For anyone interested in climatology or the changes occurring on our planet (hopefully everyone), I highly recommend the documentary "Chasing Ice" by photographer James Balog and his team. It is available to stream on Netflix and iTunes and is very well put done. The documentary is beautiful. But more than that, it helps to show the immediacy of the most important problem our planet faces.
James Balog employs time lapse footage of glaciers from all over the world and how they change over just the last several years. The resulting footage is astounding. Seeing entire glaciers deflate, calve, and melt away entirely is troubling to say the least. And the fact that it is happening in the passage of months and years instead of decades or centuries is troubling. The immediacy of the problem of climate change seems to be lost in the minds of politicians and the public as well.
Occasionally a change or regulation is legislated but it is too little and at too slow a rate. There is not one simple solution and it will take a change of many things across many industries and societies to attempt to tackle the challenges that our planet faces. We feel good about ourselves as we vote to increase emissions standards by 10 or 20 percent, or ban plastic bags, or any number of other things. But these changes are only small drops attempting to fill a swimming pool. These changes are happening to our planet NOW and at rates that are almost unfathomable. We do not have time to make one (admittedly beneficial) minute change every 6 months, or each election cycle.
For more information, check out the documentary on iTunes or Netflix or read more here: