Soon It Would Be Too Hot

Soon It Would Be Too Hot takes it’s title from the first line of JG Ballard’s 1962 climate-fiction novel "The Drowned World" which vividly describes a dystopic future Earth where the melted polar ice cap floods the living world. 

Soon It Would Be Too Hotis an urgent work about the human relationship to climate change, and was originally commissioned for projection on NOAA's Science on a Sphere , a 360 degree media platform for earth science education.  This work was created with a barrage of dynamic image- making tools from watercolors and digital animation to current NSIDC satellite visuals and NOAA's CarbonTracker data visualizations, to provoke viewers into an experience of the emergency our complex living environment faces. Current conditions of melting Arctic sea ice brought on by the warming of air and oceans is a direct result of our own carbon waste, and the numbers continue to rise. Humans may be as ephemeral as shadows, but carbon emissions are forever.

A project of NOAA/ SOS, Eco Arts Connections and CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Premiered at the Fiske Planetarium, Boulder CO in April 2014 and available to all institutions with Science on a Sphere.

This video is the "atlas" version of the work -- a flattened version of the media which was originally designed for a spherical surface, much as a map is a flattened version of the Earths spherical shape.

Special thanks to Marda Kirn and Shilpi Gupta of Eco-Arts Connection, to fellow SOS artist Michael Theodore, and to the following scientists and outreach specialists for the projects advisory group advisory team: Max Boykoff, Susan Buhr, Susan Lynds, Julienne Stroeve, Pieter Tans, Betsy Weatherhead, and Carol Wessman.