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There hasn't been
an awful lot of films like this, not kind of
a scientific documentary. There's been travelogue
documentaries and in March of the Penguins you know, kinda focusing on one
species, that sort of thing,
but kinda a general scientific look at
a continent that very few of us will ever get to see in our lives was kinda
missing.
And what we saw here in Antarctica was a lot of the marine life
was diminishing in population numbers can quite the opposite was taking place
in the Arctic. I was very curious about the ozone hole
because that was the only place in Antarctica where they were measuring it
and that's the other been of new information want to pass on...
You heard there were three countries that didn't sign the Montreal Protocol
in the film.
They have signed by now and so that makes
that document the world's only internationally,
unilaterally sign piece of legislation.
Every single country in the world has agreed to ban CFCs.
This is the idea... is that it is supposed to present a little bit of hope
in a environmental crisis such as climate change where there seems to be
no hope at all.
Having an earlier precedent that actually worked coming from a piece of
legislation that the world agreed to
is very hopeful that we can do it again. Last July
there was a crack about 19 miles long
that finally severed and discharged an iceberg
about the size and Singapore or twice the size and Atlanta,
but there was actually a bigger piece of ice
that broke off of the Petermann Glacier in
the Arctic. That piece of ice represented about
a quarter of the size of the entire glacier and the piece of ice that actually broke
off was five times the size a Manhattan
and at the time it was known as the largest piece a free-floating
ice in polar history. So the volume
a fresh water that's now entering the saltwater is happening quite suddenly
when you get a big chunk of ice breaking up what they were worried about own
in this film was the melting of the ice in the slow trickle
of water, but all that gets exaggerated
when you have a big chunk of ice break off like we've seen the past
couple years.
I actually saw a piece on the Petermann ice island I'm a year and a half
after I first saw the big one of the coast
of Newfoundland, so they do break up when they come in contact with warmer temperatures.
The title of this talk is
Connecting the Docs: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Policy with Film.
The reason I call that is because that's what the UN found actually works --
a well-made documentary showing the scientists in their field
discussing their findings, in that medium
was considered not only reliable, but also accessible.
It was easier to understand. The UN has created a partnership with me
to create a climate documentary film
showcasing the global scientist that study this thing
every year it's called the Youth Climate Report
and what we do is we did university students around the world
to interview their climate scientists. their climate researchers, where they
live and report
their latest findings and we put all those little
a snippet interviews together in about a 45-minute film.
If the information needs to get out to people
outside of academia, it has to be presented in a different way.
and if it's written in a different way, then perhaps a different medium
needs to be employed to get that information out to the average person
who's not a scientist.
And that's what the UN found was that
film achieved that because those people are not scientists they're politicians
and we need not to have it "dumbed-down" but just to have it
explained to them at a level that they can understand.