Warning of a world out of whack

Scientists have been warning for decades that if the Earth reaches global temperatures of more than 1.5 degrees we're, almost literally, toast. 

Yet, as UN Secretary General António Guterres reminds us in the alarming opening of this campaign film, our trajectory is such that we are headed for a catastrophic 2.8 degrees by the end of the century.  

Titled A Few Degrees More, the film, produced by Kaiserschnitt, explains the clever initiative created by Wien Nord Serviceplan for the Leopold Museum and Climate Change Center Austria (CCCA) that aims to underline the implications of the data. 

During the Viennese museum’s current exhibition Vienna 1900: The Birth of Modernism, landscape paintings by 15 leading artists were tilted by the exact amount of degrees that temperatures will rise in the regions they depict. 

With Gustave Courbet’s cliffs indicating rising sea levels, Egon Schiele’s tree a metaphor for dying flora, and Richard Gerstl’s garden representing biodiversity, the campaign elegantly expresses the threat to beauty of the world that we enjoy and artists capture. 

After a week of leaving bemused visitors guessing, the museum revealed the reason behind the intervention – on prime-time national TV and in newspapers and websites all over the world, on the exact day the UN climate report was published. Educational labels were placed next to the 15 tilted paintings, which led to a website where further information and ways to take action were provided.

The near zero budget campaign received 540 million media impressions in three weeks.