Ahead of the first episode of RTE's landmark documentary series on climate change, Rising Tides, Philip Boucher-Hayes writes about the programme he has been trying to make for twenty years - watch Rising Tides now via RTÉ Player.
Like any proper nerd would, I had done a lot of reading about Greenland’s Ice Sheet in the months before I went to film there. I was able to recite a dizzying array of numbers at you. But they were all pretty meaningless. It wasn’t until I got into that helicopter with the glaciology Prof, Jason Box, and flew up to the melting glaciers that any of these numbers made sense.
Like, how do you make sense of the news that scientists have just added an extra 1000 gigatons of melted Ice to the official record of the Greenland ice sheet’s recent melting? What on earth do you do with a figure like that? It’s meaningless, to anyone except the savant who can visualise what a thousand billion tons of fresh water would look like in the 310 million cubic kilometres of the Atlantic Ocean.
But when you stand in the middle of any one of Greenland’s two hundred glaciers the truth behind the numbers hits home and climate change makes sense. The glaciers are so large they force you to redefine how you use the word "vast". Rivers of melting ice, some of them up to 10 kilometres wide. Shunting millions of years of accumulated snowfall out to sea. Skyscraper sized shards grinding against each other so violently they sound like the Twin Towers coming down. This documentary’s cameras will bring you right there.
The pace at which solutions are being devised is also moving ever more rapidly.
This was why we wanted to make this documentary series the way we have done it. The idea was to show you the forces of climate breakdown at work. Seeing it for yourself rather than having learned people tell you about it second hand. Show, not tell. The gold standard of what we try to do in TV on those occasions we have the time and resources.
Show you the wake of the weather whiplashes in sub-Saharan Africa as the region gets flung from drought to flood. Show you the marine graveyards left in the wake of the heatwaves that hit 90% of oceans last year. Show you the solutions at our fingertips, if we muster the political and corporate will to implement them.
the truth behind the numbers hits home and climate change makes sense.'
Greenland is 25 times the size of Ireland. 80% of it is covered by the ice sheet. It is three kilometres deep in places, and so heavy it has literally crushed mountains. Scientists are debating how much of the ice sheet is now committed to irreversible decline, and what is the tipping point beyond which it will all melt.
Again without the aid of a super computer those numbers are pretty meaningless. But once you have stood on top of one of these frozen behemoths and seen it heading out to sea and towards Ireland you know it is a risk not worth calculating the odds on.
Our aim is not to alarm you but to restore clarity on what climate breakdown means. Because climate change in the national conversation here is now like being pinned in a corner at a wedding by a very dull uncle. Sectoral ceiling emissions, carbon budgets, MACC curves, who’s not pulling their weight, blah blah blah.
There is a place for these detailed technical discussions, but now is the time for a clear-eyed look at what is at stake. And how much faster than forecast this is all unravelling.
through the vested interests and culture war noise that increasingly
drowns out common sense.'
That was one of the most striking things about filming Rising Tides. Talking to the glaciologists measuring melting, the oceanographers taking temperature readings, the researchers calculating permafrost thaw, the meteorologists assessing hurricane intensity, they all said the same thing. The pace of breakdown is moving significantly more quickly than the official record says. What was once a risk for our grandchildren to contend with, will now happen in the lifetime of most people watching on the next three Wednesday nights.
But the pace at which solutions are being devised is also moving ever more rapidly. This series has looked around the world to see what is best practice, and to sort the snake oil and greenwashing from the real deal.
Over two years in pre-production and filming we have mapped a careful route through the vested interests and culture war noise that increasingly drowns out common sense. This series will show you, not tell you, both the true enormity of the problem and the achievability of the solutions.
The three-part series Rising Tides: Ireland’s future in a warmer world starts on Wednesday 27th March at 9.35 pm - catch up via RTÉ Player.
