On last week’s episode of VICE on HBO, the documentary news magazine’s founder Shane Smith went to Greenland to cover the startling melting of its massive ice sheets
Grist’s Ted Alvarez interviewed Smith about the episode recently. Here are a few highlights from that interview…
A. I did a story last year – and I’m going to do this every season, every time we get a chance because I think it’s the biggest problem facing humanity as a whole today. I don’t know how you get bigger.
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Q. And yet mainstream media often shies away from covering it, at least in proportion to the seriousness of the problem.
A. I find it incredibly strange that that’s the case. When you talk to people in the scientific community and ask how much of this is our fault, they say, “Oh, 100 percent of it.” And most people don’t think it’s true. But I guess there’s people who deny gravity and evolution. … It’s not even that the gun is to our heads; the hammer has been cocked back. We have to do it now or we’re screwed.
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Q. What made the biggest impression on you while out there on the ice?
A. The scale of what’s happening is amazing. I live in Tribeca, and during Sandy my whole street was underwater. It’s personal: My house is going to sink. You realize the scope of the problem. Greenland is several miles thick, and it’s sinking as fast as it can. We flew over this deglaciated land which has been covered for 50,000 years, and 10-15 miles of it is deglaciated. You realize what used to be miles wide and miles thick is just gone. If you understand the science, you understand it will happen at an exponential rate. And then it becomes wholly terrifying. You can see how a place that’s three times the size of Texas is melting all at once. It’s mind-bogglingly huge.
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I don’t think the scientific community understands the war they’re in. [They say], “It’s difficult to say anything is 100 percent this or that.” They don’t understand that if they leave any loophole, the far right, the Koch brothers, the well-funded lobbies will exploit it. Ninety percent of the comments on anything we do [on VICE] are positive, but when we cover climate change they’re negative, and it’s because they’re funded.
That’s what I really think is the most insidious. Look, we all know [climate change] is real – the science at this point is indisputable. But people who know the science is real are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for people to say it’s not real. That’s the definition of shitting where you eat: damning future generations so you can make short-term profit on fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, the episode doesn’t appear to be available online for free, other than for HBO subscribers at HBO Go. If you have access to either, you should try and watch VICE’s disturbing “Greenland is Melting” segment. Here’s Shane Smith’s “Debrief” on the episode…
You remaining climate blame believers have to come clean and stop clinging to your phony consensus worship. It wasn’t a consensus unless 32 years of “could be” and 95% is good enough for you to condemn your own children.
Mememine69 — Have you got eyes? Can you read? Look at pictures? Graphs? Do you know who funds the deniers?
But what I was going to say is that HBO sometimes goes out on a limb and runs documentaries that go contrary to the big bucks — good on them.
Lora — if you do a Google search for “mememine69” you’ll see that he/she/it is a prolific and incoherent anti-science troll.
A possible explanation is that mememine69 is paid to deny climate science across the internet, but the poor quality of mememine69’s trolling is so hilariously unconvincing that it’s just as likely a volunteer effort. When even Exxon Mobil acknowledges the greenhouse gas effect of human CO2 emissions and the need to take action, one would think the climate change denial industry would find or demand better quality trolling.