National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World (2007)
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Starring: Alec Baldwin Director: Ron Bowman Rating Product Description |
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In the 2004 eco-thriller The Day After Tomorrow, director Roland Emmerich dramatized the potential consequences of
accelerated global warming. By combining stock footage with computer-generated
imagery, the National Geographic special Six Degrees Could Change the World
serves as a sort of nonfiction counterpoint. As NASA climate scientist James
Hansen cautions, even two degrees Celsius represents a tipping point (from
which there is no return). Based on Mark Lynas's Six
Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet and narrated by Alec Baldwin, the
program roams from the bushfire-ravaged suburbs of Southern Australia to the
drought-stricken farmlands of
Other Reviews:
VERY PRO:
Spectacular. Professional. Visually Powerful.
Life Changing., April
12, 2008
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By |
Robert
D. Steele ( |
This is a spectacular piece of professional work and so compelling
as to be inspirational.
I watched this with my wife with no lights, and decided to take no notes. Here
are the highlights from my memory.
1) Brilliant, utterly brilliant, history, photography, personalities (such as
the Indian guru that has photographed the source of the
2) We are well on our way to 2-3 degrees rise, and if we do not begin to act
sensibly now, toward six degrees. I absolutely loved the way this film
developed, showing the changes one degree at a time. My wife had to point out
the computer simulations, the producers and editors of this film are world
class--they should share the Nobel with Herman Daly, Lester Brown, Paul Hawkin, and Anthony Lovin, Gore's
Nobel was an ill-advised politicized award, he is in the fourth grade compared
to this film and the serious people it focused upon.
3) Oceans as the critical carbon absorbing element, and coral as the
"canary in the coal mine" really grabbed me The
overall screenplay, photography, voice overs,
everything about this is spectacularly professional and rivieting.
4) Amazon as the next most critical element, with riveting views of the Amazon
river drying up in 2005, and the potential scenarios of drought, fires, more
drought.
5) Increasing destructiveness of weather. Katrina as the
first of what could become every month storms, instead of 100 year storms.
In passing, the film shows the world-class levies built by the Europeans, and
they do not show the downright retarded cement levees of the US Army Corps of
Engineers, levees that are the laughing stock of the rest of the (sophisticated)
world.
A highlight of the film was its focus on the one man that has figured out the
total carbon footprint of the cheeseburger, to include the methane farts of the
cows. I am not making this up. This film is AMAZING, it is spectacular, it is
professional, it is precisely the kind of well-crafted material that We the
People need to begin self-governing rather than entrusting war criminals and and cronies (both parties) who sell us out.
Here are ten links that augment the deep insight and value that this DVD
provides to anyone able to see it.
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
The Future of Life
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third
Edition
The leadership of civilization building:
Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills
for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the
Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental
Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial
Revolution
The Philosophy of Sustainable Design
Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican
Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World
at Peace
Apart from these, allowed by Amazon, I recommend the many books on climate,
catastrophe, etcetera. See my many lists.
Critical Eye:
informative but
questionable, February 14, 2008
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By |
This review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World
[Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)
I think a break down of the ratings
speak for themselve a bit.
One person put a 1 because they found it offensive(perhaps
they don't like the idea of spending money to find an alternative to dumping
their company's waste in the river.)
The other person put a 5 (perhaps they bought everything this propa-documentary said and hate selfish people that are too
profit motivated or believe everything the powers that be try to sell them.)
Well I thought it was informative. But I also noticed some things
that attempted to manipulated the viewers thoughts and
opinions, like showing the nuclear plant's exhaust while talking about carbon
dioxide and fossil fuels. That exhaust is water vapor from cooling towers, not
smoke plumes.
Same with the catasrophic weather and katrina. Yes it was a catasrophic storm, but a lot of the suffering in N.O. was
partly to blame on gross negligence of the powers that be.
I did notice it had high production values. Which is also
what annoyed me with the manipulative information. If you are going to
invest that much time and money into a film why do you have to shape the truth?
Can't we ever get documentaries that are only moderately biased so that we can
decide for ourselves? These films just fall on deaf ears to some and make
others look like tin foil hat wearers. Integrity was compromised.
I still learned a lot however.
National security issue., April 15, 2008
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By |
Preston
C. Enright (Denver, CO United States) - See all my reviews |
It's a shame how
militarists have so narrowly defined "national security" as an issue
to focus us on war-making. But as ample evidence shows, we have security issues
that involve building a sustainable economy, renewable energy, sensible
transit, green architecture, new urbanism and much else.
I saw "Six Degrees" on
the National Geographic Channel, and the author of the book was recently
interviewed on C-SPAN's BookTV. As impactful as these
media efforts have been, social change is being stalled by reckless voices on
radio stations around the country (Limbaugh alone is on over 700 stations) who are misinforming millions of politically engaged people.
These same people insist that we spare no expense when it comes to threats from
foreign policy blowback, but they refuse to acknowledge the potential
catastrophe of double-glazing the planet in carbon dioxide.
"Security" does not have to mean more profits for weapons contractors
Why We Fight. Security can come to mean
more profits for businesses that work on wind, solar, and tidal power; as well
as efficiency and conservation innovations Sustainable Industries.
Many of our energy "needs" have actually been manufactured and
marketed by industries that want to maximize the use of their commodity.
Overcoming the "perception management" campaigns of those entrenched
business interests is a daunting task, but so much progress has already been
made that corporatists are increasingly desperate in their media efforts. The
general public may not have PR firms funded by Exxon to advocate for their
interests Everything's Cool, but we do have
countless people who can write letters to editors, blog, call into talk radio
(progressive and right-wing shows), post on message boards, share DVDs Refugees of the Blue Planet,
subscribe to magazines Plenty Magazine, teach Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from
Nature-Deficit Disorder, preach A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our
Planet's Future and invest green Green Investing: A Guide to Making Money through
Environment Friendly Stocks.
True security doesn't mean designing evermore destructive weapons of war; but,
rather, designing evermore constructive methods of sustainability e2: Design Season 2.
"Humanity has entered into a
condition that is in some sense more globally united and interconnected, more
sensitized to the experiences and suffering of others, in certain respects more
spiritually awakened, more conscious of alternative future possibilities and
ideals, more capable of collective healing and compassion, and, aided by
technological advances in communication media, more able to think, feel, and
respond together in a spiritually evolved manner to the world's swiftly
changing realities than has ever before been possible."
-Richard Tarnas, quoted in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in
History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beau
Ouch!
6 Degrees Works in Both Ways, June 9, 2009
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By |
Michael
Garza |
This review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World
[Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)
Six degrees works in both way. In the
late 60's and early 70's environmentalist were preaching that CO2 would cause
the earth to go into another ice age. Funny how they can
reverse this theory when we go through a few years of hotter than normal
temperatures. Guess what? We're going through cooler temperature again
for the next several years and their regrouping again even trying to explain
why the perma frost will not melt as quick as they
had predicted. What's next?
Very depressing..., November 6, 2008
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By |
Michael
Valdivielso |
Don't just change your light bulbs. Don't just recycle. You have
to stop using oil, you have to stop eating hamburgers, you have to stop cutting
down trees. Not tomorrow, not next year, right now. The idea is not just to
save money, which we would, and also save nature, which we would, but we have
to save ourselves. We have to change the way we live. We have to get away from
plastics, coal burning, roads, cities, and beef. To just name
a few things. In other words, we're pretty much doomed. But Alec Baldwin
has a great voice, the packaging is a green-product and the extras really help
you save money. Too bad the packaging sucks when it comes to HOLDING the DVD in
place but you can't have everything.
Belongs in the science fiction section, not the documentary
section,
September 10, 2011 By
Roger McEvilly (the guilty
bystander) (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews
This
review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could
Change the World (DVD)
Since this documentary is so way-over the top, a few critical
words about it.
If shows climate effects that are expected, by some scientists (though not
all), to occur as a result of C02 produced from human activities over the next
century, with a section devoted to each 1 degree celsius
of warming projected, except that the last degree is left out-6 degrees of
warming-which according to the documentary "scientists don't know what
will happen... and don't want to find out". (Well the world has been 6
degrees warmer before and it didn't end, but anyway).
To begin with, as a professional geologist who is aware of past geological
changes, I don't necessarily think they have got most of the worst case
scenarios here wrong, it's just that I do tend to suspect they have got the
rates wrong, and that the effects depicted in this film will take a lot longer
to occur than is depicted (think in terms of hundreds or even thousands of
years, not in decades) based on past rates of geological change and the
buffering capacity of most earth processes. Such views should be more
investigated in the scientific literature and in films such as this, (the
father of modern geology- James Hutton- after all was also a strong believer in
gradualism, who probably would have thought much the same thing).
The film claims to use past earth history to project what might happen, but
fails to mention that these past earth changes took thousands and even millions
of years to occur in the vast majority of cases (eg
past volcanic C02 producing greenhouse over millions of years, not decades).
But why should the earth produce the same large-scale changes, but just all
speeded up, just because WE are here, like in some 'Day After Tomorrow'
disaster movie?
The assumption pervading this film is that:
`oh yes large-scale climate changes in the past took thousands to millions of
years, but we are doing these things- like adding c02 to the atmosphere-much
faster than nature ever has'" (actually questionable),
but this statement doesn't mean that the earth will necessarily REACT faster to
increased inputs. There is a concept in chemistry called 'buffering', which
basically means just because you increase the rate of something, doesnt mean the rate of change budges much at all. So just how much are the earth various climate system's buffered to
change? The geological record suggests they are nearly always very slow
to change, even regardless of input rate. This implies that they are strongly
buffered to fast changes.
To take an example where the film has got this 'rate' effect completely wrong,
they use the UN IPCC's Himalayan glacier (propaganda) statement that they
"could all melt by 2035", which turned out to be a date put in the
IPCC report by politically-biased IPCC scientists, and nothing to do whatsoever
with any scientific data or review. The UN's IPCC has since admitted and
retracted the statement, which even under the worst case scenarios won't occur
for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Are the rest of the scenarios shown in this film (and in the IPCC report) also
not likely to occur for hundreds or even thousands of years? How does one know,
for example, that the IPCC hasn't done much the same exageration
and other rate errors in the rest of the IPCC report, but which are just more
difficult to prove as false or exaggerated?
The geological record suggests it generally takes very long time periods for
the earth to move in such directions as in this film (sea levels, ice melting,
etc), and often regardless of increased rate of inputs. Such scientific
evidence from the past is routinely ignored by some, I suspect for the same
reason the IPCC scientists ignored criticism that the Himalayan glacier melting
rate was wrong before the report was published (and ignored later also by the
Chair of the IPCC) even when it was pointed out to them, for political reasons.
"We wanted to highlight its importance to the region...so we kept the
statement in..." (IPCC scientists), ie they kept
the statement in there for political reasons, not scientific ones (they would
have made good directors of disaster movies). They wanted to do what they
believed was the right thing, so they ignore valid critical review. The
Chairman of the UN's IPCC described the Himalayan glacier criticism as
"voodoo science", without bothering to investigate, but which just
happened later to turn out to be entirely valid criticism and dead wrong. Is
there an attitude problem with such scientists upon which these sort of
statements and films are based?. The answer would have
to be yes, by their OWN words.
To take the glacier example again, there is no physical way to melt that much
ice that quickly under ANY climate circumstances, even if the rate of warming
vastly increases. This is now admitted by the IPCC. The same is true of
Greenland ice, it is physically impossible to melt that much ice in less than
hundreds or even thousands of years in even the worst case scenarios.
Other questionable things in the film: New York subway 25 feet underwater more
or less permanently, deserts widespread in the western US, numerous world
cities drowned by rising sea level, millions of climate refugees from places
like India which has run out of government-propaganda water, etc etc. (By the way, one of the UN's environment programs also
predicted that by this last year- 2010-2011- there would be hundreds of
thousands of 'climate refugees', so far: ZERO, the statement has been withdrawn
quietly from the UNs environment program website).
If some scientists consistently get statements and scenarios like the above 2
wrong, do you think they will get the past geological record right, which
suggests at least, that the earth is strongly buffered to fast climate changes,
which is perhaps why past large scale changes generally take thousands to
millions of years to occur (rather than that the natural input rates were
slower)?
One always hears about 'runaway greenhouse' this or 'runaway greenhouse' that,
why doesn't one ever hear about the concept of `buffering'. The oceans are a
good example, they are strongly buffered to chemical changes (not mentioned
anywhere in this film). Just like the Indian scientists in the IPCC,
highlighting the buffering capacties of the earth
doesn't suit politically, just like the film `The Day After Tomorrow' slowed
down 10,000 years would make a hell of a boring disaster film. Half the IPCC
scientists would have to go back to their day jobs, such as the current
chairman, -a railway engineer-who would have to go back to work on the railways
(or his very thorough, painstaking investigations of `voodoo science').
Which would you prefer for your rental DVD? watching sea level rise 1.7mm/ year
for thousands of years (the ACTUAL current rate, as well as the rate in many
geological past changes, despite relative changes in inputs), or watching the
Day After Tomorrow's storm surge swamping the New York subway?. That will be
$5.95, and don't forget to return your DVD by tomorrow after you have watched
the sea level rise 1/365th of 1.7mm/year for a couple of very boring hours.
I do think some scientists are mixing up science fiction with science, and
can't tell the difference. This 'documentary' is a good example.
Excellent introduction to climate change, May
23, 2011
By
Learner (US) - See all my reviews
This
review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could
Change the World (DVD)
I've seen several videos and read several books on climate change,
and this is the clearest explanation I've seen so far.
From what I've learned from other scientifically-based sources, this video is
accurate and not mere fear-mongering. It's true that nobody knows if these in
fact are worst-case scenarios. But there is indication now that warming may be
happening faster than predicted - the arctic, for example, is apparently
melting faster than expected.
Usage of oil and coal - energy in general - is accelerating, not decreasing. The
third world is only getting started on industrialization. The US shows little
will to decrease it's carbon output. Overall, it
appears to me that continued warming is now inevitable. The only question is
how fast we want it to get really bad. This is my conclusion after studying the
matter.
If you are in doubt about whether human-caused warming is occurring, I
encourage you to look at all sides before you make a decision. From what I've
found, on the "yes" side you have scientists for whom this is their
expertise - geophysicists and such. On the "no" side you have mostly
oil companies and people who are not specialists in climate science. A recent
study shows that 97 percent of climate scientist say
it is real. In the scientific community, the debate is over. The only place you
see debate is in venues that have an agenda - and where you will often find the
vested interests throwing up as big a smoke screen as possible, to try to
obscure the scientific evidence.
If you want to read a good book, as a follow-up to this video, the best I have
found is
The Climate Crisis: An
Introductory Guide to Climate Change
Just Buy It and Watch It., January 6, 2011
By
Masha
(Miami, Florida) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's
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review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could
Change the World (DVD)
This movie is about 3 years old now, but practically everything
shown for 2 degrees is happening now. You can watch the film, then read the news. Just buy it and watch it.
Was required to buy this; glad I did.,
August 18, 2010
By
Sandra M. Mcmullen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
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review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could
Change the World (DVD)
I had to purchase this for a class. I'm glad I did. I found it
interesting..and a little scary. Really
made me think. I've shown it to a few other people who weren't in school
with me and they really learned something from it.
Absorbing documentary; read the book, too,
February 18, 2010
By
Jazz fan from New England
(Boston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's
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This
review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World
[Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)
Excellent, well-paced documentary; kept me watching all the way
through. Of course it's advocacy. What do you expect? Most worthwhile
discussions of political topics are advocacy. It's up to you to decide what to
think about such discussions, based on the evidence and your own policy
preferences. The same people who complain that films like this are one-sided
are perfectly happy to get their `news' from Fox News. For them, one-sidedness
is OK so long as it's their side.
And of course the film is simplistic. 90 minutes isn't enough for a PhD
dissertation or academic paper. The film dramatizes the conclusions of a
variety of climate scientists. The book it's based on (Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who shows up quite a lot in the film) notes over and
over that many of these conclusions, particularly the more extreme ones, are
highly speculative; no one knows exactly what will happen in extreme
conditions. (The film says this too, now and then). Of
course. These are possibilities, only. Some scientists think they are
serious dangers. It's worth listening to them.
The scariest things in the film for me, though, weren't the dramatic scenes of
wildfires and super-storms and massive destruction of the Amazon. One of the
scariest was a nice segment showing vinyards in England
growing champagne grapes. English champagne! You have to have lived in England
forty years ago to know just how wrong that sounds. No one had been able to
make wine in England for centuries. Now it's a paying proposition.
The biggest problem in environmentalist films is the pathetic nature of the
solutions offered. We are exhorted to drive smaller cars, turn off appliances,
etc. How hollow and silly this kind of thing is is
shown in the film itself. One scientist has spent years researching the carbon
footprint of cheeseburgers in the US. Turns out it is bigger than the carbon
footprint of all the SUVs in the US. Clearly we have a problem too big for
individuals here, if junking every SUV would have less impact than eliminating
one particular kind of meal.
The bottom line for climate change is that it really isn't about religion,
ideology, or politics. You can argue about those topics forever, and there will
never be proof to convince the true believers on the other side. With climate
change, however, it is either happening or it isn't. If it isn't,
environmentalists' arguments won't mean anything. But if it is, all the claims
of the skeptics, all their advocacy, all the money
paid by energy companies and others to support them, will not turn down the
Earth's thermostat by a tenth of a degree. Climate change will simply be an
accomplished fact. Of course, by then, it will be too late to do anything about
it.
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's
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review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could
Change the World (DVD)
This DVD and the book it was based on by Mark Lynas
are the only attempt I know of to put together much of what scientists are
predicting for the effects of global warming. They answer a question I have had
since learning about the problem: what will happen if we let temperatures rise a certain amount? The answers are organized into one
degree steps. The book and DVD overlap but each covers quite a bit that they
other doesn't, so it is well worth getting both.
Some people will give one star to anything that conveys what climate scientists
are saying about global warming. If you have already made up your mind despite
the overwhelming evidence, don't bother watching this DVD or reading the book.
They make no attempt to prove anything, they simply
lay out what scientists are predicting. But if you can at least tentatively
accept that what the vast majority of experts are saying might indeed be true,
then you will want to know what they are predicting for our future.
Of course you can't expect everything scientists are predicting to be 100%
accurate. But I have been following the science for several years, and I can
tell you without a doubt that in the vast majority of cases where the
scientists were off, they were too optimistic, often by a large amount. Global
warming deniers criticize the computer climate model predictions, but in the
wrong way. As a whole, they are much more optimistic than they should be, and
the reason is that they don't know how to include the various positive
feedbacks in their equations. The simplest proof of this is that when they run
the models for years in the past for which we have paleoclimatology
data, they consistently predict the changes will be slower and less drastic
than what actually happened. If they do this for past changes, they will
probably do so for future changes too. This DVD has predictions based on these
models and on the paleoclimatic data. The scariest
predictions come from paleoclimatology, and
unfortunately those are probably more accurate. So keep that in mind as you
watch it.
The data that has come out since the DVD was made already indicate that some
things will be happening sooner than was thought then. For example, arctic sea
ice is melting much faster than predicted, and coral reefs are dying off faster
than anyone thought possible. Here is another thing to keep in mind. Because of
thermal inertia, the albedo feedback that is already
in full force, and because of global dimming effects, temperatures are already
guaranteed to rise at least one more degree. The Amazon was carbon neutral over
the past 10 years, and when it turns into a carbon source, that will cause the
temperature to rise another degree. Two to three derees
more warming are when other feedbacks are predicted to take over, pushing
global temperature even higher. So please realize that we have very little time
left to prevent the worst things shown in this DVD. Do whatever you can to
convince Congress and the President to treat this threat as more serious and
urgent than a world war. If we don't make at least the same quality of effort
as we did when fighting past world wars, we will not win this battle, and the
consequences will be far worse than if we had lost those wars. We all have a
patriotic and moral obligation to do our part, and the most effective thing you
can do now is make our leaders do their duty to protect our future.
P.S. Note to the person who thought the DVD showed a nuclear plant's cooling
tower: coal power plants also use cooling towers. It would have been better to
show a chimney, where the CO2 is released, but the footage probably was from a
coal power plant.
Very depressing..., November 6, 2008
By
Michael Valdivielso
(Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's
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review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could
Change the World (DVD)
Don't just change your light bulbs. Don't just recycle. You have
to stop using oil, you have to stop eating hamburgers, you have to stop cutting
down trees. Not tomorrow, not next year, right now. The idea is not just to
save money, which we would, and also save nature, which we would, but we have
to save ourselves. We have to change the way we live. We have to get away from
plastics, coal burning, roads, cities, and beef. To just name
a few things. In other words, we're pretty much doomed. But Alec Baldwin
has a great voice, the packaging is a green-product and the extras really help
you save money. Too bad the packaging sucks when it comes to HOLDING the DVD in
place but you can't have everything.
The ultimate alarmist's exaggeration, based on "what if"
scenarios the latest IPCC's 2007 Report no longer supports, July
8, 2008
By
Emc2 (Tropical Ecotopia)
- See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)
This
review is from: National Geographic: Six Degrees Could
Change the World (DVD)
This documentary is based on Mark Lyna's
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. I
just can believe a reputable source as National Geographic supported this
documentary. This is the kind of message that only helps to increase the
distrust and more undesirable controversy regarding the theory of man-made
global warming, and exaggerations not based on sound science only serve to
provide ammunition for the radicals in the other side of the issue.
Any forecast up to 6 degrees for 2100 is completely outdated and corresponds to
projections from previous IPCC's reports. The average surface temperature
forecast in the 2001 Report (TAR) was an increase between 1.4 to 5.8°C over the
period between 1990 to 2100, with a sea level projected to
rise by 0.1 to 0.9 meters over the same period. On the other hand, the
2007 Report (AR4) now predicts that sea levels will probably rise by 18 to 59
cm! The best estimate temperature rise is predicted between 1.8 to 4.0°C, for
best and worst case scenarios (B1 and A1FI respectively), with the intermediate
more realistic scenarios ranging between 2.4-3.4°C, and correspondingly see
levels from 20-51 cm (see table SPM3 of the Summary for Policymakers Just check
by yourself on the IPPC's 2007 Report (AR4) Climate Change 2007 - The Physical Science Basis:
Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC
(Climate Change 2007) (the PDF version is available for free through the web) or just
read the Summary for Policymakers.
This is a documentary not worth watching, unless you are interested in
science-fiction or a documentary continuation of the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow
(Widescreen Edition).
PS: I now rest my case. Read Mr. Lynas
2011 The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of
Humans. He now took a less bold but more practical approach to the
climate change issues. In his new book he explains many things that are wrong
with green movement supporting a low-carbon society, but offering more
realistic solutions. Highly recommended.
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