A Climate Mural for our Times

Norfolk’s rich history and unique landscape are loved by those who live here and are a delight for visitors to discover. Its countryside and coastline are revered for their beauty and biodiversity. Norfolk is also a place where the effects of our changing climate are keenly felt: coastal communities bear the impacts of erosion; our farmland suffers the impact of droughts. In Norwich, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia has been at the forefront of understanding our climate since it was founded 50 years ago.

Norfolk and Norwich also have a proud and unconventional cultural and social history; of storytelling, of artistic expression, of rebellion and of inclusivity. Norwich is a City of Stories, a City of Sanctuary, and a home for independent thinkers, writers and artists.

Now, as CRU marks its 50^th anniversary and world leaders return from COP 27, an exciting collaboration harnesses the powers of art and science to aid our understanding of our changing climate – and makes a rallying call to us all to keep the climate in mind when considering our actions – from politics to the personal. 

A Climate Mural for our Times is a 10m-wide work in Norwich City Council’s debating chamber that depicts climate change over 66 million years. Painted by artist Gennadiy Ivanov, its placement is meant as a continuous reminder to our representatives that policy decisions must be made with climate change in mind.

The work is a collaboration between Norwich City Council, CRU, the Transitions Art-Science Project on Climate Change, and Global Water Futures.  

Collaboration at the heart of creativity

The painting of the mural was a result of interaction between the artist Gennadiy Ivanov, scientists, Norwich City councillors, representatives of museums, and others. The mural will be the keystone of an evolving art-science community and civic governance project.

Painting the history of Norwich through the lens of our changing climate has been challenging. Our past is woven into changes in our geological fabric and coupled to changes on the global stage; drifting continents, distant volcanoes, changing oceans, one shared atmosphere. Climate science wrote the musical score of the climate stripes, with the beat of the thermal drum always there.

Community leaders wanted to ground the mural in our local human history, and are providing the vision to help shape our voyage to a sustainable future. A vision is nothing if not seen, shared, participated in by those for whom it is created. What matters most is you – and moving you. Wherever the voyage takes us, we are all crew on it.

Join us as we take a deep dive into the stories behind these amazing artworks.

Norfolk's climate story

The chalk bedrock – the foundation – of Norwich and Norfolk was laid down before the impact of the Chicxulub Asteroid killed most of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Temperatures then were much higher than they are today and the world was completely free of ice. Then came the Ice Ages. The ice ground and scoured the bedrock, once burying Norfolk, and deposited glacial debris. The ice gave us much of the landscape we see today.

 Our ancestors in Norfolk knew the ice. The earliest human footsteps outside Africa were found on Norfolk’s shores. Their descendants made the first tools, from flints, which formed in the underlying ancient chalk bedrock. They hunted, and outlasted, the woolly mammoth. Once the ice retreated, the slow, grinding forces of nature continued and our coastline was shaped by the relentless power of the sea.

The world got warmer, but nowhere near as warm as before the Ice Ages. A short period of relative climate calm called the Holocene, lasting 12,000 years, provided some stability for 400 generations of humans. But even during this period of relative calm – a short flat line of temperature compared to the immense changes seen over previous millions of years – there were climate changes. These changes were inconsequential on the geological scale, but they produced conditions which were powerful stressors for people and amplified other burdens. Tumult, rebellion, witch-hunting, and mass migrations were the result. Norfolk and, from its founding around 500 CE, Norwich witnessed these impacts.

Where are we now?

The world is moving out of this period of relatively constant temperatures.
We have entered the Anthropocene, where our climate is determined by humanity’s actions. Global temperatures are now higher than they have been for thousands of years and are increasing faster than they have for at least 2000 years. The 2022 Global Carbon Budget, produced in part by UEA, shows that emissions show no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit the world’s warming to 1.5^oC. 

The major reason for the rate  of change is the burning of fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuel releases carbon, laid down in the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In the next 200 years, we are on course to emit most of the carbon in extractable fossil fuel reserves  back into the atmosphere. If this happens, temperatures would climb back towards those experienced by the dinosaurs in just a few centuries.

 We are wrapping our planet in a blanket of carbon dioxide. We are overheating. The icecaps and glaciers are melting as we move towards an ice-free world again. Sea levels are rising.  Our coast is crumbling. Lands are becoming parched. Our wildlife is being lost. We have set course to return to climates perhaps 6 degrees warmer than before the Industrial Revolution.

 We still have choices. Shall we act as guardians of the Earth for future generations? Or shall we leave those future generations to pay the consequences of us doing too little?

Bringing art and science together

Our climate history is a rich and powerful story, explained by ground-breaking research. The human story is also rich, punctuated by innovation, achievement, triumphs, mistakes, despair, and destruction. These stories are intertwined, and we need a way of communicating and recording that richness.

Our ancestors survived predators, ice, fire, famine and flood. They even survived themselves. They told the stories of their survival and their innovations through paintings, song, dance, and drama.

If we are to avoid the very worst consequences of climate change, we need to break out of the cages of denial, avoidance, or despair. We need to be reminded, and led, by those young people who understand and who demand mobilisation of effort. They can see the opportunities in rising to the challenge.

Norwich has a history as, and a reputation for being, a revolutionary city. We go back to history in bringing together art, science and civic governance to tell the combined story of climate and society. With A Climate Mural for our Times, we also foretell possible outcomes – dependent on current and future decisions – and place them at the centre of civic governance. Norwich has been a cradle for art and global climate science. It could be a cradle for changing mindsets.

The elements paintings

Each of the five elements paintings complements a panel of the mural, depicting social and natural events related to or influenced by the clamitic changes seen in the panels. Explore them below.

Our climate origins: 66-3 million years ago

This painting portrays the links between the climates and geology of the periods even before the time of the start of the mural and today’s Norfolk and Norwich. They include the character of the internationally important chalk rivers of the County, including the Wensum. No dinosaur fossils have been found in Norfolk, but Dippy visited Norwich in 2021.

From his standpoint of time before the collision of the asteroid which wiped out most of his relatives, he is pondering our possible fate. He sees our much shorter time on Earth as ending in a bus crash (dinosaurs think big). A famous consequence of Norwich being built on chalk bedrock was the double-decker bus being partially swallowed by a local chalk sinkhole – pictures of which went around the world.

3 million years ago–500CE

Cycles of ice ages, all of which had a profound effect on Norfolk, dominated this period, and some of these are seen in this painting.  The advances and retreats of the ice are evident in our landscapes today. Our early ancestors arrived in Norfolk 800,000 years ago. They knew the ice. The glacial cycles gave way to the relatively stable climate of the last 12,000 years, the Holocene, which helped humans to harness their imaginations. In Norfolk they built impressive circles, made of timber. They made jewellery. They developed industries. Rising sea levels, as the ice melted, placed Norwich at the head of an estuary, allowing the Romans to boost their presence in the county even more.

Our climate history

501-1400CE

Much of what we know about the climate of this period comes from tree rings and documentary records. The first 600 years saw a relatively benign climate, and these favourable conditions enabled the Vikings to make their forays. By 1000, Norwich had become one of the most prosperous cities in the land, and the building of the Cathedral soon started. A rapid deterioration of climate began around 1150. A growing demand for fuel led to more peat digging – the pits eventually flooding because of rising sea levels and a stormier and wetter climate, giving us today’s Norfolk Broads. The growing inclemency of the climate started to have a big impact on people’s lives, often exacerbating other social and economic factors. Famines made people more susceptible to the Black Death.

1401-1850

The climate worsened into “The Little Ice Age”. Norfolk villages were abandoned and shipwrecks were abundant. Bad weather set the preconditions for Kett’s Rebellion in 1549. Scapegoats were sought and "witches”, accused of causing bad weather were persecuted. The political instability of the 1600s, set off a long train of events eventually leading to Norwich gaining its reputation as the Revolutionary City. The Agricultural Revolution, spearheaded by Turnip Townshend, provided greater resilience. But adverse climate impacts continued, contributing to a wave of emigration from Norfolk in the 1830s. While skating became fashionable on the frozen Broads, the chimneys of the Industrial Revolution began spewing out carbon dioxide. The cataclysmic volcanic eruption of Tambora caused the “year with no summer” in 1816, forever linked with Mary Shelley’s creation – Frankenstein.

Our climate present

1851-present

In 1850 the UK was by far the world’s top emitter of fossil carbon dioxide. In this decade the American scientist Eunice Newton Foote discovered its atmospheric warming effect. She was followed swiftly by the independent work of Irish physicist John Tyndall. By 1870 the UK had emitted 50% of the world’s cumulated emissions. In the 1960s, annual global emissions reached 10 billion tonnes and, by 1999, cumulated emissions topped 1 trillion tonnes.

Norfolk has played important roles in North Sea energy; both from fossil sources and now from renewable sources for the future.

Extreme weather events associated with global warming have hit Norwich and Norfolk. East Anglia saw a record high temperature of 40°C in July 2022, extremely rare in the present climate. If a similar weather pattern to the mural’s projection were to occur, it would bring temperature extremes topping 43°C in 2100 and 46°C in 2200.

It was also during the period shown in this panel that our scientific understanding of climate change became firmly established, and with it, the ability first to predict our future climate and second to determine what actions are necessary to stabilise our climate. CRU was established in 1972 and has spearheaded research into global warming since. Its mission since its founding is to investigate and understand the changing climate. CRU and its partner, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, continue to shine a scientific light for the future.

Norwich City Council is also shining a light on the future. Addressing climate change is a central pillar of its 2040 vision. It has much to build on. Award-winning energy-efficient buildings are seen at UEA and in the City – in particular in Goldsmith Street. In 2002, UEA, Norwich City Council and other partners launched an innovative community carbon reduction project, which was successful until it was de-railed by the combination of the 2007-8 global financial crisis and the 2009 attack which resulted in Climategate. A lesson which should be well-learned: not prioritising action on climate change now will cost so much more in years to come. 

Our climate future: Present-2200

The future is yet to be written. It is for all of us to decide and co-produce. The solutions to climate change we imagine, and what Norwich, Norfolk – and the world – will look like are yet to be painted. Our imaginations will be so great that we will need many canvases for the future.

 We are intertwined with our planet. Our natural world nourishes and sustains us and has provided what we needed to evolve. But we have outgrown ourselves. Overshoot Day, the day we have used up the ecological resources that the Earth can regenerate in a year is getting earlier each year. This year it was July 28. For a sustainable future it should be December 31. It once was, over 50 years ago, before our destabilisation of the climate by global warming. Our pursuit of continual growth on a finite planet means we are stealing from our own future. We need to quickly innovate, for better lives without unending growth. To give Earth, and ourselves, time to renew.

Connections: Making the mural possible

The Transitions Art-Science Project and Global Water Futures

John Pomeroy spent two years at UEA in the 1980s, working with Trevor Davies, and they have collaborated ever since. John is now Director of the international Global Water Futures (GWF) research programme which is based at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. It is the largest university-based freshwater research programme in the world, with a focus on the prediction and management of freshwater supply and quality as the climate undergoes rapid change.

Some of the largest and most rapid climate changes in the world have been seen in the cold regions of Canada, with devastating impacts in that country. There are also “downstream” impacts; for example, the melting of Canadian ice contributes to rising sea levels off Norfolk. When Trevor and Gennadiy approached John with their idea of an art-science Transitions project, he immediately saw the promise in portraying these changes and impacts in art, informed by science, and accompanied by accessible scientific descriptions.

He was able to support Transitions within his scientific outreach programme, whereupon Gennadiy’s art became an important part of GWF’s scientific communication. Transitions played a role important part in the Canadian Government’s decision to set up a new National Water Agency and has led to art-science collaborations with UNESCO.

Climatic Research Unit and GloSAT

CRU’s contribution to this project was supported by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council via the GloSAT project. Together with the UK Met Office, CRU has tracked the course of global temperatures during the Industrial Era based on direct climate observations.

CRU has undertaken novel work to extend this both backwards and forwards in time by bringing together the palaeoclimate record and future climate projections over the period spanned by the mural. The record provides a central feature of the mural – the sky. Each stripe shows the temperature relative to the pre-industrial climatological baseline average during 1850-1900. Timescales and colour ranges of the climate stripes vary across the 6 panels of the mural from millions, to thousands, to yearly intervals, to accommodate the increasingly detailed information available as we move forward in time.

About the artist

Gennadiy Ivanov has lived and painted in Norwich for 17 years. He gained an MA at Norwich University of the Arts. He is a founding member of the Transitions art-science project, along with scientists Trevor Davies and John Pomeroy. His first climate-related paintings were of the Norfolk coastline. During an artist-in-residency with Global Water Futures, he joined scientists on field research programmes in the Canadian Rockies and the Arctic.

He has a remarkable range of styles and techniques, and perfected the skill of rapidly producing field paintings in the severest of conditions in the remotest of places. He used these field paintings, photographs, memories, and imagination to create large oil paintings all the time in conversation with the scientists. His unique paintings, together with scientific captions, have been exhibited many times in the UK and Canada. They were shown at COP 26 in Glasgow, and at the UN General Assembly in New York.  He has become a foremost exponent of climate art, all the time rooted in the latest science.

 Because of the scope and overwhelming significance of climate change, it is important to reach people emotionally and intellectually; the problem is so big and so profound. This collaboration with CRU over a vast mural installed at the heart of City Hall, informed by CRU’s science, has given full rein to his imagination and allowed him to deepen the way he works with scientists. Scientific numbers and graphs, and impacts on society, are turned into powerful visual messages.

With thanks to Gennadiy Ivanov (artist), John Pomeroy (University of Saskatchewan), Trevor Davies (UEA), Tim Osborn (UEA), Michael Taylor (UEA, supported by NERC GloSAT), Alan Waters (Norwich City Council)

With acknowledgements to: Ed Hawkins (University of Reading) and Julian Andrews (UEA)