You May Think You Know About Climate Change, but Have You Read the Graphic Novel?

In Climate Changed, French graphic novelist Philippe Squarzoni envisions the Earth's warming atmosphere as a dinner plate being pushed toward the edge of the table:  steady until it is pushed far enough to suddenly drop.

San Francisco sculptor Courtney Mattison depicts the brief window of time left to protect marine ecosystems from climate change as a sprawling collage of vibrant pink, gold and green coral reefs set against the backdrop of the future -- stark white anemones, bleached and dead.

Canadian playwright Chantal Bilodeau has embarked on an eight-part series of plays dramatizing how people from various cultures in the eight Arctic nations are dealing with the changing of their environment.  The first of these, Sila, is playing at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Mass., through May 25.

While polls show that the general public and many politicians are reluctant to think about a climate-changed future, fiction writers and game designers are busy filling in the void.

And Steve Cosson, whose musical The Great Immensity closed Thursday after a month long run in New York, tells the story of frightening changes to rain forests, water supplies, and polar bears through a woman's search for her husband, vanished on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal.

As the threats connected to global warming penetrate the world's consciousness,  the fate of a warming world is increasingly reflected outside politics.  It comes in some unexpected artistic realms.  For example, this year's Pulitzer Prize in music went to John Luther Adams, whose orchestral work Become Ocean is intended to evoke melting polar ice and sea-level rise.

You May Think You Know About Climate Change, but Have You Read the Graphic Novel?