Exceeding Evidence: Photography Theory and Global Climate Model Visualizations

Abstract

In “Exceeding Evidence,” I develop an interpretation of climate model visualizations based on insights from aesthetic and photography theory. Through this interpretation, I hope to redeem climate model images from their association with a dominating and removed “Earth from space” perspective (as made in T. J. Demos’s Against the Anthropocene [2017]). I draw on the observation from photography theory that images can be read either for their comprehensible, narratable information or for the ways in which their detail exceeds comprehension and narrative. This insight suggests that climate model images, like photographs, might be used for more than just evidence—they might give a sense of the world’s excess over our ability to understand it, and so a connection with the world “in its own terms.” To this end, I give a close reading of two visualizations made by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio, based on global climate model and satellite data of carbon dioxide levels during 2015. The first visualization not only projects the data on a global map but also expands it into a three-dimensional cylinder. The second demonstrates how satellite data is integrated with model data. These visualizations are interesting for more than the evidentiary and rhetorical uses of climate model visualizations—they also offer a rare if not unique disclosure of the planet as a whole.