Chasing Ice Page #5

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 CO2

cause global warming is probably

the greatest hoax ever perpetrated

on the American people.

RUSH LIMBAUGH:

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.

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.

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