Climate on the Edge | directed by Alain Belhumeur
INTERVIEW WITH ALAIN BEHUMEUR
Interviewer:
Can you give us an idea of what your film is about?
Belhumeur: Episode 2 of the Arctic series.
Interviewer: Is that what it's called?
Belhumeur: It doesn't have a final title yet. We're calling it Climate on the Edge, or Threat at the Roof of the World, but I'm not too keen on those. It's actually a scientific film that explains the mechanisms that govern current, future and past climates in a way that's easy to understand. At least, that's what we want to achieve. The idea is that the world has not always been what it is today. It is continually changing, and a good thing, too, because there have been times in the history of our planet that were favourable to the development of life, allowing the world to become what it is today: an inhabitable planet. It has not always been like that, and perhaps in future, we will have to prepare for different kinds of climate change. Everyone pretty much agrees that the climate is threatened by greenhouse gases, among other things. And it's fairly obvious that since industrialization, the greenhouse effect has been increasing exponentially. Nevertheless, in some regions the impact is almost negligible. In others, such as the Canadian Arctic, which the film focuses on, it is pretty catastrophic. In the Arctic, climate change can already be seen, and it can be presented as one of the most sensitive areas, I would say, of our planet right now. Although we could also talk about the expanding deserts or continental glaciers all over the world that are starting to melt. But the difference of one or two degrees, or four or five degrees, depending on what is predicted for the future, will be much more critical to the polar icecap. It was always thought that the Arctic Ocean was a permanent ice sea, at least at the pole. And now current models are saying that within 50 years, which is not that far off, there may no longer be any ice in summer. That gives you the picture. What that means is that in the meantime, what is known as seasonal ice that comes then goes each season along the coasts, is shrinking and retreating. That has a big impact on wildlife and the climate in general. However, we will be dealing with wildlife in another episode.
In the episode on Climate on the Edge, we will try to understand the exchange of natural carbon dioxide between the air and the land surface, or natural carbon sinks. Phenomena like that are under observation right now because we have no benchmarks for the Arctic. The first studies were done only recently. Then we'll try to focus on a specific moment, to be able to make more informed decisions on what is happening. We will observe that all coastal countries will be affected by the fact that the sea level may well rise just through expansion, given the rising temperatures. It could take hundreds of years before we stop seeing the effects of current global warming. That means that even if we put a halt to all CO2 emissions, if we managed to sign Kyoto and all that, we would still see ocean warming. Which causes expansion, so the sea level rises, continental glaciers melt and may lighten the weight on continents. Look at Greenland, for example. The continental glaciers are retreating there, as well, mountains are melting and will change the basic features of the climate. It's fairly complex, I'll admit. I don't know yet how much we'll be able to explain in an hour. But we have to prepare for changes and that is the basic idea of the film. Not to cry catastrophe, but to say that the planet will survive whatever happens, and that human beings will have to adapt to those changes.
Interviewer: So you're satisfied with what you shot in relation to what you want to show?
Belhumeur: Well, we did some shooting, an overview of what can be done in a summer. We got a lot of footage from the film crews shooting the other episodes, so I think that in terms of the landscape, and some of the wildlife, we're covered. In terms of science, part of it, the explanation of certain invisible phenomena, is still abstract. For example, we can talk about the water column in the ocean. You realize that it is bacteria that run the world and fix carbon, and that chlorophyll can be used as a kind of filter to recycle carbon dioxide. However, when you're talking about bacteria or viruses, it's not easy to show things on such an infinitely small scale. And when it is all taking place on a time scale of over a thousand years, that is pretty hard to show, too. So there are things like that that need to be clarified and explained in simple terms.
Interviewer: Making it easy to understand is a real challenge, then?
Belhumeur: Yes. Because with science, a lot of parenthetical remarks are sometimes needed to explain one phenomenon. There are no simple formulas. So that's the challenge of Climate on the Edge, because it's multidisciplinary. When you talk about global warming, you have to go into astronomy and biology and geography, and everything else. What's interesting is trying to understand these phenomena. The people making climate models are developing theories, stating hypotheses-each one as wrong as the next, in my opinion-but that's where we are now with our current knowledge. We make predictions with variables when we can't control all the factors. Not to mention that we can't predict what will happen in 50 years; maybe in 25 years people will have changed their habits. Very long-term predictions are hard to make. In the short term, in a hundred years or so, people won't be changing their behaviour that fast, even if we will see certain phenomena at work.
But what people tell me is that it's not warming that is the most important thing, it's climate change. For instance, the fact that the oceans are going to be warmer. That will affect air currents, and rivers too. So the biggest problem will probably be water; drinking water may disappear or at least diminish or be harder to find. And water evaporation, clouds, storms, precipitation, air currents may all change too. In some regions, hurricanes will be more frequent; some countries will have too much rain; there will be more floods in Europe, like last year's. It's starting to happen. Things that were unusual are becoming more and more common. El Niño is becoming a well-known phenomenon. There are cycles that are no longer predictable the way they used to be. If it rains more in one part of the world, somewhere else it is probably going to rain less, resulting in droughts. So that changes things. It changes things for farming and for coastal countries. Shorelines will be more susceptible to erosion and may crumble into the sea. If the sea level rises, there are islands that may disappear, people who will suffer. But I'm not going to look at that kind of prediction since that will be dealt with in episode 5. I'm sticking to the scientific mechanics, the great climate machine.
Interviewer: What impact would you like your film to have on viewers?
Belhumeur: Our goal isn't to dramatize the situation, but to try to understand something complex. It is a basic ecology lesson in which we try to put all these disciplines together so as to understand, for example, that if a wind or an ocean current is interrupted or altered, it will affect the climate. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it will be catastrophic. Even in some northern regions, like here, there are people who won't be complaining. But we have to look at it in a global context. If we want to continue living on the Earth, with a milder, more temperate climate, then we would do better not to try to precipitate an ice age, or the opposite. We would do better to think of the long term.
Interviewer: Were there any surprises during shooting?
Belhumeur: You want anecdotes? What I've been talking about isn't very visual; it's all pretty theoretical. That's a problem for me. Climatologists, the people who make models, work with numbers in a computer, and I can't picture it. I would have liked to have a crystal ball we could look into. But what was visually remarkable was the thawing of the permafrost. That's probably the most obvious thing in the Arctic right now. We know that the layer of fertile soil - or the layer of soil anyway - is very, very thin and sits on top of an ice base almost everywhere in the Far North. The ground is permanently frozen. So when it warms up a few degrees and gets above the freezing point, the subsoil collapses. Cliffs and hills or places on the edge of the sea are clearly eroding but the subsoil is also melting. There are certain lakes that don't freeze and that are thawing the ground underneath, the subsoil. And what's more catastrophic in such cases is that under the ice and in the subsoil, there is a lot of methane trapped in the form of ice. It's like reserves from an ancient time, a time in which our atmosphere was a pretty dangerous gas. And this gas is liable to be released as the permafrost melts. So that's even more worrisome.
Interviewer: Because methane is even more dangerous than CO2.
Belhumeur: In fact, methane's greenhouse effect-I don't want to get my figures wrong-but it is about 30 times as dangerous as CO2, which is in car exhaust. Methane has a serious warming effect. We can talk about four or five kinds of gas on the scale, even though it's carbon dioxide we always hear about, because that's the one that makes up the biggest percentage of the atmosphere.
Interviewer: That's the one we produce.
Belhumeur: It's the one produced by combustion and even by our breathing: we take in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. But methane can ignite, even in lakes in winter. There are stories of Inuit burning themselves by igniting a natural methane well, a pocket of trapped gas. Some people are even thinking of recovering methane for use as fuel, but…
Interviewer: That's a good idea.
Belhumeur: If we burn methane, we'll just create carbon dioxide. Which may be better than having methane, but it will still increase our carbon dioxide. All those things are connected. We need to continue to do research to try to understand the effects of each of the different kinds of gas.
Interviewer: So in conclusion, we can say that it's a complex subject but that your film will simplify it as much as possible so we can understand it.
Belhumeur: Yes. The aim is to help viewers to understand this complex phenomenon, to play down a situation that could be seen as catastrophic and to remind people that change is inevitable. Things were not always the way they are now, but we can adapt. It's up to us to adapt in order to survive.
Interviewer: Thank you.