Actual observations of the world show global warming. Time-lapse photos of the destruction of the Columbia Glacier, in Alaska, by James Balog, should make any person start wondering how to control warming processes.
It’s a film documenting warming, a film that Joanne Nova and Anthony Watts hope you will never see.*
James Balog, at TEDS, explains the stuff in under 20 minutes:
From National Geographic’s site:
© 2008 James Balog/Extreme Ice Survey
This remarkable image sequence captures a series of massive calving events at Columbia Glacier near Valdez, Alaska. Composed of 436 frames taken between May and September of 2007, it shows the glacier rapidly retreating by about half a mile (1.6 kilometers), a volume loss of some 0.4 cubic miles (1.67 cubic kilometers) of ice or 400 billion gallons (1.5 trillion liters) of water.
The time-lapse was taken as part of the ongoing Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), an ambitious project to capture global warming-induced glacial retreat in the act. Beginning in December 2006, photographer James Balog and his colleagues set up 26 solar-powered cameras at glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Alps, and the Rocky Mountains. Each unit will take a photograph every daylight hour until fall 2009.
In 2008, Balog’s team began to return to each of the camera sites to collect images. In the end, they will have more than 300,000 images to analyze and stitch together to produce more dramatic videos like this one.
This kind of multiyear effort, says Balog, is necessary to “radically alter public perception of the global warming issue.”
Don’t miss: Extreme Ice a NOVA/National Geographic Television special airing on PBS March 24, 2009 at 8:00 p.m.
Resources:
- James White, Director of INSTAAR, the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, answers questions at Balog’s site, regarding glaciers and warming. He is also a Professor of Environmental Studies and of Geological Sciences at the university.
- Sea level change maps
- “Quantifying global warming from the retreat of glaciers,” Johannes Oerlemans, Science 8 April 1994: Vol. 264. no. 5156, pp. 243 – 245. DOI: 10.1126/science.264.5156.243
- Economics of Global Warming, William R. Cline, Institute for International Economics, 1992
- Global Warming and the World Trading System, Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Steve Charnovitz, and Jisun Kim, Institute for International Economics, 2009
- Policy papers on global warming from the Institute for International Economics
- “How Much More Global Warming and Sea Level Rise?” Gerald A. Meehl, Warren M. Washington, William D. Collins, Julie M. Arblaster, Aixue Hu, Lawrence E. Buja, Warren G. Strand, Haiyan Teng, Science 18 March 2005: Vol. 307. no. 5716, pp. 1769 – 1772 DOI: 10.1126/science.1106663
- “The Climate Change Commitment,” T. M. L. Wigley, Science 18 March 2005: Vol. 307. no. 5716, pp. 1766 – 1769, DOI: 10.1126/science.1103934 (This is a paper whose existence is denied by Joanne Nova and other contrarians and denialists.)
_____________
* Am I too harsh? Go over to those blogs and see if you can find the WordPress pingback listed in the comments to those posts, for this post’s link to them. No? Then they’ve gone in and deleted the message. It’s automatic on WordPress, and it works wonderfully. But if they have the readership they claim, and if they are so certain of their views, why do they fear Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub?
Posted by Ed Darrell 
