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If your friends ever play down the climate catastrophe, show them these images. From a submerged Statue of Liberty to abandoned cityscapes-turned-deserts, French artist Fabien Barrau has turned the most disastrous potential outcomes of global warming into jaw-dropping works of art.
The series of images, entitled ‘News From The Future’ and posted to his Instagram account, intend to help us imagine a climate apocalypse in the very places we live. It’s not fun, but it is strangely captivating. ‘This series is a personal work of anticipation of the consequences of climate change,’ he said. ‘It is not a scientific work but an artistic work where I am inspired by the probabilities of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data.’
Last year, the IPCC found that several of the world’s major cities could be underwater by 2030, including Amsterdam and Venice. And in 2020, the IUCN World Heritage Outlook warned that 7 percent of all natural wonders faced ‘critical’ threat due to the climate crisis, and that 30 percent were of ‘significant concern’.
Here are some more of Barrau’s images, predicting how this might look:
The Eiffel Tower destroyed by desert
An overgrown Chicago
A sandy New York cityscape
An underwater Arc de Triomphe
A buried Colosseum in Rome
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