National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World [DVD]

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.

I saw this documentary a few years ago but the concepts are still quite vivid. Each degree Celsius of global heating will have powerful effects on the biosphere and society. It is somewhat of an understatement to say that global heating "could" change the world; more technically, the question is how a loss of most of the polar ice caps would change agriculture, coastal mega-cities, and human societies.Since some politicians in the U.S. are still wringing their hands over the localized flooding in New Orleans and New York, and have only taken baby steps or half-measures to deal with a higher sea level, the prognosis for larger political response is in doubt. In contrast, some proven solutions have been described by Harvard Prof. David Keith in his recent book about climate: a combination of nuclear energy to replace coal power stations on a one for one basis, and jets releasing high atmosphere sulfur dioxide (SO2) - an artificial and perennial Mount Pinatubo of sorts.

We used this documentary as the introduction to a weekend of programs about climate change, presented in our community planetarium, hoping to educate our audience and bring the facts forward, rather than the political and economic considerations that have become entangled with the science. This NG documentary served this purpose brilliantly. If there was anything I could change, or recommend for future documentaries, it would be to devote a greater portion of the program to what governments, engergy producers, and ordinary people can do to pull back from the edge, or even to reverse global warming. Some of this is mentioned at the end, but more would be better. Overall, however, this is an excellent, balanced, effective presentation of a complex and very urgent problem. Very well done!

This documentary was much better than a companion in the same series by National Geographic. It explored a quickly approaching future, a task that sometimes can be daunting when working with climate change. While I'm sure they left many things out of the documentary, because you can't possibly cover every nuance of climate change in an hour and a half, the key points were made about the environmental expectations overall.In addition, the documentary made the point to make sure the audience knew that the degree in the title is Celsius, but continually converted it to Fahrenheit for continual ease of understanding of myself along with millions of other Americans without the knowledge of the conversion rate from Celsius to Fahrenheit.I would certainly recommend this documentary to all of those who are wondering how climate change will affect them. Also, to those non-believers, this will wake them up!

I just opened this and there is no DVD inside! The cover was wrapped in a sealed clear plastic so I don't understand how there could be no disk inside! I have contacted the seller and will post an update later. This is very disappointing for National Geographic!

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.