Mick Hartley

Picturing Climate Change:

Ahead of the global climate talks in December 2009, nine photographers from the photo agency NOOR photographed climate stories from around the world. Their goal: to document some of the causes and consequences, from deforestation to changing sea levels, as well as the people whose lives and jobs are part of that carbon culture.

This is from Poland's Coal Industry:

[Pep Bonet / Consequences by NOOR]

Poland has long relied on coal for its energy, using mostly antiquated equipment like this extractor at the Adamow field in Turek. The country uses coal for 94 percent of its energy needs, among the highest rates anywhere. Plans are to reduce that to 60 percent in 2030 via a nuclear plant, natural gas and wind and solar power.

Excellent pictures of the Russian Reindeer Herders, and Greenland's Shrinking Ice, but, I'll admit, my sympathy here is strictly limited. Both the Nenet on Siberia's Yamal peninsula, and Greenland's Inuit, survive by necessity in the harshest imaginable, freezing cold conditions – and we're meant to view as a tragedy the fact that things'll get warmer for them?….that they'll no longer have to eat their meals of raw reindeer out on the open tundra while kitted out in seventeen layers of reindeer hide? Well, you know…adapt: it's what everyone else does. (Yes, I know….glib.)

Now the Maldives – yes, there they do have a problem.

Great pictures, anyway.

Update: worth pointing out that the threat to the lifestyle of the Nenet comes not so much from global warming as from the development, by Gazprom, which is scheduled for the Yamal peninsula due to its huge gas reserves.