Chasing Ice

Chasing Ice is a 2012 film about climate change, and one man's attempt to show the few but obstinate skeptics visual evidence of it. The only reason I ended up seeing it as that it got nominated for an Oscar for, of all things, Best Song.

The film, directed by Jeff Orlowsky, documents the travails of nature photographer James Balog, who, along with an intrepid crew, position time-lapse cameras at various points near glaciers across the Arctic. By showing the receding ice, he wants to prove that global warming is not just a bunch of statistics, but an actual thing visible to the naked eye.

He has a few obstacles--the cameras don't work at first, and he struggles with a bad knee, which makes it kind of difficult to climb and hike to the remote spots. But he ends up getting some pretty amazing photos, that show some glaciers losing miles of ice, even during winter.

That global warming is such a hot potato is amazing--I suppose those who think it isn't true are either in the pocket of big oil or are just opposing anything that smacks of liberalism--and Chasing Ice uses clips of the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck as easy targets. The problem with the movie is that it seems like too much preaching to the choir--we already know there's a problem. Would this movie sway Hannity and Beck? Doubt it.

I'm also curious as to why there was no mention of satellite photography, which would surely show the same thing without having to climb so much.

The most spectacular footage is when two of Balog's researchers witness a calving event--when a glacier breaks off and plunges into the ocean. The one they saw and filmed lasted 75 minutes, and was the equivalent of lower Manhattan rolling over and tumbling into the sea.

Chasing Ice has some lovely vistas of Iceland, Greenland, and Alaska, and is a nice complement to stat-heavy films like An Inconvenient Truth, but it lacks the oomph necessary to make it a game-changer in the childish climate science debate.

Oh, and the song, "Before My Time," by J. Ralph? Pretty good, sung by Scarlett Johansson.