The thirteen photographs below are some of the most widely shared environmental images of the late 2010s: a melting heatwave, iguanas stunned by cold, snow on Saharan dunes, a starving polar bear, a seahorse clinging to a cotton bud. Each one is real, but many were passed around with captions that got the numbers or the cause wrong. Here we give each picture its correct context: where and when it was taken, what it actually shows, and what reliable sources say about the bigger issue behind it.
The short version is that the long-term trends are real. NASA ranked 2017 as the second-warmest year in its record, behind 2016, and the 2020s have since set new records. Air pollution, forest loss and plastic in the sea are well documented. At the same time, one snowfall or one thin bear cannot prove a global trend on its own, so it helps to know which images are evidence of a pattern and which are dramatic single moments. Read the photos as starting points, then follow the sources at the end for the data.
Extreme heat and unusual cold
1. Summer driving in the desert heat
An oven glove on a steering wheel and a dashboard reading in the 50s Celsius: this pair was shared by Arizona drivers during the June 2017 heatwave, when Phoenix reached about 119°F (48°C). Car sensors in direct sun read higher than official shade temperatures, but the official numbers are extreme enough. Kuwait's Mitribah station reportedly logged about 54°C (129°F) in July 2016, among the highest reliably measured temperatures on Earth.
One common caption blamed this heat on the ozone hole. That is a mix-up: the ozone layer filters ultraviolet light, and its thinning is a separate problem from the build-up of greenhouse gases that drives global warming.
2. Iguanas frozen stiff in Florida
During a January 2018 cold snap, Floridians found green iguanas lying motionless on lawns and pavements, some having dropped from trees. Iguanas are cold-blooded, non-native reptiles that go rigid when temperatures fall to around 10°C (50°F), and many recover as they warm up, though prolonged cold can kill them. The same week, photos of alligators with their snouts poking through frozen ponds went viral; alligators survive this way by keeping their nostrils above the ice.
3. Snow on the dunes near Aïn Séfra
Red sand under white snow near Aïn Séfra, a town in northwest Algeria at the edge of the Sahara, in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains at about 1,000 metres. The town's first recorded snowfall came in February 1979, then snow fell again in December 2016, January 2017 and January 2018, which is where the "three years in a row" claim comes from. It is rare and beautiful, but a few cold spells in a high desert town are weather events, not a sign that the Sahara is cooling.
Wildlife and forests under pressure
4. An Amur tiger resting on a forest road
This photo, shared on the Russian site Pikabu with a joke about a "taiga speed bump", shows an Amur (Siberian) tiger lying on a snowy track in the Russian Far East. Tigers there do use forest roads, and the claim that it was waiting for food from people is not supported. The real threats are poaching, snares, illegal logging and the hunting of the deer and wild boar tigers eat. Thanks to protection, Russia's count has grown from about 330 to 390 in 2005 to around 750 in 2022.
5. Forest edge in Brazil
A Reuters aerial photograph shows dense rainforest meeting bare, ploughed farmland in a sharp straight line, the kind of boundary created when forest is cleared for soybeans and cattle. Agriculture is the main driver of Amazon deforestation. The viral caption's prediction that every forest on Earth would vanish by 2040 had no source, so we have left it out; the documented losses are serious enough.
6. A polar bear starving in Svalbard
German nature guide and photographer Kerstin Langenberger took these photos in the Svalbard archipelago in 2015, and her post about this emaciated female became one of the decade's best-known climate images. Polar bears rely on sea ice to hunt seals, and shrinking ice means longer fasts. Scientists pointed out at the time that a single thin bear might also be old, ill or injured, so the photo is a powerful symbol rather than proof of what killed this animal.
Smoke, smog and polluted water
7. A giant screen glowing through smog
An outdoor video screen is almost the only thing visible through dense grey smog in a Chinese city, reportedly Beijing during one of its winter pollution episodes in the early 2010s. In 2018 the World Health Organization estimated that nine in ten people worldwide breathe air that exceeds its guideline levels and that outdoor and household air pollution together cause about seven million deaths a year. China has since cut fine-particle levels considerably in many cities.
8. An orange morning in Gijón
This was taken at 10 a.m. in Gijón, Asturias, in mid-October 2017, when the remnants of Hurricane Ophelia swept smoke from wildfires in northern Spain and Portugal, along with Saharan dust, across the region. Those fires killed at least 49 people, 45 of them in Portugal. The original caption used US figures; for the record, the National Interagency Fire Center lists 71,499 US wildfires burning about 10 million acres in 2017.
9. A reservoir turned pink in Russia
Two photos posted on Pikabu show a stream and a pond coloured vivid magenta and pink. The exact location and cause were not given, so treat the picture as unexplained. The earlier claim that acid rain did this is unlikely: acid rain harms lakes but does not dye them pink. Bright pink or red water is usually caused either by industrial discharge or, in salty lakes, by natural algae and bacteria.
Crowds and an oil disaster
10. A beach packed shoulder to shoulder in Rio
This photo was posted in mid-2013 and appears to show a special event rather than a normal beach day; the crowd and tents are consistent with World Youth Day on Copacabana that July. On population, the UN's 2017 projections put the world at 8.6 billion by 2030 and 9.8 billion by 2050, and the UN marked the eight billion milestone in November 2022. The old caption's figure of nine billion by 2030 was too high.
11. Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico, 2010
These Reuters images show oil-streaked water and a sea turtle caught in the slick after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April 2010, killing 11 workers. Oil flowed from the well for 87 days. Estimates of the total range from about 134 million US gallons, the figure NOAA uses, to about 210 million gallons, far more than the "1,000 tons" in the old caption. NOAA estimated that tens of thousands of juvenile sea turtles and birds died.
Plastic in the sea
12. The seahorse and the cotton bud
American photographer Justin Hofman took this image in Indonesian waters in 2017. A tiny seahorse is gripping a plastic cotton bud as it drifts with the current. It was a finalist in the Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, and his own caption, embedded above, explains why he wanted it seen. One clarification on ocean plastic: NOAA describes "garbage patches" as shifting areas full of small plastic pieces, not solid islands you could walk on.
13. A plastic whale on a Philippine beach
This is not a real whale. Greenpeace Philippines built a 15-metre replica of a decomposing whale out of plastic waste collected from the sea and placed it on a beach in Naic, Cavite, south of Manila, in 2017, when the Philippines chaired ASEAN. Real whales do die after swallowing plastic; in 2018 CNN reported on a young sperm whale found in Spain with plastic waste in its stomach.
What the evidence says and what helps
Put together, the photos point at real, measured problems: rising global temperatures, air pollution, forest loss, oil spills and plastic waste. The best way to take them seriously is to pair each image with good data, which avoids the inflated numbers that sceptics can easily knock down.
- Check where and when a viral photo was taken before sharing it; reverse image search usually finds the original.
- Use primary sources such as NASA, NOAA and the WHO for numbers.
- Cut single-use plastics where you can, and support local clean-ups and better waste collection, which matter most in the countries where most ocean plastic enters the sea.
- Back policies and organisations that protect forests and wildlife habitat; the Amur tiger's recovery shows that protection works.
Sources: NASA: Long-term warming trend continued in 2017; Wikipedia: Aïn Séfra; Wikipedia: Siberian tiger; Wikipedia: Hurricane Ophelia (2017); NIFC wildfire statistics; Scientific American: The polar bear photo seen around the world; Wikipedia: Deepwater Horizon oil spill; Greenpeace Media: Whale art installation; photographers credited under each image; originally compiled by Bright Side.
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