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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.

The 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 pushe sit--
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!

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.

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.

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.

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