For days, Beijing has been trapped under a blanket of yellow-brown dust that the U.S. Embassy air monitor classifies, inits hourly reading, " hazardous." Living under Beijing skies, one 1has come to expect an incremental uptick in the numberof officially declared "blue sky" day each year. 2 Nearly two years after the world failed to achieve a decisiveclimate change deal in Copenhagen, and we' ve become used to 3many of what we read about the human effects of carbon 4emissions. Orville Schell, the author and the journalist who heads 5the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, has writtenrepeated about the need for global cooperation on climate change. 6"As a writer, I felt that what I wrote had limited effect," he told me recently, "so we decided to try a different approach: Let's do it in a visual way." The results are in display now at the Three Shadows 7Photography Art Centre in Beijing, and, with luck, it will be near 8you soon. "Coal + Ice" is a documentary exhibitionencompassing works by thirty photographers around the world. 9It seeks to doing something unprecedented: to chart the horrific 10grandeur of our effects on the planet, from the coal mines beneath our feet to the dwindling glaciers on our highest mountains. The images chosen by curators Jeroen de Vries and Susan Meiselas describe a spectrum that is vast in aesthetics and geography.