MR. CAPEHART: Good afternoon, and welcome back. I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post. You’re about to meet two men–one, a photographer; the other, a reporter–who have used their powerful storytelling to chronicle how a changing climate is impacting the world. But today our conversation is about warming temperatures, how they are impacting Antarctica. Please welcome photographer James Balog and CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir. MR. BALOG: Thank you. MR. WEIR: Thank you. [Applause] MR. CAPEHART: So, James, you’ve captured some of the most powerful images depicting the rapid change in vanishing ice, which we saw in the opening montage. What do those images tell us about global climate change, specifically its impact on the continent of Antarctica? MR. BALOG: Yeah. Well, we are a species that looks for patterns and likes to tell itself stories about the patterns, and the patterns are what science does. Science is a discipline of finding the patterns out there in the world, and art is a medium through which we tell ourselves stories about what those patterns are all about. And so when I, as a photographer, was out there looking at ice, really as an aesthetic, subjective, emotional response to the world that I saw changing around me, it collected this visual evidence that people could understand. It wasn’t about charts and graphs and statistics. It was real, and it was immediate, and it was tangible for people who were not educated in the hardcore quantitative science. The critical story about Antarctica is that there are two particular places in Antarctica where the ice is very unsteady. One is in the Antarctic Peninsula, which is that long finger that sticks up from the main body of Antarctica towards South America, and the other part is down to the […]
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