Great Throughts Treasury

"I have to believe that there is still time [to save the planet]."

" I think it’s the strongest evidence that anybody’s put forth in a format that a layperson can understand. There has been lots and lots of incontestable evidence to come out of the science community in the form of graphs and numbers, and to the scientists, it’s already been incontestable for a really long time, but the public doesn’t have such an inherent understanding or appreciation of that science information. When it comes out in pictorial form, even more people can understand it than understood it before."

"You have to dig a little bit deeper and you have to understand the scientific information a little bit more to understand that in fact, it is accelerated by human behaviours. The human connection is something that requires a willingness to observe and process the facts as they’ve been accumulated by thousands of very careful, very sceptical researchers from around the world. Merely the existence of a retreating glacier is not enough to say that this is a human acceleration of the problem; but when you take those pictures and combine them with scientific context, you’d have to be an ideologically-driven denier to ignore the fact that this is human caused. Really, what the film does nicely is it combines the art and the science. It takes our visuals and puts it together with the scientific knowledge base and context so that by the end of it, you understand through the art and science, that this thing is real, happening and accelerated by humans."

"You could see landscapes that physically evoked a sense of mortality, retreat and change."

"The polls here in the US are showing that the acceptance of human-caused climate change is now in the upper 50%. And the acceptance of climate change as a concept is more than 70%. So it’s really come around after a lull there for a while, and I think there’s a strong majority that understands that climate change is real. People are understanding this based on the evidence of the senses and the human experience that’s going on in the world right now. It’s not obviously from our pictures; it’s from these extreme and violent weather events, all these odd things that keep happening and the understanding is finally getting out there that all of these things are connected to atmospheric instability – droughts, wildfires, floods, storms and the whole business."