Understanding Climate Change and Its Impacts

It's hard not to be impressed when you see entire houses being swept away by floodwaters 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... 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 it's global warming. The latest estimates for rebuilding from Irene, already $7 billion. 2011 is now on track to be the most expensive. of year ever for weather-related damage. A drought of historic proportions has hit Nepal. The horror of raging wildfires has again returned to Russia. They say it was like nothing they've ever seen before. Sixteen 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 not over. The globe is actually cooling and has been cooling since 2002. The consensus is that there's a lot of there is no consensus. I mean, how do you not? Global warming is real. You're about to self-implode. 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 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. 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? All right, quickly. 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. All right, 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, otherworldly, sculptural, architectural, insanely, ridiculously beautiful. And that's when I thought, okay, the story is in the ice. Somehow. I was about 25 or so I guess and I was finishing my master's degree in geomorphology and 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 worlds, 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 in 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 them. 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 isn't just the drive to climb mountains and hang off cliffs. He has the ability to capture it and weigh and communicate it. Observing it and knowing it is one thing. 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 to us with a proposal to do a profile of one glacier in Iceland. We essentially countered to him and said, well look, why don't we just do a bigger story. It was on the cover of the magazine. Most popular, most well-read 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 Sun House Glacier in translation, is where I really first got it. That glacier had been receding at several hundred feet a year, which is a lot. You normally have a little bit of advance in the wintertime and a little bit of retreat in the summertime. But when you see huge amounts of change, that's outside 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, someone who's trained in 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, 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 the spot is, Stan, right there. That's exactly where the ice was right there. Right? Over? Correct. 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. Here to be from over there. And when I saw those, the lights went off for me. I realized the public doesn't want to 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 25 cameras for three years. And they would shoot every hour as long as it was daylight. We would download the 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. 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 letting me come up here and have a look at the system because I was curious and I really wanted to do whatever I could to get my foot in the door. Spav is the field assistant in Iceland. You ready? As ready as I can be. These are just really attractive because I think they're more picturesque and they're still big glaciers. Jason had 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 the grandfather, the godfather of 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, 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 of. I mean ice axes and crampons, all this technical climbing gear that I had never used before. I remember thinking 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. 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. 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 got to be this action right here. 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 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 ever more ice and water into the ocean. Okay, good. Yep, right up here. It's sort of like doing a portrait of people. Richard Avedon and Irving Penn spent their entire careers doing portraits of faces, essentially, 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 and impassive place, and now they're just crumbling into these tiny little blocks of ice going off into the ocean. It's crazy. When I first tripped to Greenland, we were setting up one of the cameras at Stor Glacier. When we got there, we saw this really bizarre-looking peninsula just kind of perched out at the front of the calving face of the glacier, where the glacier ends. This thing is going to break off all summer long, man. Look at this. Those peninsulas 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, that whole island is 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. This is really big stuff happening right under our noses 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, This is tonight's dinner I just found out. 8, 7, 6, 5 Oh 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 that we actually managed to pull this off. You know, about 20 years ago, I was a skeptic about climate change. I thought it 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 scientists 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 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 than about 280 parts per million. Until we started adding. Carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and now it's about 390 parts per million. That's about 40% higher than it was when carbon dioxide was only varying for natural reasons. But now we're headed for 500 parts per million or more. That pace is a hundred to a thousand 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 0.8 degrees C, about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 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 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 breathe, and that affects everything in the agriculture and the water supply and the biology of all the plants and animals around us. Plants and animals are already going extinct. They're going extinct a hundred times faster now than they did a thousand years ago, and as the climate continues to warm, we're going to lose more and more and more species because we're going to have more surprises happening. We are going to have a mass extinction event that could happen within the next 200 to 300 years. Mass extinction event means that we lose half or maybe three quarters of the number of species that we have on the planet. Are we going to be losing 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've lost close to 20% of the forest area in Arizona and New Mexico. And that's high mortality in those forest areas. We have seen 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 there's a reason for that. We're seeing extraordinary changes in our environment. Munich Re is the world's largest reinsurer, reinsurance 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 already contributing to more intense and more events. It cannot be explained by just better reporting, it has to be explained by changes in the atmospheric conditions. Imagine a baseball player on steroids who steps up to the plate and hits 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 to those steroids... 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 abscess in your tooth, would you keep going to dentist after dentist until you found a dentist who said, Ah, don't worry about it, leave that rotten tooth in. Or would you pull it out because most 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'm short on engine number two. We cannot power with one engine. You look out that window at that sea water with icebergs floating around in there and you realize, we go in that, we'll have five minutes of physical function and in ten minutes we're dead. The fire brigade will be on standby in case we need their help. Delta, on ground, I can see you coming with the vehicle. Copy that. Roger that, thank you. He needs to do his adventures. That's what makes him who he is. That's who the man is. That's who I love. That's who I married. Do I wish sometimes that it was closer and he would come home at night at five o'clock? As a wife, yes. As a human being, it needs to continue. 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 is better. It's my job to go out there every couple of months to visit the cameras, to go over if 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. Yeah in fact it's very weird. It could still shoot. Come on, please. Please work. It's dead. Has to be dead. So everything we're trying is getting thwarted. Zebras. We're getting the zebras again. Oh. We've had numerous, numerous timer failures. We've had cameras buried under 15 or 20 feet of snow. Ugh. Oh my. We've had plexiglass windows sandblasted. We've had batteries explode inside the camera boxes. I think it's a bird just kind of... Picking away at it. This is what a fox does to your cables when you're not looking. He had spent a lot of money from 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, I just, it makes me insane. It makes me fucking insane. It's hard to see somebody that you love chase after something that might not ever happen. You see that white dot down there? There's a white dot on the... So something's happening inside the timer. After months of troubleshooting, 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 redesigned the controllers. We switched to an entirely different kind of a circuit that used less power, 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 that they were working. We've got to be getting close. We'll be able to see it from up here. Ah, yeah. Okay, all right, this is a big one Okay, here goes playback March 11th 2008 it just shot. It's been working all winter Yee-hoo! Oh 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 2300 frames. Since June. 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, receded 11 miles. The glacier is retreating but it's also thinning at the same time. It's like 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 programmed to think that geology is something that happened a long time ago or will happen a long time in the future and we don't think that 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 the pockle 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. Looks 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 cryokinite, it's made from a combination of natural dust that blows in from the deserts of Central Asia, mixed with little flakes of car... 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 cryokinite holes melting away and filling up with water. And when you look down in those holes you can actually see 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, and you see it melting down through the channels. It goes from little channels into big channels, and eventually everything drops vertically down through these big Moulin caverns. It goes down to the bottom of the ice sheet and out to the ocean. Ordinarily, if you make climate a little warmer, the glacier shrinks a little bit. If you make climate a little colder, the glacier grows a little bit. And those two things kind of work to maintain a balance. But if it gets too warm and the ice gets too thin, it doesn't respond just a little bit. The volume drops. You cross that tipping point, climate no longer matters. It's irreversible. It's just going to keep going. The sea level rise that will happen in my daughter's lifetimes will be somewhere between a foot and a half and three feet minimum. That doesn't sound like a lot if you live up in the Rocky Mountains but if you live down in Chesapeake Bay along the Gulf Coast of the United States in the Ganges flood plain that matters. It 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 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 coastline, 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 meltwater rushing out to the ocean. That's what we're photographing. That's what I've been up there trying to document. 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 there and give you some scale? Sure. Just be careful. Don't get too close to the edge, all right? 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. And if you don't have 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 dangerous spot. Yeah. For sure. Well, and then 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. Every day 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 of this place. Adam, have you ever done something like this before? No, not at all. It's all calculated risk. It's not like we're just going out there and playing Russian roulette. Piece of cake. There's all sorts of curious crinkling and crunching effects in my knee. It's 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 assume it won't collapse. Okay! Oh thank god. Fantastic! There were audible chunks of gravel-like substances that I could feel rolling around in there. Bionic man. I was covering up the soreness with anti-inflammatories and painkillers so that I could function in the field and I would think, oh, that's pretty good, not so bad. But the drugs were masking. The symptoms way more than I had realized. Goodbye, dear. Bye-bye. Love you. Love you, too. Normal 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 gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2, 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. James. 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 have been there. It might have been here. But it's in this zone somewhere. Look, look at this. In in 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, 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... Sometimes 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. 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 the best that can be said about this is... I'm a safety liability. 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 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 had a hard time letting ideas go, you know. Here's another thing. That's why your knee's like this. Okay. You guys should at least go and look at one of the cameras, get it downloaded, get the computer changed today. Okay? See the route? Okay, hold on. Oh, ah! 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. What? The sandwiches are better here. After the sandwich, I'm totally happy to be here. Alright, this project is... Now we're two years in. We have like hundreds of thousands of images. It feels like, yeah, he goes... He goes to that point where he can't anymore and sometimes you even feel he's going further. Yeah, you hear how he speaks about it. He says, well, so I'll just do a fourth knee surgery, you know? Like, how many, however many it takes to keep him going. Like most people say, I'm going to get knee surgery to fix me, you know, kind of to make it better. But for him, it's to make it better so that he can keep on pushing it, destroying it basically. And then maybe he'll just have to do it again. Okay, Slav, you ready for another exposure? Do it exactly as you just did it, okay? You ready? Okay. Low beam. So as quick as I can, 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, no longer just a human being walking around in the regular world, you're a human animal striding around on the surface of a planet that's out in the middle of a 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 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 is just it was such a shot in the dark. The idea spawned from this one glacier called Stor. That event was so spectacular, we decided, okay, we gotta go back and go to the big glacier, Lulisset Glacier, and sit and wait. Gonna try to catch some big calving events, you know, kilometer wide pieces of ice coming off of this massive, massive glacier. The Alulisat Glacier is kind of like the mother of all glaciers in Greenland. It is the most productive glacier in the Northern 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 about to turn and go in front of the peninsula that we think is going to go. Oh, I see. 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 call 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 are the messengers. He is a visionary and his works are like sacred objects. I present James Bailog. Well 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. 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. Without further ado 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. 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 the heat takes away the surface of the glacier and 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 to it. at the Columbia Glacier in Alaska. This is a view of what's called the calving face. This is what one of our cameras saw over the 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-lapse shot of Columbia. 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 upstream 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 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. Collapse it! Put rocks over it! It's gripping too! We gotta 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. And we'll also have more of 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, the 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. Work 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 Lusat Glacier calving face, a little helicopter 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 and never touch the sea. I'm on the phone with Jim on one of our regular check-ins. Jim, just, nothing's happening. Hey, Jim. 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 scopes. It's starting, Adam. I think. Adam, it's starting. Oh, wait, Jim, Jim. Jim, this is... The big piece is starting to cap. Let me call you back. I'll call back. Okay, bye. Yeah, in that V section right there. Holy shit, look at that big bird rolling. All four are running, right? Yeah. Look at that. You see how, look at the whole thing. Calving face is 300, sometimes 400 feet tall. Pieces of ice were shooting up out of the ocean 600 feet and then falling. The only way that you can really try to put it into scale with human references is if you imagine Manhattan. All of a sudden... All of those buildings just start to rumble and quake and peel off and just fall over and 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. We watched and recorded the largest witness 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. 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 ten 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 climatologists 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 becoming. 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 the evidence that we knew what was going on. You can't deny it. We don't have a problem of economics, technology, and public policy. We have a problem of perception, because not enough people really get it yet. I believe we 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, 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 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. Cold feet fell me down So much left to do If I should run ten thousand miles home Would you be there? Just a taste of things to come I still smile, but I don't want to die I don't want to die alone Way before my time Keep calm and carry on No words for the where I don't wanna die I don't wanna die Way before My time Is it any wonder All this empty air Drowning

If it's snowing, it's global warming. If it's hot, it's global warming. There's nothing that doesn't prove that it's global warming.

The latest estimates for rebuilding from Irene, already $7 billion. 2011 is now on track to be the most expensive. of year ever for weather-related damage. A drought of historic proportions has hit Nepal.

The horror of raging wildfires has again returned to Russia. They say it was like nothing they've ever seen before. Sixteen 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 not over. The globe is actually cooling and has been cooling since 2002. The consensus is that there's a lot of there is no consensus.

I mean, how do you not? Global warming is real. You're about to self-implode.

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 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.

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? All right, quickly.

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.

All right, 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, otherworldly, sculptural, architectural, insanely, ridiculously beautiful. And that's when I thought, okay, the story is in the ice.

Somehow. I was about 25 or so I guess and I was finishing my master's degree in geomorphology and 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 worlds, 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 in 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 them. 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 isn't just the drive to climb mountains and hang off cliffs. He has the ability to capture it and weigh and communicate it.

Observing it and knowing it is one thing. 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 to us with a proposal to do a profile of one glacier in Iceland. We essentially countered to him and said, well look, why don't we just do a bigger story. It was on the cover of the magazine.

Most popular, most well-read 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 Sun House Glacier in translation, is where I really first got it.

That glacier had been receding at several hundred feet a year, which is a lot. You normally have a little bit of advance in the wintertime and a little bit of retreat in the summertime. But when you see huge amounts of change, that's outside 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, someone who's trained in 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, 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 the spot is, Stan, right there. That's exactly where the ice was right there.

Right? Over? Correct.

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. Here to be from over there. And when I saw those, the lights went off for me. I realized the public doesn't want to 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 25 cameras for three years. And they would shoot every hour as long as it was daylight.

We would download the 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.

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 letting me come up here and have a look at the system because I was curious and I really wanted to do whatever I could to get my foot in the door.

Spav is the field assistant in Iceland. You ready? As ready as I can be.

These are just really attractive because I think they're more picturesque and they're still big glaciers. Jason had 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 the grandfather, the godfather of 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, 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 of. I mean ice axes and crampons, all this technical climbing gear that I had never used before. I remember thinking 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.

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. 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 got to be this action right here. 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 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 ever more ice and water into the ocean. Okay, good. Yep, right up here. It's sort of like doing a portrait of people. Richard Avedon and Irving Penn spent their entire careers doing portraits of faces, essentially, 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 and impassive place, and now they're just crumbling into these tiny little blocks of ice going off into the ocean.

It's crazy. When I first tripped to Greenland, we were setting up one of the cameras at Stor Glacier. When we got there, we saw this really bizarre-looking peninsula just kind of perched out at the front of the calving face of the glacier, where the glacier ends. This thing is going to break off all summer long, man.

Look at this. Those peninsulas 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, that whole island is 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. This is really big stuff happening right under our noses 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, This is tonight's dinner I just found out. 8, 7, 6, 5 Oh 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 that we actually managed to pull this off. You know, about 20 years ago, I was a skeptic about climate change.

I thought it 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 scientists 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 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 than about 280 parts per million. Until we started adding. Carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and now it's about 390 parts per million.

That's about 40% higher than it was when carbon dioxide was only varying for natural reasons. But now we're headed for 500 parts per million or more. That pace is a hundred to a thousand 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 0.8 degrees C, about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 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 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 breathe, and that affects everything in the agriculture and the water supply and the biology of all the plants and animals around us.

Plants and animals are already going extinct. They're going extinct a hundred times faster now than they did a thousand years ago, and as the climate continues to warm, we're going to lose more and more and more species because we're going to have more surprises happening. We are going to have a mass extinction event that could happen within the next 200 to 300 years. Mass extinction event means that we lose half or maybe three quarters of the number of species that we have on the planet. Are we going to be losing 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've lost close to 20% of the forest area in Arizona and New Mexico.

And that's high mortality in those forest areas. We have seen 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 there's a reason for that.

We're seeing extraordinary changes in our environment. Munich Re is the world's largest reinsurer, reinsurance 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 already contributing to more intense and more events. It cannot be explained by just better reporting, it has to be explained by changes in the atmospheric conditions. Imagine a baseball player on steroids who steps up to the plate and hits 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 to those steroids... 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 abscess in your tooth, would you keep going to dentist after dentist until you found a dentist who said, Ah, don't worry about it, leave that rotten tooth in.

Or would you pull it out because most 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'm short on engine number two. We cannot power with one engine.

You look out that window at that sea water with icebergs floating around in there and you realize, we go in that, we'll have five minutes of physical function and in ten minutes we're dead. The fire brigade will be on standby in case we need their help. Delta, on ground, I can see you coming with the vehicle.

Copy that. Roger that, thank you. He needs to do his adventures. That's what makes him who he is. That's who the man is.

That's who I love. That's who I married. Do I wish sometimes that it was closer and he would come home at night at five o'clock?

As a wife, yes. As a human being, it needs to continue. 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 is better. It's my job to go out there every couple of months to visit the cameras, to go over if 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. Yeah in fact it's very weird.

It could still shoot. Come on, please. Please work. It's dead.

Has to be dead. So everything we're trying is getting thwarted. Zebras.

We're getting the zebras again. Oh. We've had numerous, numerous timer failures.

We've had cameras buried under 15 or 20 feet of snow. Ugh. Oh my.

We've had plexiglass windows sandblasted. We've had batteries explode inside the camera boxes. I think it's a bird just kind of...

Picking away at it. This is what a fox does to your cables when you're not looking. He had spent a lot of money from 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, I just, it makes me insane. It makes me fucking insane.

It's hard to see somebody that you love chase after something that might not ever happen. You see that white dot down there? There's a white dot on the... So something's happening inside the timer.

After months of troubleshooting, 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 redesigned the controllers. We switched to an entirely different kind of a circuit that used less power, 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 that they were working. We've got to be getting close. We'll be able to see it from up here. Ah, yeah.

Okay, all right, this is a big one Okay, here goes playback March 11th 2008 it just shot. It's been working all winter Yee-hoo! Oh 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 2300 frames. Since June.

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, receded 11 miles. The glacier is retreating but it's also thinning at the same time.

It's like 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 programmed to think that geology is something that happened a long time ago or will happen a long time in the future and we don't think that 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 the pockle 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. Looks 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 cryokinite, it's made from a combination of natural dust that blows in from the deserts of Central Asia, mixed with little flakes of car... 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 cryokinite holes melting away and filling up with water. And when you look down in those holes you can actually see 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, and you see it melting down through the channels. It goes from little channels into big channels, and eventually everything drops vertically down through these big Moulin caverns.

It goes down to the bottom of the ice sheet and out to the ocean. Ordinarily, if you make climate a little warmer, the glacier shrinks a little bit. If you make climate a little colder, the glacier grows a little bit. And those two things kind of work to maintain a balance. But if it gets too warm and the ice gets too thin, it doesn't respond just a little bit.

The volume drops. You cross that tipping point, climate no longer matters. It's irreversible.

It's just going to keep going. The sea level rise that will happen in my daughter's lifetimes will be somewhere between a foot and a half and three feet minimum. That doesn't sound like a lot if you live up in the Rocky Mountains but if you live down in Chesapeake Bay along the Gulf Coast of the United States in the Ganges flood plain that matters.

It 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 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 coastline, 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 meltwater rushing out to the ocean.

That's what we're photographing. That's what I've been up there trying to document. 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 there and give you some scale?

Sure. Just be careful. Don't get too close to the edge, all right? 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. And if you don't have 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 dangerous spot. Yeah.

For sure. Well, and then 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. Every day 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 of this place. Adam, have you ever done something like this before?

No, not at all. It's all calculated risk. It's not like we're just going out there and playing Russian roulette. Piece of cake.

There's all sorts of curious crinkling and crunching effects in my knee. It's 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 assume it won't collapse.

Okay! Oh thank god. Fantastic!

There were audible chunks of gravel-like substances that I could feel rolling around in there. Bionic man. I was covering up the soreness with anti-inflammatories and painkillers so that I could function in the field and I would think, oh, that's pretty good, not so bad.

But the drugs were masking. The symptoms way more than I had realized. Goodbye, dear.

Bye-bye. Love you. Love you, too. Normal 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 gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2, 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. James. 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 have been there. It might have been here. But it's in this zone somewhere. Look, look at this.

In in 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, 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...

Sometimes 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. 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 the best that can be said about this is... I'm a safety liability. 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 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 had a hard time letting ideas go, you know. Here's another thing.

That's why your knee's like this. Okay. You guys should at least go and look at one of the cameras, get it downloaded, get the computer changed today. Okay? See the route?

Okay, hold on. Oh, ah! 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. What? The sandwiches are better here.

After the sandwich, I'm totally happy to be here. Alright, this project is... Now we're two years in.

We have like hundreds of thousands of images. It feels like, yeah, he goes... He goes to that point where he can't anymore and sometimes you even feel he's going further.

Yeah, you hear how he speaks about it. He says, well, so I'll just do a fourth knee surgery, you know? Like, how many, however many it takes to keep him going.

Like most people say, I'm going to get knee surgery to fix me, you know, kind of to make it better. But for him, it's to make it better so that he can keep on pushing it, destroying it basically. And then maybe he'll just have to do it again.

Okay, Slav, you ready for another exposure? Do it exactly as you just did it, okay? You ready? Okay.

Low beam. So as quick as I can, 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, no longer just a human being walking around in the regular world, you're a human animal striding around on the surface of a planet that's out in the middle of a 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 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 is just it was such a shot in the dark. The idea spawned from this one glacier called Stor. That event was so spectacular, we decided, okay, we gotta go back and go to the big glacier, Lulisset Glacier, and sit and wait. Gonna try to catch some big calving events, you know, kilometer wide pieces of ice coming off of this massive, massive glacier. The Alulisat Glacier is kind of like the mother of all glaciers in Greenland.

It is the most productive glacier in the Northern 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 about to turn and go in front of the peninsula that we think is going to go. Oh, I see.

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 call 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 are the messengers. He is a visionary and his works are like sacred objects. I present James Bailog.

Well 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. 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.

Without further ado 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. 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 the heat takes away the surface of the glacier and 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 to it. at the Columbia Glacier in Alaska.

This is a view of what's called the calving face. This is what one of our cameras saw over the 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-lapse shot of Columbia.

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 upstream 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 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. Collapse it! Put rocks over it! It's gripping too!

We gotta 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. And we'll also have more of 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, the 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. Work 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 Lusat Glacier calving face, a little helicopter 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 and never touch the sea. I'm on the phone with Jim on one of our regular check-ins. Jim, just, nothing's happening.

Hey, Jim. 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 scopes. It's starting, Adam. I think.

Adam, it's starting. Oh, wait, Jim, Jim. Jim, this is... The big piece is starting to cap. Let me call you back.

I'll call back. Okay, bye. Yeah, in that V section right there.

Holy shit, look at that big bird rolling. All four are running, right? Yeah. Look at that.

You see how, look at the whole thing. Calving face is 300, sometimes 400 feet tall. Pieces of ice were shooting up out of the ocean 600 feet and then falling.

The only way that you can really try to put it into scale with human references is if you imagine Manhattan. All of a sudden... All of those buildings just start to rumble and quake and peel off and just fall over and 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. We watched and recorded the largest witness 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. 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 ten 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 climatologists 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 becoming. 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 the evidence that we knew what was going on. You can't deny it. We don't have a problem of economics, technology, and public policy.

We have a problem of perception, because not enough people really get it yet. I believe we 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, 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 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. Cold feet fell me down So much left to do If I should run ten thousand miles home Would you be there?

Just a taste of things to come I still smile, but I don't want to die I don't want to die alone Way before my time Keep calm and carry on No words for the where I don't wanna die I don't wanna die Way before My time Is it any wonder All this empty air Drowning

Transcript for:Understanding Climate Change and Its Impacts

Transcript for:
Understanding Climate Change and Its Impacts