Thin Ice (2013): Climate Scientists in the Trenches

Thin Ice (2013): Climate Scientists in the Trenches

As the filmmakers explain, the Thin Ice documentary (2013)project began over a cup of coffee at a climate change and governance conference in Wellington in 2006. Peter Barrett (Victoria University) suggested to Simon Lamb (then at Oxford University) that he make a film about the science of climate change with his friend David Sington (DOX Productions). The idea was to let people see an insider’s view of the astonishing range of human activity and scientific work needed to understand the world’s changing climate. Viewers would then be able to decide individually and collectively how to deal with the issue.

Climate science has been coming under increasing attack. Geologist Simon Lamb takes a look at what’s really happening with global warming by filming scientists in multiple disciplines at work in the Arctic, the Antarctic and around the world. The result is a unique exploration of the science behind global warming and an intimate portrait of a global community of researchers racing to understand our planet’s changing climate. Simon and David talked to researchers on four continents as they explained their work measuring changes in the atmosphere, oceans and ice sheets. They also discovered how scientists use computer models to understand the effects of those changes.

The key messages from this 73 minute film are that scientists can be trusted and that ultimately we have to quit using fossil fuels. We do not try and say how this should be done, but we hope that the film will lead audiences into some deeper thinking on the issue and perhaps even a shift toward solutions. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/04/thin-ice-the-movie/#sthash.JxRl7CNS.dpuf

The scientists:

MYLES ALLEN, ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICIST

Myles is interested in how human and natural influences on climate contribute to observed changes.

CLIFF ATKINS, GEOLOGIST

Cliff extracts glacial history from sediment cores by studying pebble shape and sediment texture and other features.

NANCY BERTLER, PALEOCLIMATOLOGIST

Nancy is using ice cores to study climate history over the 20,000 years in the Ross Sea region of Antarctica.

MARTIN BLUNT, PETROLEUM ENGINEER

Martin's research interests are in flow through porous media - applications include carbon capture and storage.

NEIL BOWLES, ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICIST

Neil works on space experiments for observing the planets and runs lab experiments for data analysis.

MARTIN BRASIER, PALEOBIOLOGIST

Martin has sought to expand our understanding of big transitions in the fossil record.

WALLACE BROECKER, OCEANOGRAPHER

Wally has been studying the oceans since 1953 when he began his PhD at Columbia University.

LIONEL CARTER, MARINE GEOLOGIST

Lionel's research centres on the use of cores from the sea floor to understand past changes in global climate.

NIKI DAVEY, MARINE BIOLOGIST

Niki studies sea cucumbers, an important part of the biomass and biodiversity of the oceans.

DAN DIXON, PALEOCLIMATOLOGIST

Dan's research is focused on the reconstruction of Antarctic climate from chemistry in snow and ice cores.

KATIE DUGGER, ECOLOGIST

Katie studies the effects of changes in landscape and climate on foraging ecology and survival of animals.

GAVIN DUNBAR, GEOLOGIST

Gavin has worked on sediment cores form the tropics to the poles, using geochemical techniques to estimate past temperature.

SIR LLOYD GEERING, THEOLOGIAN

Sir Lloyd continues to be one of NZ's more controversial theologians, debating religious and secular issues.

DAVID HARWOOD, GEOLOGIST

Dave is an expert in dating rocks with microfossils, especially diatoms (marine algae).

MATTHEW HUBER, PALEOCLIMATE MODELLER

Matt works to improve our understanding of Earth's warmer past with models used for modern climate.

PHILIP JONES, CLIMATOLOGIST

Phil is known mainly for the 150-year-long monthly time series of global surface temperatures.

BRIAN KARL, ECOLOGY TECHNICIAN

Brian has been  monitoring  Adelie penguins, their foraging, diet and movements for the last 22 years.

DANIEL KOSELI, ENGINEER

Daniel works with Fabian Moeller as an engineer monitoring CO2 injection into strata 600 m below ground level near Berlin.

ANDERS LEVERMANN, CLIMATE SCIENTIST

Anders uses computer models to study the behaviour of the Earth System with a particular interest in tipping points.

ADRIAN MACEY, FORMER NZ CLIMATE CHANGE AMBASSADOR

Adrian was until recently Vice-Chair (then Chair) of the UN Climate Change negotiations (Kyoto Protocol track).

MARTIN MANNING, ATMOSPHERIC CHEMIST

Martin led NZ's greenhouse gas research for over 20 years, then directing IPCC's WG-1 Technical Support Unit.

PAUL MAYEWSKI, PALEOCLIMATOLOGIST

Paul has led researchers investigating climate history in both the Arctic and the Antarctic for 4 decades.

MALTE MEINSHAUSEN, CLIMATE MODELLER

Malte models the cause & effect chain from CO2 emissions to temperatures to climate change impacts.

FABIAN MOELLER, ENGINEER

Fabian works with Daniel Koseli as an engineer monitoring CO2 injection into strata 600 m below ground level near Berlin.

HUGH MORTIMER, ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICIST

Hugh is now directing his research to developing satellite instrumentation to study the Earth’s atmosphere.

TIMOTHY NAISH, GEOLOGIST

Tim's  main research interest is the past behaviour of Antarctic ice sheets over millions of years.

SCOTT NODDER, MARINE BIOLOGIST

Scott's research includes iron cycling, carbon fluxes in marine ecosystems and ocean time-series observations.

LISA NORTHCOTE, MARINE TECHNICIAN

Lisa provides analyses for projects on water, sediment and life in the oceans around New Zealand.

RAY PIERREHUMBERT, ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICIST

Ray enjoys developing idealized mathematical models for addressing the big questions about Earth's climate.

ALEX PYNE, POLAR DRILLING TECHNOLOGIST

Alex has been developing  polar field and drilling equipment and managing operations for over 30 years.

JAME RAE, OCEANOGRAPHER

James' hiking and surfing in Scotland stimulated his interest in cold water, mud and the environment.

STEFAN RAHMSTORF, OCEAN MODELLER

Stefan studies the role of the oceans in climate change and is co-founder of the www.realclimate.org blog

ROS RICKABY, BIOCHEMIST

Ros is fascinated by the interactions between  organisms, ocean chemistry, atmospheric composition and climate.

KATJA RIEDEL, ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICIST

Katja's main research interests are greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and in ice cores.

LIZ SIKES, PALEOCEANOGRAPHER

Her main interest is the study of the climate variability in the ocean over thousands of years.

CRAIG STEVENS, OCEANOGRAPHER

Craig works on boundary layer problems, particularly ocean-atmosphere and ocean-sea ice interactions.

CRAIG STEWART, OCEANOGRAPHER

Craig studies ocean structure and currents by leaving recording instruments tethered on deep ocean moorings.

LONNIE THOMPSON

Lonnie's observations of glacier retreat in the last three decades show that glaciers around the world are melting.

MIKE WILLIAMS, PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHER

Mike's research focuses on how ocean and ice, including ice shelves and sea ice, interact around Antarctica.

TONY WILLIAMS, METEROLOGIST

Tony has been a weatherman for 43 years and still finds it fascinating.

Body Modification, Feminism, and the Eco-Cyborg

Although most body modification films highlight masculine visions of power, a few Japanese films draw on a feminist cyborg myth either explicitly or implicitly, providing a speculative connection between humans and animals which biologically modify their bodies.  Three of these films connect the cyborg myth with the natural world and produce hybrid beings with capabilities more like cuttlefish than decorated humans. According to the documentary Kings of Camouflage(2007), the cuttlefish [is] a flesh-eating predator who's a master of illusion, changing its shape and color at will. It can hypnotize its prey or even become invisible.” Scientist Mark Norman explains their amazing modification abilities: “They've developed this skin that can do the amazing changes in color and changes in shape. And what fascinates me the most is how different cuttlefish species have taken that basic tool that probably evolved for camouflage, and they've taken it a step further and said, ‘All right, how can we use this in other ways?’"

Noboru Iguchi’s Machine Girl (2009) and RoboGeisha (2009), and Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police (2008) highlight how women take “basic tools” and gain power when they are transformed into cyborgs. What changes in these Japanese films, however, is the interconnection between nature and machine embodied by each character’s bodily changes. These films take the connection between animal and human body modification one-step further than films such as Elysium to include biology. In these Japanese cyborg films, body modification immerses women in both nature and culture. The modification explored here blurs nature-culture boundaries and aligns human change with cuttlefish evolution.

As Donna Haraway explains in her Cyborg Manifesto, “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (291). For Haraway, cyborg fiction offers a space in which women can deconstruct binaries that construct nature and the feminine as inferior to their binary opposites, the masculine and culture. Haraway suggests the “cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (295). Because Western culture is grounded in such binaries, alternative perspectives are needed to blur exploitative boundaries. As Haraway contends, “most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in social practices, symbolic formulations and physical artifacts associated with ‘high technology’ and scientific culture” (295).

The American socialists and feminists Haraway describes might agree with the view that “a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war” (Sofia 1984) (295). But contemporary Japanese body modification horror supports a second perspective, one in which “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (295). In Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, and Tokyo Gore Police, women, nature and the machine merge creating new organisms with the ability to modify themselves from within.

Directed by Noboru Iguchi, Machine Girl most clearly aligns with the traditional view of the cyborg as a hybrid of machine and organism. The film’s protagonist Ami (Minase Yashiro) loses a hand and replaces it with a gun. The opening scene introduces her alteration and highlights a school girl Ami’s quest to avenge her brother Yu’s (Ryôsuke Kawamura) murder. “You’re the one who made it my business,” she says, as she kills a group of young men taunting a schoolboy. She has lost a hand, and when gang members throw knives at her, she attaches an automatic weapon and shoots off their heads. Blood spurts everywhere, so much so that the schoolboy calls her a murderer despite having saved his life.

When the film flashes back, Ami provides backstory to situate this scene: Six months before “she could hold her little brother with her left arm.” She excelled at basketball and cared for her brother Yu after her parents commit suicide. They seem like a contented nontraditional family until Yu borrows money from a gang to buy a videogame. In spite of Ami’s assistance, Yu is thrown from the top of a parking garage and dies. Despite the gang’s connection to Yakuza boss Ryûji Kimura (Kentarô Shimazu) Ami wishes to avenge her brother’s death and infiltrates the gang’s hideout, where she is captured and tortured, losing her hand during her escape. A machinist and his wife Miki (Asami) replace her hand with a custom-made automatic weapon. Because she lost her son to the Yakuza, Miki helps Ami defeat Kimura and his family while Yu’s ghost applauds, connecting machine with a supernatural element that complicates the cyborg myth.

Iguchi’s RoboGgeisha provides a more explicit connection with biology, since the cyborgs created in the film mingle machines with bodies and minds. The film’s opening introduces a Goblin Squadron of female cyborgs who fight off a prime minister’s security guards. Yoshie (Aya Kiguchi)—the RoboGeisha of the title—intervenes, saving the prime minister. The robogeisha explains her situation, telling the audience, “I am not a monster. I am a robot.” Another cyborg shows her spinning saw mouth, but the robogeisha protects the prime minister and declares, “Violence has no place in the world of the geisha.” From here the film flashes back to the RoboGeisha cyborg’s origin when she was Yoshie, the younger of two sisters working in a Geisha house. Although her older sister Kikue (Hitomi Hasebe) is considered the superior Geisha, Yoshie proves the most powerful. A customer and owner of a steel-works company, Kageno (Takumi Saitô), discovers Yoshie’s natural strength and fighting ability and recruits her into an army of Geisha assassins, including her sister as part of the Goblin Squadron. During training parts of each woman recruit’s body are altered into weaponry directly linked to their brains, turning them into cyborgs with ties to the natural world.

When Yoshie refuses to destroy members of a Family Rescue Organization attempting to find their lost daughters, Kageno nearly destroys her, but she survives, discovering Kageno’s real plan to have his robotic castle throw a new and very powerful nuclear bomb into the center of Mount Fuji, effectively destroying Japan. With the help of the Family Rescue Organization who find and repair her, Yoshie sets out to stop him and his robotic warriors. Ultimately Yoshie destroys Kageno and his robot castle only by reconnecting with her elder sister. Together their cyborg strength knocks the robot castle into space where it explodes into harmless fireworks. In RoboGeishabodies and machines merge both individually and through sibling connections.

Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police even more blatantly alters the cyborg myth by merging science and technology with genetics. The film is set in a future-world vision of Tokyo where the police have been privatized and destroy lawbreakers with unfettered violence. The samurai-sword-wielding Ruka (Eihi Shiina) leads the police squad with a mission to destroy homicidal mutant humans known as "engineers" who possess the ability to transform any injury to a weapon in and of itself. Ultimately Ruka too becomes an engineer when a genetic key is inserted in her wounded body. Once she discovers the police she works for assassinated her father, Ruka joins forces with the keyman (Itsuji Itao) who created the engineers. As a powerful biological cyborg, Ruka overthrows the police, halting their violent assault on the citizens of Tokyo. 

Although these three films approach the cyborg in varying ways, they all reinforce Haraway’s claims: “The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience…. This is a struggle between life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 291). They also highlight, if in fictional form, our connection with the natural world. According to the narrator of Kings of Camouflage, “Evolution means change, so maybe in a few million years, the flamboyant will march on eight legs right onto the beaches. Or the broadclub will hypnotize its predators as well as its prey. Perhaps the Australian giants will invent even more daring strategies to outwit their rivals.” Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, and Tokyo Gore Police offer a space in which to explore how evolution may also change us.

An Introduction to Murray and Heumann’s Everyday Eco-Disasters: Cinematic Eco-disasters and Our Basic Human Needs

An Introduction to Murray and Heumann’s Everyday Eco-Disaters:

Cinematic Eco-disasters and Our Basic Human Needs

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011), an epic anti-War drama confronting the fight for survival of a Devon horse named Joey in the no-man zones of World War I France, addresses our relationship with the environment in a variety of ways. It effectively illustrates the connections between human and nonhuman nature with its focus on the relationship between Joey and his owner’s son, Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine). The scenes before, during, and after battles also demonstrate the horrific consequences of modern warfare to people, animals, and the natural world, a devastating human and ecological disaster leaving clear evidence that, as the film tells us, “The war has taken everything from everyone.”

But the film moves beyond more traditional disaster themes by illuminating everyday eco-disasters associated with our basic needs.  For example, Joey, a swift and strong thoroughbred, must prove he can plow a field for turnips to ensure the Narracott family maintains their shelter and the surrounding land that provides their food. When the turnip crop fails and war is declared, Albert’s father, Ted (Peter Mullan) sells the horse to the British army to pay the farm lease and, again, secure those basic needs. Joey’s horrific war journey, then, is caused by a family’s drive to simply survive.

Film and Everyday Eco-Disaster centers exclusively on films associated with our basic needs (air, water, food, clothing, shelter, and energy), and the everyday eco-disasters associated with their exploitation. Such exploitation is typically associated with a “fair use” model of ecology, which grew out of economic approaches to the environment connected to Social Darwinism. Human approaches to ecology, however, maintain the worth of our basic needs, either as separate from or part of nonhuman nature.  Whether defined by psychologist Abraham Maslow as physiological needs, by Reality therapist, William Glasser as survival needs, or self-determination theory as competence in dealing with the environment, our most basic needs all highlight our connection with our external ecology, a connection that broaches environmental externalities.

Environmental externalities resulting from everyday eco-disasters continue to have negative effects on water, air, and landscapes. For example, oil remains from the 1979 Ixtoc oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and cleanup continues after the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident, ominous foreshadowing of the possible aftermath of the 2010 BP environmental catastrophe caused by the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. Negative externalities have a detrimental affect on workers in various industries, including fishing, drinking water, air quality, mountains and forests. See, for example, the December 23, 2008 coal slurry dam breach caused by mountaintop removal mining in Tennessee or the April 10, 2010 West Virginia Massey mine explosion that left twenty-nine dead.

Natural gas drilling also causes negative externalities, as documented in Gasland (2010), threatening upper water supplies in the Delaware basin, for example. Genetically engineered seed has produced resistant super weeds, and carp introduced in the Chicago River are threatening other fish in Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes. Environmental externalities have a global effect negatively impacting water, air and quality of human and nonhuman life around the world. Recent documentaries and feature films explore and argue against these everyday eco-disasters.

With explorations of films as diverse as Dead Ahead, a 1992 HBO dramatization of the Exxon Valdez disaster, Total Recall (1990), a science fiction feature film highlighting oxygen as a commodity, The Devil Wears Prada (2006), a comment on the fashion industry, and Food, Inc. (2009), a documentary interrogation of the food industry, Film and Everyday Eco-disasters explores documentaries and feature films as film art to determine how successfully they fulfill their goals. We assert that whether or not the films we explore succeed as arguments against everyday eco-disasters and the negative environmental externalities they produce depend not only on the message the filmmakers convey but also, and most importantly, on the rhetorical strategies they employ.