Chasing Ice Page #3

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.

RADIO CHATTER:

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.

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 f***ing 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

Rate this script:4.0 / 1 vote