From Lighthouse to Light Buoy. Mixed technics on canvas W 30cm x H 40 cm by Shaharee Vyaas (2023)

Human history and folklore are riddled by tales of sudden climate changes: the Biblical flood that caused Noah to build his arch and Plato´s tale of the city of Atlantis who disappeared into the sea are among the best-known legends. Noah built an arch filled up with stock he would need to start over again. The location of Atlantis was a long-time mystery, till some scientists located in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park in southern Spain a multi-ringed dominion in some mud flats, swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago. Atlantean residents who did not die in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there. These tales contain indications of the previous ways people dealt with a sudden climate change
Because climate changes can run over millennia, the idea that human activities could influence that cycle seemed to be farfetched. Till in the 1820s, French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier proposed that energy reaching the planet as sunlight must be balanced by energy returning to space since heated surfaces emit radiation. But some of that energy, he reasoned, must be held within the atmosphere, and not return to space, keeping Earth warm. He proposed that Earth’s thin covering of air—its atmosphere—acts the way a glass greenhouse would. Energy enters through the glass walls, but is then trapped inside, much like a warm greenhouse.
This greenhouse effect is at the center of the debate how CO2 pollution of the atmosphere is causing an abnormal and steep rise of temperatures around the planet.

The Bull and the Bear in this painting illustrate both sides of the debate. On one hand the established industrial lobbies and their shareholders, on the other the environmental consequences of their actions.