Balog noted, "We really didn't know what the glaciers were going to do" or "what would happen in the course of one or two or five years." Yet what they discovered was "completely shocking."
"You kind of have this mindset that these glaciers are these slow-moving creatures, and you just kind of think that they're stagnant and always just sitting there," Orlowski said. "I think what [Balog] really accomplished in the time-lapses was revealing to the world a very different way of understanding how the planet's changing."
The origins of the EIS go back to early 2005 when Balog took on an assignment for The New Yorker. "I really resisted that assignment," he said, thinking at the time that climate change was "unphotographable." But "the demands of that assignment" pushed him to explore what was possible.
A former skeptic, Balog noted that in the past, he "wasn't so convinced the whole climate change story was real." He said, "I thought that the whole story was based on computer models. Twenty years ago, computer models were relatively sketchy. They're quite good now."
After learning more about climate science, Balog said, he came to "realize that it wasn't about computer models -- it was about empirical evidence drilled up out of those ice sheets." It dawned on him in the late 1990s, he said, that "we need to revise the way we're thinking about the world."
"Most people don't really have it in their mental landscape that something as grand and seemingly all-enduring as the atmosphere can be changed by human intervention," said Balog. "It all seems too big."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/02/chasing-ice-james-balog-documentary_n_2057684.html
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