Whenever you feel discouraged about working to fix global warming and convince people that it’s a real problem, watch this video:
In the documentary Chasing Ice, filmmaker James Balog shot photos of glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, and Alaska at 30-minute intervals for months and months. As Grist has reported:
The resulting time-lapse movie can condense months and years into a few mesmerizing moments. Now we can watch the canary in the coal mine as it expires.
“Melt” doesn’t really capture the awesome violence of what we’re seeing. Balog’s cameras look on as the flank of an Icelandic glacier “deflates,” crumpling into black-puddled nothingness like a giant decomposing animal. A crawling river of ice in Alaska turns into a raging torrent, speeding up before our eyes. Greenland’s Ilulissat ice sheet rolls over the landscape, an endless white blanket sloughing off into the ocean. It is, as the photographer says in the film, a “magical, miraculous, horrible, and scary thing.”
So horrible and so scary that it can erase even the teachings of Bill O’Reilly. This woman did not believe in global warming. Now she does, and she wants to do something about it. That matters.
