The Problematic Status of Visual Evidence in Climate Change Campaigning

As forms of visual evidence, photographs of melting glaciers function as powerful and persuasive signs of the visible impacts of climate change upon the landscape. Indeed, such photographs have fi gured as vital tools in historical efforts by environmental campaign groups to bring public and political attention to the reality of climate change over the past two decades.1 Since Greenpeace fi rst photographed the crack in the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica in 1997, images of melting and retreating glaciers have been used both in campaign group literature as well as reproduced in the popular media as proof of the reality of global warming, and the resultant climate change.2 It would appear, then, that photographs used as a means of documentary evidence function