Climate change and our shifting environment in Chasing Ice | Truth to Tell
Huge calving ice glaciers, white mountains falling in slow-mo into fizzing, bubbling water make great imagery. But, its hard to see what kind of case they make for climate change.
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Many of us climate change believers have surely had enough run-ins with Neanderthal deniers to be looking for a stronger case to hang our next foray on. As such, there are likely to be two reactions to this film: one, for those who agree – know – that climate change exists, for whom the the images are shocking and depressing; two, those who deny climate change, for whom the images will be a platform for more mindless, cyclical debate.
To my unscientific brain, the crashing ice calves, spectacular and awesome though they may be, are not only no proof of climate change, they are no indication of human intervention in climate change even if we win the argument on climate change’s reality.
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1 comment:
The dramatic increase in the rate of ice melt is surely tangible evidence of a warming world. I suppose you could say most anti-AGW activists have moved off of the argument that "there is no warming", and so the point is moot. But they only moved onto the argument that "it may have warmed a bit but it's not significant and anyway it stopped in 1998." So visually seeing that the ice melt is still accelerating is surely at least some help to those who can be reached on a rational level.
The connection of warming to CO2 and human emissions is of course a related but additional argument, which requires bringing up radiative balance, orbital measurements of infrared absorption etc. The film touches on this, but certainly nothing that the anti-AGW movement will find to be new or compelling.
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