Six+Degrees+Could+Change+the+World

Laura Balducci //Six Degrees Could Change the World//

The National Geographic film // Six Degrees Could Change the World // is a Ron Bowman film that first aired on TV in 2008. It is a movie about global warming that demonstrates the catastrophic changes a one degree rise in global temperature can do to our environment. It goes through the changes that would happen with one degree, two degrees, and so on until it reaches six degrees. The film is trying to “hit home” and get everyday people concerned of the climate change. Many different sustainability problems were shown to be causes of global warming. Among the issues covered are CO2 emissions, greenhouse gases, land exhaustion, energy consumption and glacial melting. What “hit home” for me was the future of so many ecosystems. Seeing the images of the rain forest river already drying up and then seeing that it could soon be a dessert is scary. All those animals and all those trees gone, leaving locals waterless and the rest of the world with one less co2 sink. What didn’t captivate me was all the talk about hurricanes, droughts, and other extreme weather without a direct explanation of the causes. I got annoyed when they showed a clip on how with the melting glaciers people of Greenland are no longer in need of sled dogs for transportation and so there are many abandoned dogs all over the city. But then the next clip shows the researchers farther north inland studying the glacier melting. These guys could use sled dogs to travel with all the snow but they were using snow mobiles! Talk about contradicting yourself. The only real solution they give the viewers is that we need to change how we function. I went on the National Geographic website looking for more information there. Under the environment then global warming links I clicked on solutions. I was again disappointed that no individual actions were mentioned. The summary of their solution is that CO2 emissions have to be reduced by 50% to keep the temperature from rising. In the movie, one solution proposed was florescent lighting instead of regular light bulbs and to unplug devices not in use. I can see how this relates to energy consumption but there are so many additional solutions out there that they didn’t even touch upon. They go a little into how CO2 is affecting the ozone and depleting our buffer from the sun, but don’t really tell us how to reduce CO2. I think that individual power should have been brought up. They should have shown what one person can do on his/her own to reduce his/her own carbon footprint and the effect is has on reducing CO2 emissions. They show how much of a carbon footprint a cheese burger has now show how much of an impact the average person has and how much those changes can reduce it. I looked for the average person’s carbon footprint and found a really cool website that helps you calculate your daily CO2 emissions. You enter the amount of hours you use many different appliances and an automobile and then tells you how much you produce. Then you can enter smaller numbers and see how much doing something like having the TV on less reduces your carbon emissions. ([])