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The Great Bloviator rarely disappoints
"The global warming scientists are just Democrats, folks. They're all part of an agenda."
—Rush Limbaugh
Last night my wife and I went to a university screening of a new movie called Chasing Ice. A former National Geographic photographer, James Balog, engineered a long-term ice survey, AKA the Extreme Ice Survey. He set up 30 cameras in Greenland, Alaska, and Montana. They're powered by solar cells and programmed to take one exposure every hour when the sun is shining. Twice a year, basically just before and after winter, they go to each camera, collect the memory card, and make repairs.
Then they assemble the time-lapse photographs in to time-lapse animated sequences.
It is scary as hell. amazingly beautiful, but to see these amazing glaciers actually disappear is absolutely terrifying. There used to be a joke that the way you could tell Iceland and Greenland apart was that Iceland is green and Greenland is white with ice. Well, at the rate that the ice sheet on Greenland is retreating, that's not going to be true at some point in the future.
The problem with the loss of glaciers is two-fold. First, there's no problem if the glacier is already floating in water and starts to calve and melt: its mass is already accounted for in ocean levels. But if the glacier is on land and starts melting and breaking apart, THAT is what causes ocean levels to rise. The second problem is that the north end of the planet used to be pretty much white. White reflects ultraviolet radiation, which helps keep the planet from heating up. If all of that melts and becomes darker, we're going to start absorbing more UV and the planet will start heating more.
And considering that ships can now go across the North Pole during summer without too much difficulty, that's not a good thing.
SO. If you have an opportunity to see Chasing Ice, see it. Aside from the very scary science, the photography is absolutely amazing. I would love to have a chance to go to those camera sites and do some shooting there, but that's not going to happen. At least I can appreciate it remotely.
There were a couple of interesting counter-points made in the film, so Balog acknowledges skepticism but has little truck with it. The first, made right off the bat by James Balog, was that he himself is a trained geologist and was a climate change skeptic when he started this project. The other was a Canadian Yukon glacier scientist talk about some glaciers are actually growing. His group did a survey in the Yukon and there were somewhere around 400 glaciers that they tracked historically over (IIRC) 150 year period. Some actually grew. Four of them. Half of the remaining are gone entirely, the remaining half are shrinking.
The movie releases on DVD on September 10 and can be pre-ordered at Amazon right now.
http://www.chasingice.com
http://extremeicesurvey.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Balog
http://www.jamesbalog.com/
—Rush Limbaugh
Last night my wife and I went to a university screening of a new movie called Chasing Ice. A former National Geographic photographer, James Balog, engineered a long-term ice survey, AKA the Extreme Ice Survey. He set up 30 cameras in Greenland, Alaska, and Montana. They're powered by solar cells and programmed to take one exposure every hour when the sun is shining. Twice a year, basically just before and after winter, they go to each camera, collect the memory card, and make repairs.
Then they assemble the time-lapse photographs in to time-lapse animated sequences.
It is scary as hell. amazingly beautiful, but to see these amazing glaciers actually disappear is absolutely terrifying. There used to be a joke that the way you could tell Iceland and Greenland apart was that Iceland is green and Greenland is white with ice. Well, at the rate that the ice sheet on Greenland is retreating, that's not going to be true at some point in the future.
The problem with the loss of glaciers is two-fold. First, there's no problem if the glacier is already floating in water and starts to calve and melt: its mass is already accounted for in ocean levels. But if the glacier is on land and starts melting and breaking apart, THAT is what causes ocean levels to rise. The second problem is that the north end of the planet used to be pretty much white. White reflects ultraviolet radiation, which helps keep the planet from heating up. If all of that melts and becomes darker, we're going to start absorbing more UV and the planet will start heating more.
And considering that ships can now go across the North Pole during summer without too much difficulty, that's not a good thing.
SO. If you have an opportunity to see Chasing Ice, see it. Aside from the very scary science, the photography is absolutely amazing. I would love to have a chance to go to those camera sites and do some shooting there, but that's not going to happen. At least I can appreciate it remotely.
There were a couple of interesting counter-points made in the film, so Balog acknowledges skepticism but has little truck with it. The first, made right off the bat by James Balog, was that he himself is a trained geologist and was a climate change skeptic when he started this project. The other was a Canadian Yukon glacier scientist talk about some glaciers are actually growing. His group did a survey in the Yukon and there were somewhere around 400 glaciers that they tracked historically over (IIRC) 150 year period. Some actually grew. Four of them. Half of the remaining are gone entirely, the remaining half are shrinking.
The movie releases on DVD on September 10 and can be pre-ordered at Amazon right now.
http://www.chasingice.com
http://extremeicesurvey.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Balog
http://www.jamesbalog.com/