In the most northern parts of Canada, ice is melting at an extremely rapid rate. In February 2006, the temperature jumped from -26 degrees to 5 degrees and poured rain. Caches of frozen caribou meat were ruined and many ice floes broke off.
In the Gansu Province, China, sand from the Gobi desert is moving quickly, forcing entire villages to move. The sand can move six to seven meters a year. Schoolchildren plant trees in an attempt to keep the sand from moving into other areas. The trees have a survival rate of less than 50%.
In Montana, a reservoir for farmland irrigation is running dry. Many families have already had to sell their land and move because crops are dying.
The flooding of Mumbai, India in 2005 devastated much of the city, especially the poor. The city was built on a floodplain, and many locals believed that the government did not do enough during the disaster and were not planning for future floods.
The Sahel, in Africa, is used to droughts, but the used to occur only every five to ten years. The area has been in a persistent drought for about five years. Food is incredibly scare, and environmental refugee camps have been set up in some areas. Humanitarian relief groups have been bringing in food and water to these camps, but many times it is not enough. There is a program, lead by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai, which plants trees in the hopes of returning some of the forests that used to exist in the area.
This movie is great for showing exactly what is happening and putting faces with the people being affected the most by climate change. It shows very dramatic scenes and can, at times, be a little over the top. While the movie shows the present, it offers no solutions for the future. Some super-high-tech/low-emissions inventions are shown, but no real way of effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale.
