remote sensing to create a coherent picture of the increasingly ecotonal equilibria of land and sea.

Remotely sensed maps rack and model climate change globally and in the United States have come under attack for forecasting of temperature rise, global melting, and scenarios of climate-related disasters.

IOP Science/Ben Strauss et al. (2012)

8. Cast as maps, sensed data offers models of the risk of climate change in potent persuasive records of considerable elegance; despite the immense complexity of the physics of such changes, the continuous sensing of air temperature and oceanic extent capture the essence of causation webs whose continuity could not be otherwise grasped. The propositions of maps of climate change have come squarely within the crosshairs of the climate change “skeptics” who have been charged to lead the Trump transition team who’s eek to exclude the Earth Sciences program from the future activities of NASA–such as Christopher Shank–who hope to eliminate “heavily politicized” programs of remotely-sensed climate data from NASA’s research aims. Rather than being a failure of mapping, the success of such maps have placed earth-observation is in the sights of the Trump’s circle, who seemingly seek to avoid all contractors who attended negotiations for the the Paris Agreement, developed metrics for projecting the social costs of carbon emissions for the Department of Energy, or trusted empirical climate science.

The decision to go after such maps seems like nothing less than a form of cartographical bullying. To be sure, Trump’s interest in doing so may rest in a rejection of the notion of a global “carbon budget“–a concept that emerged over fifteen years ago, as scientists began to calculate the impact of burning fossil fuels and their relation to temperature change. If global competition offers Trump and his nominees a primary lens on the world–indeed, China has surpassed the United States in carbon output, and Japan’s carbon output grows–who paint the budget as a national restraint, the registration of climate change data provides a basis to judge its extent, rather than a basis to restrict the use of oil and coal that threaten the climate–and climate monitoring is misleadingly tied to limiting emissions of power plants, automobile driving, airplane fuel, or industry and holding them accountable to the environmental consequences of sanctioning the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels.

For such complex changes demand to be embodied in maps that better process the dangerous eventuality of sea-level rise and its consequences–it only to try to stop its occurrence or create more resilient responses to climate change. Even in an age of big data, much the world depends on the scientific accuracy and continuity of NASA satellite feeds. Although the rising of the shores are widely perceived at first hand, the value of the continuous collection of data of earth-based observation offers the best and clearest tracking of surface temperature, ocean extent, groundwater and polar ice, all threaten to be silenced by government fiat: the familiar color-saturated images that map concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have been long systematically discredited as propaganda by the extractive fuel industry to the extent that the very program for their production may be defunded, seeking to kill the medium of the message. (After an adviser to the Trump transition hoped to eliminate NASA’s earth science programs, an angry governor of California vowed the state would launch “its own damn satellite[s]” to monitor its own oceans, coastal erosion, fires and air.)

The dangers of defunding climate research–a program of NASA whose budge expanded to $2 billion annually, and ranges from observation of atmospheric temperatures to polar ice thickness–would foreclose the most accurate assessment of global temperature change and calibrations of environmental change to model future climate on a global scale, and the embodying of climate change in maps. The anticipated disruption of the continuity of climate data collected over decades reflects a Trump administration staffed by climate change deniers who discount understanding trends in atmospheric temperatures. Trump’s transition team indeed distributed a lengthy questionnaire of McCarthyist tenor quizzing members of the US Department of Energy to describe their trust of empirical records of climate change, involvement in “efforts to limit carbon emissions,” and experience of measuring carbon output or attendance of climate change conferences sponsored by the United Nations “in the last five years,” with a persistence that barely cloaks an intense animosity to research, and suggests an interest in eliminating experts of climate change for their alleged bias.

The eery undercurrent of such questions does not question the accuracy of remotely sensed observations, but suggests an outright rejection of staking opinions about ocean changes, as if to silence the discussion of climate change by the United States Government and to intimidate the ownership of evidence within a scientific community–the practice of such “guerrilla archiving” to save scientific data from state censorship responds to an unprecedented arrogance of making reality conform to one’s own models. Even before the linguistic new order of “climate contrarians” eager to alter climate change policies of the Environmental Protection Agency had strenuously advocated, the plans to “undo the EPA power plant regs” by Myron Bell, whose Cooler Heads Coalition is “focused on dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis,” sees any climate policy as a constraint on civil action and views climate science as imperiling limited government and constraints on private property. (Ebell has dismissed the scientific efforts that underpin these visualizations as created by “a lot of third-, fourth- and fifth-rate scientists [who] have gotten a long ways” deceiving the public; the ability to pull the plug from an onslaught of such satellite-generated imagery that depicts the dangers of climate change in detail seems too tempting, and the consequences of doing so too terrifying to believe.) Despite the attention to our national borders during the 2016 US Presidential election, challenges to our shorelines, coasts, and floodplains went almost ignored–less time was devoted in Presidential debates to climate change or energy in 2016 than was merited; the subject absent from most any Presidential debates since Al Gore ran for the Presidency. The issue has been unfairly marginalized. The dismissal of climate science as “politicized science” is not only unprecedented but perpetuates disinformation of assertions man-made climate change and global warming are but a hoax attributed to elites, and foisted on the nation–an argument without a clear narrative, but long advanced by the industry of extractive fuels.

9. The misreading of the politics of climate change–and the maps of our shores–inverts more cautious and less alarmist narratives of possibly modulating carbon emissions. There is almost a clear suggestion that if not to paint climate scientists as pursuing a hidden agenda as if were un-American. Indeed, the feared disruption of the continuity of climate data collected over decades in an administration staffed by climate change deniers would discount recent gains in the measurement and understanding of global trends in changing atmospheric temperatures that would threaten a real loss of continuity in climate science.

President Elect Donald J. Trump persists to allege that “nobody really knows” if climate change is “real” in deceptively dangerous ways, perpetuating a dangerous message of climate change denial: in recent days, Trump has cast the authority of climate change models within a message that is “job killing,” “terrible idea,” and in fact only a “hoax.” Indeed, there almost seems a particular pushback to the extent to which the increasingly elegant interactive features of climate maps have offered viewers the ability to envision alternate outcomes, emphasizing contingency as much as naturalizing jurisdictions as stable, and framing supra-national questions that demand collective action beyond anything like national frontiers in ways that seem to undercut the logic and vision of a program designed to put “America First.” The resuscitation of plans to cut NASA’s research budget into climate science, since “most of it is a bunch of bunk.” Tabling climate monitoring of global warming to which the United States has committed would undercut any serious public discussion of climate change: indeed, a focus on deep space would funnel federal funds to engineering firms and public-private partnerships. Yet such broad redirecting of federal monies to defense contractors–such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop Grumman–in place of funding environmental monitoring that would be a huge victory of a military-industrial complex long waiting to regain an upper hand despite increasingly pressing environmental concerns.

Doing so suggests a weirdly topophilic localism based in isolationism, removed from the nature of the spatial complexity of climate change. The creation of impressively persuasive rhetorical power interactive maps boast surely makes them especially effective tools to dramatize alternative scenarios of climate change and of the scale of anthropogenic impact on the inhabited world and targets. For they are powerfully provocative rebukes to the obstinacy of climate change denial. To interrupt collecting uch data could bolster the discrediting of climate science on global warming and help to raise questions about the credibility of sea-level rise–minimizing the value of maps based on continuous data and the mapping of trends from remote sensing satellites–from forest fires to temperature change and ice thinning. Hence, the frantic downloading of government-funded climate observations to private non-government servers for public interest lest it be lost to future scientists to map and document a continuous record of climate change–before, as the deputy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy put it, “those who want to dismantle federal climate change research programs storm the castle“–and blur the extent of man-made climate change.

Is the best way to combat these threats to produce maps of climate change that more effectively link the local and global–and affirm the possibilities and extreme importance of the locally based knowledge of climate change? Whereas sophisticated and detailed images were created to offer forms of judgement for specialized scientific communities, and to generate support for reducing national emissions, the elimination of indispensable criteria for judging a rapidly changing climate and the effects of man-made global pollution or ocean acidification rests on their being recast as being polemic distortions to justify federal over-reach–as if elites wanted to oppose the interests of the nation. Indeed, in ways that seem to sit with the apocalyptic populism that coasted Trump to an electoral victory, the erasure of such a mapping of climate change seems all too easy to end, redirecting NASA’s budget to deep space exploration, would replace environmental monitoring with a massive gift to defense contractors–old Republican clients of the military-industrial complex such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop Grumman–as well as to decimate a scientific program. The victory of a military-industrial complex long hoping to regain an upper hand would come at a huge cost to increasingly pressing environmental concerns, funneling federal funds to engineering firms and public-private partnerships above the considerable technologies developed to make climate change more legible.

10. The feared erasure of a detailed map of climate change and the disappearance of a comprehensive map of climate change is real. For any limiting of decades of government data would effectively compromise a picture of climate change would allow members of the incoming administration who deny climate change as man-made–despite agreement of 97% of climate scientists that accelerated global warming it is. For in the name of a false sense of populism, and even as the collation of mean temperatures in the United States increasingly diverged from average historical records,

–with a rise in unexpected flooding, relative sea-level rise, and ice-thinning, the defunding of remote sensing would disrupt the feed of data maps of climate change and interrupt the monitoring of the historical continuity among datasets that provides the most powerful means to formulate historical trends in sea-level rise, aridity of soil, and polar melting can we register the complexity of climate change.

Indeed, the ways that landscape, climate maps, and art intersect might deserve to be rethought at the moment when the completeness of such maps based on remote monitoring has come under attack. For despite the tendency to meld such meld such hypothetical scenarios into apocalyptic thought that includes viral pandemics, radiation leakage disasters, bolide impacts from asteroids, or other impending catastrophes, the human-made nature of climate change is oddly implicitly denied. Despite the range of evidence of increased temperatures, drought, unnatural flooding and polar melting, resistance to acknowledging or responding to climate change has grown with resistance to mapping. But the value of these maps only begins to capture the dynamics that global warming and sea-level rise pose to our shores unless carbon emissions are decreased.

Geographic distributions of greenhouse gas emissions across the nation have sharply and dramatically increased over previous generations, in ways that make compelling maps. Despite the scary density of self-reported emissions of greenhouse gases in the lower forty-eight–here depicted in a bubble mapping of concentrations of metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted by all sectors of industry and consumption which suggest its reflection of the most inhabited areas of the United States, but also, notably, of its agricultural centers:

The heat islands of many urban centers in the United States are small greenhouses of accelerating temperatures–often tied to carbon emissions.

Yet the greatest index of climate change rests in sea-level rise brought by arctic melting. Indeed, the numbers of coastal flooding, resulting from sea-level rise, has progressed at an alarmingly rapid rate, far beyond earlier eras–that makes the continuity of local observations crucial to isolate climate change that is generated by human activity. If sea-level rise due to current global warming has doubled the risk of extreme coastal flooding since 1880,

the risk will easily triple across the lower forty-eight with continued sea level rise.

(2012)

But the geography of climate change is embedded in a topography of complex causation webs and increased uncertainty, without much evident continuity in maps alone. Despite the flushing in to the atmosphere of increasing amounts of metric tons of carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide and fluoridated gas emissions circulate, such a point-based map can hardly communicate the drifting of such gasses across the globe, with a continuity far more difficult to process cognitively, whose wind-blown diffusion is mapped not by points but rasters to foreground their accumulation and concentration, as they circulate driven by wind currents, trapping of heat in different areas best detected and tracked by remotely sensed observations to reveal the global impact of heat-trapping gasses able too e placed in a global context, rather than a local one–a problem of synthesis for which satellite observation and data registration is particularly crucial–even if they are taken as a form of scientific propaganda designed to hamper industries through undue regulations.

NASA Earth Data/AIRS

Temperature rise over time reveals uneven continuity, but can be chronologically charted over a longue durée; temperature changes have historically grown in the global climate during World War II above atmospheric concentrations of 325 ppm, escalating dramatically in recent decades as a consequence of massive consumption of fuel throughout most of the globe in concert with extensive deforestation–underscoring the impossibility of processing any geographic distribution of greenhouse gasses without a chart of historical levels of emissions, and the need for continuing to register global datasets.

Behind Energy

And the acceleration of such carbon gas emissions in recent years has been so striking that projected soil moisture for the future United States of 2095, according to a recent NASA study, assuming no restraints on carbon emissions, with our future bringing the “dust-bowlification” where the southwestern United States and central plains is beset by megadroughts by the century’s end in their map of local soil moisture, due both to lack of precipitation and soil evaporation, and a continuing growth of carbon emission levels.

NASA Goddard Flight Center/Climate Progress (2015)

–and a grimmer global picture that models the effects of consistently rising global carbon emissions on a global level by 2080-99, using a Palmer Drought Sensitivity Index including lessened rainfall and decreased plant and ground evaporation.

Cook, “Global Warming and 21st century Drying”

But the projection of processes of global drying out, disastrous for food production and agriculture as well as for species, finds its counterpart in the accelerated warming of oceans that produces sea-level rise–particularly evident when remote observations are placed in relation to a pre-industrial dataset.

11. To the extent that maps present is based on actual records of earth observation and far from a simulation, the measurement of global climate change and surface temperature rises seem to encounter resistance. Perhaps the topophilic nature of most people-their identification with place has encouraged an outsized place of that place in their spatial imaginary–and the remove of place from a model of global climate change.

Remote sensing offers tools for tracking temperature and modeling climate change far more accurately than earth-based measurements, as does remotely sensing and synthesizing arctic ice-melting and declining water presence in the ground. Despite the preponderance of evidence in maps of man-made nature of such changes, the resistance to accepting monitoring of temperature change is an almost cognitive refusal to continue to process or calibrate climate change–even as the global temperatures in January 2016 far exceeded earlier years since temperatures were first accurately recorded.

NASA/Temperature Anomalies for January, 2016

For both projections and maps of carbon emissions, sea-level rise, increasingly unnatural coastal flooding and drought have been dismissed as doctored hoaxes, based on small samples and as hypotheticals, in ways that undermine their persuasive value. Despite the importance of such maps to explain climate change, the widespread dismissal of them as deceitful attributions of temperature changes or the consequences of continued carbon emissions to human agency needs to be confronted, especially because the incoming Trump administration has promised to roll back climate protections as a first act.

The role of local maps are perhaps particularly vital here to spur local action on climate change. Although the United States is not yet nearly as vulnerable to extreme droughts, floods, and temperatures as many areas, we are beginning to perceive changes to our shores and sea-levels, and as we do we may be feeling the first localized impacts of climate change–and come to terms with the strikingly localized denial of the existence climate change risk or its man-made nature in the United States. Even as observations of rising temperatures are evident across much of the United States in recent years, with clear consequences on crops, irrigation, and land moisture,

Texas Observer

an almost atavistic insistence on the impermeability of our boundaries have left many convinced of the stability of our shores.

Mapping the increased instability of our shores–and the greater threats of their greater instability to the nation, rather than the guarding of our national frontiers–is a consequence of the accelerated concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere far exceeding naturally occurring levels–a concentration of “greenhouse gasses” on track to increase sea-levels considerably by 2025, and to double that increase by 2100 if carbon emissions are not stopped. We might begin by mapping the permeable nature of our coasts, and the spaces, species, and habitats that climate change stands to compromise, indeed, as a way to understand the local impact of climate change, and the compromising of the “safe spaces” of the shores in a world of accelerated climate change–and calling for a different sense of spatial geography. It is not surprising that coastal regions of the United States are the most ready to accept man-made climate change–those living in Hawaii, California, and Massachusetts are most ready to attribute climate change to human actions–the power of maps to convince non-coastal states of the dangerous complexity of climate change’s cascading effects are perhaps most able to be staked through how remotely sensed maps of the dangers climate change map the danger sea-level poses to our coasts. Yet recent studies in Advances in Political Psychology suggest that even the more Republicans know about climate change and science, and are familiar with the complex causation of global warming and climate change, the less they believe it.

12. Can maps offer a needed and important counterweight to such deniers?

Non-profit cartographers have tried. But in the matter that the denial of evolution seems to grow as religious people learn more natural sciences, the persistence of the denial of climate change appear as constitutive parts of a conservative agenda–as if acknowledging climate change was linked to endorsing regulation, and denying climate change a pillar of support of an unregulated free market, even in the face of experiential evidence of climate change. The need for maps to stake a counter-argument, and to embody the local consequences of climate change beyond its denial–here represented by the denial of elected representatives of the evidence of climate change as of the current year.

Think Progress

For the open denial by political representatives of local states in the existence of man-made climate change–even in areas such as Florida, South Carolina, and New Jersey, if not in Louisiana–suggests the level of 