Today the Doc Media Centre celebrated Polar Day by screening ‘Chasing Ice‘, a multi-subtitled film released in 2012. This documentary serves as a powerful challenge for man-made climate change deniers. Find below a synopsis of the film as found on YouTube:

Melting Ice

Climate change is the hot and pressing issue of today, even though it has not yet fully sunk into public consciousness.

I found the approach of Balog interesting as the film maker links the various wild fires and weather disasters around the globe to one single source, the undebatable heating up of planet earth, a man-made temperature rise without a doubt.

Everything in nature is a question of balance, may it be our own bodies or the bigger body of this planet. Humanity needs to urgently rise to those challenges and not see the natural disasters throughout the world as separated occurrences but rather as a global pattern.

This vision, however, needs personal change as well as change on all levels of society because we will all be affected by global climate and weather changes. Climate change does not discriminate between race, skin color, ethnicity or nationality. Climate and weather pattern or their resulting natural disasters such as wildfires, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, rising see levels, earthquakes, tsunamis etc. do not respect borders, free trade zones, countries or continents.

Melting Ice

To rise to the challenge and change the status quo needs a major shift in our personal and political life, indeed it actually needs a shift in civilization, an entire rethink of values.

Paul Watson, the founder and president of the ‘Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’ (1977), co-founder of ‘The Greenpeace Foundation’ (1972), co-founder of ‘Greenpeace International’ (1979), director of the ‘Sierra Club USA’ (2003-2006) and director of ‘The Farley Mowat Institute’, wrote the following revealing and challenging article, A Very Inconvenient Truth.

Melting Ice

Paul Watson’s arguments have hardly ever been raised before, hardly anyone speaks about this perspective at all. It is an ‘Inconvenient Truth’ because it demands personal change, and this appears to be hard.

There at so many solutions and resolutions regarding climate change, they are all good, no doubt, however, we need a much more radical solution. Tinkering at the edges of the problem or partial solutions will not help. Climate change can be slowed down in this way, but we need radical solutions to reverse it.

The question remains, are we ready for it or do things have to get worse before we are convinced to make the necessary changes? These are all challenges which need to be addressed, on a personal, political, economical, national, international, and even global and ‘civilizational’ level.

In a ‘TED’ talk entitled ‘If our oceans die, we die‘ Capt Paul Watson draws attention to the destruction of our environment and the depletion of our oceans. ‘Everyone knows things must change, but we don’t want to change’.

Melting Ice

I am happy we attended the Polar Day. It has sparked off this article, focussed my interest and passion and convinced me that certainly my and perhaps our group project should be heading in this direction. Thank you John for inviting us! I feel like a project has been born.

In addition to this first ‘environmental’ article I have found the following interesting and encouraging bit of news in ‘National Geographics’. Slowly, there seems to emerge a trend against big multi-billion projects that destroy the environment and ultimately our planet.

The Arctic is Melting

Beautiful Ice