On Saturday evening, we got together for dinner with friends, then went out together to see Chasing Ice.  I’ve heard that this film makes believers out of climate change skeptics, but it also brings home the reality for people who know that climate change is real.

I’ve been speaking and writing about climate change for over twenty years.  I’ve got pictures of receding glaciers in my power point presentation.  Still, on the morning after seeing the movie I woke up with images in my mind from the movie’s time-lapse photography, of massive glaciers deflating and melting away.

The film made the point that so much other evidence supports:  Climate change is real and we can observe its effects.  The impacts on the earth’s natural systems are massive, and we must take action now.  The Chasing Ice website shows the movie’s official trailer, a film of the largest glacier “calving” event ever recorded, and actions that people can take to address climate change.

Chasing Ice is a human interest story as well as a movie about the warming of the planet and the melting of ice.  National Geographic photographer James Balog is a remarkable man, with other notable accomplishments.  This film shows his project, which involved setting up cameras in some of the most remote places on earth in order to use photography to document the effects of climate change on the largest ice structures on our planet.

James Balog hiked for miles in snow and ice, with a bad knee, sometimes on crutches, on some of the earth’s most rugged terrain.  He endured and pushed through in spite of disappointments and failures in order to film, photograph, and document climate change in action.

What motivated this remarkable man?  To paraphrase his words at the end of the movie, “When my children and their children ask, `What did you do when the climate was changing?’ I want to be able to say, ‘I did everything I could.'”

From the movie- the largest glacier calving event ever filmed: