Superstorm Sandy a ‘wake-up call,’ says former climate change skeptic James Balog

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/article/1281278--superstorm-sandy-a-wake-up-call-says-former-climate-change-skeptic-james-balog

Published on Thursday November 01, 2012
By Linda Barnard

“Nature isn’t natural anymore,” says photographer James Balog, whose dramatic work chronicling the devastating impact of climate change on the world’s glaciers is profiled in director Jeff Orlowski’s award-winning documentary Chasing Ice.

The film, which won the audience award at Hot Docs in May, opens in theatres (including Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox) Nov. 8. But the New York premiere is in doubt.

The theatre is south of the blackout line in lower Manhattan, one of the areas slammed by super-storm Sandy earlier this week, a weather event directly related to climate change according to scientists, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and, of course, Balog.

“I was pleased to see distinguished political figures acknowledge what the information has been saying all along,” said Balog from his Colorado office. “Things that should have been talked about and dealt with . . . Sandy is a wake-up call.”

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Chasing Ice shows the result of several years’ work by Balog, initially an avowed climate change skeptic. He and his team later expanded their work into an ongoing international monitoring project called the Extreme Ice Survey.

Cameras were placed in remote spots, often with great difficulty, in order to gather time-lapse photographs of glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska and Montana. The resulting images, gathered over periods as short as months and as long as several years, becomes shocking as glaciers melt and retreat before the audience’s eyes.

“Nobody had ever photographed what this process looks like over the short term,” said Balog. “I expected to see marginal changes, but the volume of change, the rate of change and the sheer dynamics of these changes was an absolute shock. It remains an absolute shock.”

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