Global Warning San Francisco 2

Title

Global Warning San Francisco 2

Artist

Bonnie Follett

Medium

Photograph - Photograph

Description

Global Warning San Francisco 2 shows a view from my rooftop looking east towards the Financial District of San Francisco, taken at about 1:00 pm in the afternoon on 9/9/2020. The Transamerica pyramid peeks out of the skyline at left.

This photograph is from a series of photos “Global Warning San Francisco” that I captured at mid-day on September 9, 2020 from my apartment and roof of my building in San Francisco, California. As soon as I opened my eyes that day upon waking I knew something was severely and eerily “off” in my city. I had no idea what time it was and had to check and recheck clocks. Weird orange and red glowed from my apartment windows. From the roof of my building things were no better. This was an unprecedented and very dark day in San Francisco that has been much commented on and photographed. But the lack of full spectrum light left the white balance an impossible thing to maneuver on this day. It was very difficult to duplicate what I saw with my own eyes, but I did my best. It remained dark the entire day.

The cause of this strange and apocalyptic day in the city was this: California and the West Coast states had been suffering for weeks from a mass of wildfires that had burned over 3 million acres (in California alone) and the smoke from those fires was sitting over the city. Underneath the layer of smoke was a marine layer from the ocean. This held the smoke above the marine layer and left the air on the ground relatively clean. But the smoke layer had blocked full spectrum light from the sun. Only red, oranges and yellows could be seen with your eyes. (In fact, no matter how I fiddled with an attempt to find any other color in my photos it was impossible, with a minor exception of colors from windows or lights on the ground level. In the following days, the marine layer shifted and the smoke descended on the city, with many continuing days of “unhealthy air” or “extremely unhealthy air.”

The 2020 wildfire season was the worst on record. It has followed many successive years of increasingly difficult drought and fires, because global warming and climate change has exacerbated the damage to our environment and weather. Coastal areas seem to be the ones most affected so far, because oceans take up and absorb most of the heat from global warming. Anyway, I felt San Francisco’s darkest day was a kind of a warning - that we must address the global climate issues, rather than focusing only on “putting out the fires” as they arise.

For more info: https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/science/orange-skies-in-san-francisco-san-francisco-air-quality.html

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--- COPYRIGHT NOTICE ---
All images on my profile and linked pages are Copyright © Bonnie Follett. All Rights Reserved.

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September 27th, 2020

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