A simple but effective analogy explaining the difference between weather (short term patterns) and climate (long term patterns). Clip was taken from the recent science TV series Cosmos.

This is an 18 minute TED talk that renowned photographer James Balog, of the Extreme Ice Survey gave in Oxford in 2009. He talks about his quest to merge art and science together to produce irrefutable proof of the impact climate destabilisation is having on the glaciers of this world. Not only is his (time lapse) photography visually stunning but it is perhaps more compelling evidence than some of the weighty scientific reports on the matter.

James ends his talk by concluding our current inaction on climate destabilisation is one of “perception”, in other words, not enough people really get it yet. They don’t really get the magnitude of change and the danger it will bring. I whole heartedly agree and can only applaud James’s effort to produce material that makes this so abundantly clear.

Check out the trailer of the full length documentary Chasing Ice that tells this same story in a more powerful way. Also check out the in depth interview of James with Bill Moyers.

I watched the documentary Chasing Ice in at the ICA theatre in London and even on that relatively small screen the power of this film was almost overwhelming. It is the story of photographer James Balog and his quest to capture the changes that are happening in the Arctic. In 2007 he started up the Extreme Ice Survey which, in their words, is an innovative, long-term photography project that merges art and science to give a “visual voice” to the planet’s changing ecosystems. The film documents the story of James and his team self engineering the 28 cameras to withstand the arctic conditions and then installing them at 13 glaciers around the world. As you can imagine with dealing with Arctic type extreme weather quite a bit went wrong and due to the nature of time lapse photography any failure was a year down the drain. The film is a testament to the both the character and vision of James, of how much he (and his team) risked to tell one of the most important stories in human history. Not only is his evidence compelling, but so too are the visuals of these truly unique landscapes. I urge you to check out the film’s website to find out how you can watch this truly important film (and support EIS in the process).

Here also is a link to a TED talk James gave in Oxford, UK that is based on the work EIS did as the basis of Chasing Ice.

Dan Miller uses ink to demonstrate how CO2 can have a big impact on warming the earth even though it is a very small percent of the atmosphere. Just like alcohol or cyanide, small amounts can have big impacts

For more information on climate change, visit Dan’s web site, ClimatePlace.org