It's hard not to be impressed
when you see entire houses being swept away
by flood waters in the West
Fires stretch from one end
of Texas to the other.
Tornadoes--
a dozen tornadoes have already been spotted
Liberals will say, well if it's cold,
it's global warming, if it's snowing it's global warming,
if it's hot it's global warming-- there's nothing
that doesn't prove that there's-- it's global warming.
VO-- MSNBC The latest estimates for rebuilding from Irene,
already seven billion dollars.
2011 is now on track
to be the most expensive year ever for weather related damage.
A drought of historic proportions has hit Nepal.
The horror
of raging wildfires has again returned to Russia.
She say it was
like nothing they've ever seen before.
16 of the last 20 years are the hottest on record.
The science is not in
It is in
No
Stuart quit saying that.
The debate is over.
No, the debate is not over
The globe is actually cooling
and has been cooling since 2002.
The consensus is that there is no consensus.
I mean how do you not...global warming
is real.
You're about to self implode here.
The ice caps, the poles, are not going
to melt, the oceans are not going to flood the coast --
I promise you, 20 years from today,
I'll be the one that's laughing.
The worst that would happen is
that I'd just get really wet if I just stood in place.
No.
You fall, you try to run, you bang your knee on a piece
of ice, and you bust your knee.
Ah, I just-- I have to get this picture.
The first time I worked with James,
It was obvious how he goes about things, you know?
Alright quickly!
Cause this light won't last forever.
He pushes it-- he's looking for something.
You do have rope in the car?
Yeah.
Go back and get whatever you have.
Okay.
Alright, I'm,
I'm almost certain to get wet, Okay?
In fact, I think I'm so certain to get wet,
I'll take my boots off.
And it was very interesting
because it was his first real encounter
at looking at ice in that way.
He really did fall in love with it.
There's this limitless Universe
of forms out there...
That is just, surreal, other worldly.
Sculptural, architectural...
insanely, ridiculously beautiful.
And that's when I though, okay, the story is in the ice.
Somehow.
I was umm, about 25 or so, I guess.
And I was finishing my master's degree in Geomorphology.
And um, I loved the science,
but I wasn't interested in being a scientist.
The modern world of science was all about statistics
and computer modeling and that just wasn't me.
I had no contacts in the photo world,
I had no knowledge of the photo world.
But, youthful brashness can take you a long way,
make things happen, so, that's how it worked.
I had this idea that the most powerful issue
of our time was the interaction of humans and nature.
One of the subjects I started to look at involved people hunting.
But they were bloody, gory, horrific pictures, hard to look
at-- hard for me to look at even today.
And so, when I had this idea to look at endangered wildlife,
I realized that I needed to show these things
in a more seductive fashion.
I had to look at it in ways
that would engage people-- pull them in.
He's always taken the big view.
You know? He's not looking at this little micro slice.
He's really looking at what humanity is doing
from a very large perspective.
His books-- they force you to regard nature in a way
that you're not accustomed to looking at em.
He's forcing you to think.
He's forcing me to think.
And that's what I love about James' work.
You know, Ansel Adams was the father
of all landscape photography and he created a movement
around wilderness that only images could do.
And now you have James with that same kind of eye.
But being able to do more with the technology.
It's not just the drive
to climb mountains and hang off cliffs.
He has the ability to capture it in a way and communicate it.
Observing it and knowing it is one thing, but sharing it
and sharing it effectively can change the world.
I did a couple years of research
on the climate change story,
trying to find what you could photograph about climate change
that would make interesting photographs.
And I eventually realized that the only thing that-- to me--
sounded right, was ice.
He came with us with a proposal
to do a profile of one glacier in Iceland.
We essentially countered to him, we said, well look,
why don't we just do a bigger story.
It was on the cover of the magazine.
Most popular, most wellread story in the last five years.
As I was shooting that story,
I started to get the very strong sense
that this was a scouting mission for something much bigger,
and much longer-term that was about to unfold.
The Solheim Glacier, the Sunhouse Glacier in translation,
is where I really first got it.
That glacier had been receding several hundred feet a year;
which is a lot.
You normally have a little bit of advance in the winter time,
a little bit of retreat in the summer time;
but when you see huge amounts of change,
that's outside of normal behavior.
There was a real sense of the glacier just coming to an end;
and like this old, decrepit man, just, you know,
falling into the earth and dying.
It was very evocative, very emotional.
As a guy who's been mountaineering
for basically my whole adult life, uh, someone whose trained
in the earth sciences, I never imagined
that you could see features this big disappearing
in such a short period of time.
But when I did-- when I saw that-- and I realized, my God,
there's a powerful piece of history that's unfolding
in these pictures and I have to go back to those same spots.
So, I set up a whole bunch of camera positions
around that glacier where I would just go back
and shoot a single frame.
You know, one in April, one in October,
and we would just see how the glacier changed in six months.
Right there where Svav is.
Right there.
That's exactly where the ice was.
Right there.
Right? Over.
Uhh, correct, this is where...
That glacier had changed so much, that,
I'm not kidding, for like three hours, we stood there,
looking at the prints of six months ago,
looking at the glacier going, we must be wrong,
we can't be in the right places.
They appear to be from over there.
And when I saw those, the lights when off
for me, I realized, the public doesn't wanna hear
about more statistical studies, more computer models,
more projections-- what they need is a believable,
understandable piece of visual evidence--
something that grabs them in the gut.
So I created this project called the Extreme Ice Survey-- or EIS.
The initial goal was to put
out twenty five cameras for three years.
And they would shoot every hour as long as it was daylight.
We would download those cameras every so often
and turn those individual frames into video clips
that would show you how the landscape was changing.
I thought that basically,
you could just buy all this time lapse equipment off the shelf,
slam it together and put it out there.
I was so naive about that.
Uh, there was a custom computer that needed to be built
and there were a thousand little engineering details that needed
to be worked out and a lot of trial and error,
because people hadn't built this stuff before.
And it was clear to me, it would have to be a team effort.
I wasn't that into photography,
but I talked him into me coming up here and having a look.
Cause I was curious and I really wanted to do whatever I could
to get my foot in the door.
Svav is the field assistant in Iceland.
You ready?
As ready as I can be.
These are more attractive
because I think they're more pictureeqse,
and they're still big glaciers.
Jason has a deep, deep well of experience
about Greenland's glaciers, about Greenland logistics,
about what the glaciers were doing.
Tad's a glaciologist he's really the grandfather,
the Godfather the knowledge base about those glaciers in Alaska.
The scope and the scale of EIS is bigger
than any other project since I've known him.
They would work all day, in our little,
what used to be our garage, turned into a workshop--
until sometimes, 11, 12 o'clock at night.
James sent me a gear list of things
that I had never heard-- I mean Ice axes and crampons--
all of this technical climbing gear
that I had never used before.
I remember thinking that I never want to do ice climbing
or ice related stuff, it's dangerous, I'm gonna die,
but of course, I still went with James to Iceland.
Jeez...
What?
I'm just saying Jesus Christ.
I'm just emphasizing how bad the
weather is.
Yeah, I don't need it.
I get it.
The essence of the camera systems is based
on putting really delicate electronics
in the harshest conditions on the planet.
They have to withstand hurricane force winds.
Negative 40 degree temperatures.
It's not the nicest environment
for technology to be sitting out in.
Whatever the dangers of that boulder are,
that's a better spot than this is.
Well we found a place to hide the camera;
that's the good news.
The bad news is we've got a major engineering project to try
and get that thing anchored and supported.
This thing is loose.
Look how soft this stuff is.
Yeah it's gotta be this section right here.
Uh... The other way around.
Rock! This is fantastic.
Look at this.
It's exactly what we wanted.
Okay.. Well, here we go.
The first eyeballs on the glacier-- finally.
Let's uh, see what a couple years brings to us.
We installed five cameras
in total on that trip.
After that, we went on to Greenland.
When glaciers break these gigantic icebergs
off into the ocean it's called calving c-a-l-v-i-n-g.
Ever since glaciers have entered the ocean, hundreds of thousands
of years ago, ice has always calved off.
But what we're seeing now is the Greenland ice sheet thinning out
and dumping out ever more ice and water into the ocean.
Okay good.
Yep. Right up here.
It's sort of like doing a portrait of people.
You know, uh, Richard Avendan
and Irving Penn spent their entire careers doing portraits
of faces essential, and found endless variation
and endless beauty and endless magic in those faces and for me,
that's the same thing as what's going on here.
You know you feel this tension between this huge,
enduring power of these glaciers and their fragility.
You know, they came from a great, impassive place,
and they're just, they're crumbling
into these tiny little blocks of ice going off into the ocean.
It's crazy.
My first trip to Greenland, We were setting
up one of the cameras at Store Glacier.
We got there, we saw this really,
bizarre looking peninsula.
Just kind of perched out at the front of this-- the calving face
of the glacier, where the glacier ends.
This thing is gonna break off all summer long man.
Look at this.
Those peninsulas are, are just a matter of days--
at most, a couple weeks.
It was huge.
It was five football fields long-- 1,500 feet long.
And about 300 feet above the surface of the water.
As we're setting up the cameras, we also set up a video camera,
and had it pointed right there, at that peninsula,
and we just had it rolling.
Just in case.
Oh my God, a giant crack just formed.
See that whole island, it's going away.
There it goes man.
We were there
for just a one hour period of time.
And, absurdly, somehow fortunately captured an event
that seldom is caught on film.
There is this really big stuff happening right
under our noses, happening right now.
But I feel like time is clicking, you know.
And we need to get these cameras out here.
Okay. Onward.
The logistics
of things are just like, crazy.
It reminds you how far he's willing to take an idea.
Heads up!
Tight, tight tight.
This is tonight's dinner,
I just found out.
Eight.
Seven. Six, Five.
Ah!
This is the way to travel, my friend.
We ended up installing about a dozen cameras in Greenland,
five in Iceland, five in Alaska and two in Montana.
Frankly, I can't believe we actually managed
to pull this off.
You know, about 20 years ago,
I was a skeptic about climate change.
I thought is was based on computer models,
I thought maybe there was a lot of hyperbole
that was turning this into an activist cause.
But most importantly, I didn't think that humans were capable
of changing the basic physics and chemistry
of this entire huge planet.
It didn't seem probable, it didn't seem possible.
And then I learned about the record that's in the ice cores.
The history of ancient climate
that was embedded in those cores.
And the story that the glaciers were telling.
The Greenland
and Antarctic ice sheets are these giant domes of ice
that preserve climate records, very much like tree rings.
Snow is added to the top, turns into ice,
and ice core scientist can drill holes through the ice sheets
and pull out a core and examine, not only the ice,
but also bubbles of ancient air that are trapped in the ice.
By looking at the chemistry of the ice, we can learn
about past temperature, and by looking at the air,
we can actually measure the carbon dioxide content.
One of the things that we learn, is that past temperature
and carbon dioxide vary together.
They go up together, they go down together.
And over the last 800,000 years or so,
atmospheric carbon dioxide was never higher
that about 280 parts per million.
Until we started adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
And now it's about 390 parts per million.
And that's about 40 percent higher than it was
when carbon dioxide was only varying for natural reasons.
But now we're heading for 500 parts per million or more.
That pace is a 100 to 1000 times greater
than the pace at which things have changed
by themselves, naturally.
The amazing thing to me is that we're already seeing impacts
because the change already has been so small, right?
It's been .8 degrees C,
about 1.5 degrees Farenheit since 1850 or so.
And yet we've seen so much stuff...
crazy stuff going on already.
What counts to me more than the notion
of the climate changing, is that the air is changing.
The air that we live in, the air that sustains us,
the basic physics and chemistry of that air is changing.
This is about the stuff that you and I breath.
And that effects everything in the agriculture
and the water supply of all the plants and animals around us.
Plants
and animals are already going extinct.
They're going extinct a 100 times faster now
than they did 1000 years ago.
And as the climate continues to warm, we're going to loose more
and more, and more species because we're going
to have more suppresses happening.
We're going to have a mass extinction event
that could happen within the next 200 to 300 years.
Mass extinction event means that we loose half,
or maybe three quarters of the number of species
that we have on the planet.
Are we going to be loosing the plants that clean our water?
The plants that clean our air?
If there's no pollinators out there to pollinate,
then we're going to have to do it by hand.
And they're already doing that in China-- having to go out
and pollinate their crops by hand.
In the last 20 years, we have lost,
close to 20 percent of the forest area
in Arizona-New Mexico.
And that's a high mortality in those forest areas.
We have seen an increasing in the length of the fire season
by more than two months; larger fires
in the Western United States in the last 20 years;
and we've seen hotter fires - more extreme fires burning.
It's not just by chance that I'm seeing many rare events
happening all in sequence, you know.
There's a reason for that.
We're seeing extraordinary changes in our environment.
Munich Re is the world's largest
re-insurance company and our business model is
to provide insurance for the insurance companies.
As Munich Re is a major reinsurer for natural perils,
natural catastrophes; we need
to know the risks as best as we can.
We have discovered some trends in the number
and in the losses natural perils have caused.
And, interestingly, for the weather related events,
our activities-- primarily greenhouse gas emissions--
are contributing to more intense and more events.
It cannot be acclaimed by just better reporting,
it has to be explained by changes
in the atmospheric conditions.
Imagine a base ball player on steroids
who steps up to the plate and hits a home run.
Can you attribute that home run to his taking steroids?
Well steroids occur naturally in very small amounts
in your system, but by adding just a little bit
of those steroids, you can change your background physical
state and increase your chances for enhanced performance
and that's exactly what happens in the climate system.
Greenhouse gases occur in very small amounts but by increasing
that just a little bit, you change the background state
of the system and make it much more susceptible
to increased extremes.
If you had an abcess in your tooth,
would you keep going to dentist after dentist
until you found a dentist that said,
ahhh, don't worry about it.
Leave that rotten tooth in.
Or would you pull it out because more
of the other dentists told you you had a problem?
That's sort of what we're doing with Climate Change.
We'll be arguing about this for centuries.
We're still arguing about a minor thing called evolution,
a minor thing about whether man actually walked on the moon.
We don't have time.
We have low oil pressure
in engine number two.
So I've shut down engine number two.
We cannot hover with one engine.
You look out that window at that sea water
with icebergs floating around in there and you realize if we go
in that, we'll have five minutes of physical function
and in 10 minutes we're dead.
The fire brigade will be on standby
in case we need their help.
RADIO CHATTER
He needs to do his adventures.
That's what makes him who he is.
That's who the man is, that's who I married.
Do I wish sometimes that it was closer
and he would come home at five o'clock?
As a wife, yes.
As a human being, it needs to continue, so.
He's on this never ending quest
for something.
He's just going and hoping that something
that he's doing is taking him in the right direction
and I think that EIS is it.
He's looking to make a global, worldwide impact.
I've never seen him so passionate
about a project before.
Alright, this way.
It's my job to go out there every couple
of months to visit the cameras.
To go over is everything is okay.
There was always a possibility that this would happen.
This just-- this whole piece must have cracked off
in one part; flew off into whoever knows where.
The rock obviously did not read our warning.
It's only shot eight pictures
in the past 24 hours which is somewhat weird.
In fact it's very weird.
It-- It could still shoot.
Come on, please.
Please work.
It's dead.
It has to be dead.
Okay, so...
Everything we're trying is getting thwarted.
Again. Zebras again.
Ohhhhh.
We've had numerous,
numerous timer failures.
We've had cameras buried under 15 or 20 feet of snow.
Ewwww.
Oh my.
We've had Plexiglas windows sand blasted.
We've had batteries explode inside the camera boxes.
I think it's a bird just kind
of pecking away at it.
This is what a fox does to your cables
when you're not looking.
He had spent a lot of many-- grants,
personal money, getting to Alaska, getting to Greenland
and when you go out there, you want it to work,
and when something doesn't work, you feel so far from anything
and anyone that can help you.
I think It's in that voltage regulator.
All of that obsession means absolutely nothing
if a little electronic piece that big doesn't work.
If I don't have pictures, I don't have anything.
You know, everything is a failure.
No, it's dead, it's not working.
Period, flat out, just dead.
It's dead.
God, after all this!
After all this, it just it makes me insane!
It makes me fucking insane!
It's so disappointing.
It's hard to see somebody that you love chase
after something that...
might not ever happen.
See that white dot down there...
There's a white dot on the...
Something's happening inside the timer.
After months of trouble shooting,
we realized that the core problem was
in the voltage regulator and in this little computer timer--
this custom made computer that told the cameras when to fire.
We worked with these guys
at National Geographic, and we sat down
and re-designed the controllers.
We switched to an entirely different kind
of a circuit that used less power and is a lot more reliable
because it has a simpler electronic circuitry inside it.
That was the turning point
for the whole system.
We had to replace all the old timers.
And had to wait for a whole season to check on them again
and make sure they were working.
We gotta be getting close.
We are.
We'll be able to see it from up here.
Yeah.
Okay.
Alright. This is the big one; Okay.
Here it goes.
Playback.
March.
11, 2008. It just shot!
It's been working all winter!
Ahhh man. Hello!
I can't believe that worked.
Do you know how cold it's been out here, for how long?
I'm unbelievably surprised.
We have over 2,300 frames.
Since June?
Let me see.
And everything's working.
It's been shooting the entire time...
Fantastic.
Here's the memory of the camera and this is-- actually,
that's an interesting thought.
This is the memory of the landscape.
That landscape is gone.
It may never be seen again in the history of civilization
and it's stored right here.
In 1984, the glacier was down there, 11 miles away.
And today, it's back here.
It receded 11 miles.
The glacier's retreating,
but it's also thinning at the same time.
It's like the air being let out of a balloon.
You can see what's called the trim line--
it's the high water mark of the glacier in 1984.
That vertical change is the height
of the Empire State Building.
You know, we're really in the midst of geologic scale change.
You know our brains are programed to think
that geology is something that happened a long time ago
or it will happen a long time in the future.
And we don't think that can happen during these little years
that we each live on this planet.
But the reality is that it does.
That things can happen very, very very quickly.
We're living through one of those moments
of epochal geologic change right now.
And we humans are causing it.
Up and down the edges of the ice sheet,
there's this zone called the melt zone.
This is where the sheet is melting and that stored water
from the ice sheet is running out to sea.
I have to wrap my knees for the day's festivities.
This knee has had two surgeries on it already
and it really could use a third.
It's like the surface of the moon.
Look at those holes.
Oh my gosh, look at this stuff!
I had no idea it was so thick in here.
This stuff, this cryoconite, it's made from a combination
of natural dust that blows in from the deserts
of central Asia, mixed with little flakes of carbon,
Fine particles of soot that come from wildfires, diesel exhaust
and coal-fired power plants.
And on top of it, there's algae that grows out here and all
of that stuff accumulates in these little holes,
and because it's black, it absorbs the sun's heat more
than the surrounding ice does.
And all over the surface of the ice sheet,
there's literally billions
of these little cryoconite holes melting away
and filling up with water.
And when you look down at those holes,
what you can actually see is these little bubbles
of ancient air being released as the ice sheet melts.
The part of Greenland that's melting,
is out on the edges of the ice sheet.
And that area is growing, and it's moving higher
up onto the ice sheet.
As the climate changes in that part of the world.
You see, all this water, melting
down through these swiss cheese holes, you see it melting
down through the channels,
from little channels into big channels.
And eventually, everything drops vertically,
down through these big Moulin caverns.
Goes down to the bottom of the ice sheet
and out into the ocean.
Ordinarily,
if you make climate a little warmer,
the glacier shrinks a little bit.
If you make the climate a little colder,
the glacier grows a little bit.
And those two things kind of work to maintain balance.
But if it gets too warm, and the ice gets too thin,
it doesn't just respond just a little bit, the volume drops.
You cross that tipping point, climate no longer matters.
It's irreversible-- it's just gonna keep going.
The sea level rise that will happen
in my daughter's lifetimes, will be somewhere between a foot
in a half and a half and three feet.
Minimum. That doesn't sound like a lot if you live
in the Rocky Mountains, but if you live down in Chesapeake Bay,
along the Gulf Coast of the United States,
in the Ganges flood plane that matters a lot.
It matters in China, it matters in Indonesia.
A minimum of 150 million people will be displaced--
that's like approximately half the size of the United States.
And all of those people are going to be flushed out and have
to move somewhere else.
It also intensifies the impact of hurricanes and typhoons.
It means that there's a lot more high water along the coast
lines, so when these big storms come,
it pushes that much more water that much further inland.
That's where our story
of Greenland Climate Change is expressed,
it's in that melt water, rushing out to the ocean.
That's what we're photographing; that's what I've been
up there trying to document.
You know, I've seen this thing from your photos
and sat pictures, but to be here, it's incredible.
It's all becoming a little more real.
While we're heading over, why don't I walk over
and give you some scale?
Sure.
Just be careful, don't get too close to the edge, alright?
Stay up where it's flat.
This is really something.
This is terrifying.
This isn't a 10 foot little hole in the ground,
it's 100 feet deep into an abyss.
If you don't have that, that little dot of a person
for scale, then it's lost.
That is fabulous.
This is a reasonable route right here.
Look at that.
Oh yeah.
That's like a gift.
This is the danger spot.
Yeah.
For sure.
Well, and the other danger is
that the whole thing suddenly implodes
and the entire thing collapses,
but I don't think that's very likely.
This moulin is one of thousands of moulins all
over the melt zone in Greenland and everyday,
the ice is cooking down,
and water is pouring into the ice sheet.
It's enormous, you can't wrap your head
around how much water is coming off this place.
You got it.
Adam, have you ever done something
like this before?
No. Not at all.
It's all calculated risks.
It's not like we're just going out there
and playing Russian Roulette.
Piece o'cake.
Ohhh, there's all sorts of curios crinkling
and crunching effects in my knee.
Just not what the doctor ordered.
Alright. Look down!
Look down?
Look! Down!
It's just bottomless...
Oh my God.
I do not want to go any lower than this.
I'm going out here on this broken fin.
Okay? And I don't, I assume it won't collapse.
Okay.
All done!
Oh thank God!
Fantastic!
There were audible chunks of gravel like substances
that I could feel rolling around in there.
The bionic man.
I was covering up the soreness with anti-inflammatories
and pain killers so that I could function in the field
and I would think, ah, that's pretty good-- not so bad.
Not realizing that the drugs were masking the symptoms way
more than I had realized.
Bye babe.
I love you.
I love you too.
More
and more people are becoming increasingly skeptical
about the existence of climate change.
These so called climate scientists are
hoodwinking the entire world community.
There is no consensus, this is a myth.
The notion that man made gas,
this anthropogenic gas, this C02 cause global warming is probably
the greatest hoax ever perpetrated
on the American people.
All of this garbage science has been a total fraud and a fake!
Jim was told after his surgery
that hiking is not a form of exercise
that they want him to pursue anymore.
I'm not sure that's sunken in quite yet.
I think, when we started out,
the glacier was approximately right here.
It might of been there, it might of been here;
but it's in this zone somewhere.
Look. Look at this.
In '05, you couldn't even look into the canyon back there,
look, it was all filled up to that point.
And look how, look how low it is now.
Beautiful.
And that's 2007-- that isn't even 2005.
In 2007, just two years ago, you couldn't see any
of that mountain ridge over there.
The thing has deflated tremendously, I mean,
I don't know what the number of feet is, but, it's a lot.
If I hadn't seen it in the pictures,
I wouldn't believe it at all.
When I saw that glacier dying, it was like, wow.
You know we, uh...
If a glacier that's been here for 30,000 years,
or 100,000 years is literally dying in front of my eyes,
you're very aware of the fact that...
You know, sometime you um...
sometime you go out over the horizon and you don't come back.
James is now doing exactly what his doctors
said he shouldn't be doing.
Lower.
Oh, man.
A little more...
Okay...
Yes...there you go.
It feels worse this morning
than it has any day since the surgery.
It felt better the three days after the surgery
than it feels right now.
I think that the best that can be said about this is,
ah I'm a safety liability.
Well, you can maybe limp your way up, but...
you can't go down that.
Unless you're in a wheelchair.
I mean, we need to go up there--
check on the camera, and all of that, but...
but you don't necessarily need to do it.
I mean, that's more of a climb
than we did in the past two days.
I have a hard time letting ideas go, you know?
Well here's another thing.
That's why your knee's like this.
Okay.
I'm inclined to think that you guys should at least go and look
at one of the cameras get it downloaded,
get the computer changed today.
Okay?
Yep.
Enough
See the route?
Okay.
Hold on. See if you can get in there.
That's it!
Let's get out of here.
Every once in a while,
I get this thing in the back of my head saying,
what were you thinking?
Maybe that office job wasn't so bad.
But...
The sandwiches are better here.
The after the sandwich,
I'm totally happy to be here.
This project is...
now we're two years in.
We have like, hundreds of thousands of images.
It feels like, yeah,
he goes to that point where he can't anymore
and sometimes you even feel he's going even further.
Yeah and he speaks about it, he says, well,
so I'll just do a fourth knee surgery, you know?
Like, however many it takes to keep him going.
Like most people say, I'm going to get knee surgery
to fix me, kind of, you know?
It's to make it better.
But for him, it's to make it better so he can keep
on pushing it, destroying it, basically,
and then maybe he'll just have to do it again.
Okay Svav, you ready for another exposure?
Do it exactly as you just did it, okay?
You ready?
So as quick as I can, I, I cover it.
That's right.
Way back, early in my career,
I discovered that there was really something special
about photographing at night, that places your mind
on the surface of a planet.
You're no longer just a human being walking
around in the regular world.
You are a human animal, striding around on the surface
of the planet that's out in the middle of the galaxy.
We as a culture-- we're forgetting
that we are actually natural organisms
and that we have this very, very deep connection
and contact with, and contact with nature.
You can't divorce civilization from nature.
We totally depend on it.
Shortly after that,
he sent us on this month long, massive trip,
to a place that's really hard to get to,
to get a shot that's is just-- it was such a shot in the dark.
The idea sprung from this one glacier called Store.
That event was so spectacular, we decided,
okay we got to go back, and go to the big glacier,
Ilulissat glacier and sit.
And wait. We're going to try to catch some...
some big calving events.
You know, kilometer wide pieces of ice coming
of this massive, massive, glacier.
The Ilulissat glacier in Greenland is kind
of-- like the mother of all glaciers.
It is the most productive glacier
in the Norther Hemisphere.
It's rumored that this is the glacier that put out the iceberg
that sank the titanic.
It flows at 130 feet every day.
This is a really, really huge fjord of ice,
and it's about five miles wide.
That is massive.
I totally lost him.
You see him still?
He's going-- he's, he's about to turn on go
in front of the peninsula that we think's going to go.
Oh, I see him.
He's at the base of it.
What's up?
My boots are frozen.
And I'm really tired.
And nothing happens.
For days and days and days.
We called it glacier watching.
Because literally, it was just,
me and Adam, for three weeks, watching ice.
Photography for me has been--
as much as anything-- about a raising of awareness.
Through that camera, you know, we become vehicles
to raise awareness outside my own experience.
And in this case, we're the messengers.
He is a visionary,
and his works are like sacred objects.
I present James Balog.
Thank you so much.
Can we dim the house lights a little bit more?
That's it, better.
Okay. What I'm here to do tonight is bring
to you tangible, visual evidence of the immediacy
of climate change itself.
Glaciers matter because they're the canary
in the global coal mine.
It's the place where you can see climate change happening.
And without further adieu,
let me tell you what we've been seeing out there.
This is a glacier called the Solheim Glacier,
we're looking down on it.
Now we turn on our time lapse.
You can see the terminus retreating,
you can see this river being formed,
you can see it deflating.
You go back a couple years, in time...
That's where it started.
That's where it ended a few months ago.
Now down onto the side of the glacier,
looking across the terminus.
This is what we see.
Look at this.
You'll see deflation happening here
as heat takes away the surface
of the glacier, the surface drops.
At the same time, a stream is undercutting it
from a glacier that's melting faster up valley,
washing this thing away.
The vast majority of glaciers in the world are retreating.
Glacier National Park Montana will need a new name.
We'll be calling it glacier-less national park by the middle
of the century because all the glaciers will be gone.
There's such a strange, bizarre fascination
in seeing these things you don't normally get
to see-- - come alive.
We're up at the Columbia glacier in Alaska, this is a view
of what's called a calving face.
This is what one of our cameras saw
over a course of a few months.
The action at Columbia is in part,
due to local glacier dynamics
and in part due to climate change.
Here's another time-laps shot of Columbia.
And everybody says well don't they advance in the wintertime?
No, it was retreating through the winter
because it's an unhealthy glacier.
We realized it was retreating so far we had to turn the camera
up stream to follow the retreat.
Then, we had to pivot it again.
And then, when we went back this past August, it was so far
out of frame we had to turn the camera one more time
so that we could still see the glacier.
So that's where we started three years ago way out on the left,
that's where we were a few months ago last time we were
into Columbia.
We're going to have
to collapse it --- put rocks over it.
It's ripping too.
We got to collapse it now.
James Balog is documenting the melting
of glaciers around the world.
The most visible manifestations of climate change on the planet.
And he's making it possible for scientists to watch too.
James Balog is founder
and director of the Extreme Ice Survey he's joining us now
from Denver, James, thanks for being with us.
My pleasure, thank you.
BRIAN WILLIAMS We'll also have more on our special report
on a man who lets his pictures do the talking
As a photographer, it's exciting
to see this stuff, but as a citizen of the world,
you go, this is horrible.
And consider who NASA is sending
as a delegate to the climate change summit in Copenhagen.
Jim Balog, a photographer with the group Extreme Ice Survey.
Prior to '06--
This glacier had retreated 10, 11 miles.
And, now we've added just in the past few years,
another two and a half miles.
One of the things you often hear
in the debate about glacier change is
that there are glaciers around the world
which are also getting bigger
and advancing, so, how can that be?
How can that be a response to a global warming signal?
What we've done recently on the Yukon territory in Canada ---
where we looked at the change in glacier area from 1958 to 2008.
And what we found was, of the 1,400 glaciers that were there
in 1958, four got bigger.
Over 300 disappeared completely, and almost all
of the rest got smaller.
Yes, there is a component of natural variability
in the climate change we observe, but, it's not enough
to explain the full signal.
So there has to be a greenhouse gas element to it.
Up to the Ilulissat Glacier calving face.
A little helicopter is shown for scale.
The Atlantic Ocean is on the left side of the frame,
covered with icebergs so thick,
that you could walk across the ocean...
I'm on the phone with Jim,
on one of our regular check-ins, Jim, just, nothing's happening.
Hey Jim!
Uh... it's going well.
We had some serious bouts of wind.
But other than that, things are fairly well set up here.
We've got some continuous time lapse going.
It's starting Adam, I think.
Adam it's starting.
Oh wait, Jim, Jim...
The big piece is starting to calve.
Let me call you back.
Call him back.
Okay. Bye.
Is it still going?
Yeah.
In that V-section right there.
Holy shit, look at that big berg rolling.
All four are running, right?
Yeah... Look at that!
Do you see how...
look at the whole thing!
The calving face was 300 sometimes 400 feet tall.
Pieces of ice were shooting
out of the ocean 600 feet and then falling.
The only way you can try to put it into scale
with human reference is if you imagine Manhattan.
All the sudden, all those buildings just start to rumble
and quake and peel off and just fall over,
fall over and roll around.
This whole massive city, just breaking apart
in front of your eyes.
We're just observers.
These two little dots on the side of the mountain
and we watched and recorded the largest,
witnessed calving event ever caught on tape.
So how big was this calving event
that we just looked at?
We'll resort to some illustrations again
to give you a sense of scale.
It's as if the entire lower tip of Manhattan broke off,
except that, the thickness-- the height of it-- is equivalent
to buildings that are two and a half
or three times higher than they are.
That's a magical, miraculous, horrible, scary thing.
I don't know that anybody's really seen the miracle
and horror of that.
It took a hundred years for it
to retreat eight miles from 1900 to 2000.
From 2000 to 2010, it retreated nine miles.
So in 10 years, it retreated more
than it had in the previous 100.
It's real.
The changes are happening; they're very visible,
they're photographable, they're measurable.
There's no significant scientific dispute about that.
And the great irony and tragedy of our time is that a lot
of the general public thinks
that science is still arguing about that.
Science is not arguing about that.
One of the really troubling things
about climate change is that almost all
of the world's prestigious climatologist are much more
frightened about all this than the public is.
People have a hard time understanding
when we talk about climate change.
What for me is so powerful and actually unprecedented
in the work that he is doing, is visualizing the change
that allows us to actually see what was and what is become.
I actually saw his work last spring
and that kind of changed my life in the sense that I had
to quit what I was doing, which was working for Shell,
and get involved in this debate in a much more profound way.
The Extreme Ice Survey will go
down in history as this is the evidence
that we knew what was going on.
You can't deny it!
We don't have a problem with economics,
technology and public policy.
We have a problem with perception.
Because not enough people really get it yet.
I believe we really have an opportunity right now.
We are nearly on the edge of a crisis,
but we still have an opportunity to face the greatest challenge
of our generation, and in fact, of our century.
Thank you.
When my daughters, Simone and Emily, look at me 25 or 30 years
from now and say, what were you doing when, when...
global warming was happening
and you guys knew what was coming down the road.
I want to be able to say, guys,
I was doing everything I knew how to do.