The Asia Society's "China Green" project has just posted a riveting and sobering series of videos on how climate change is affecting the once-vast glacier fields of the Tibetan Plateau that are in turn the source of nearly all the major rivers of Asia: Yellow and Yangtze in China, Mekong and Salween in Southeast Asia, Brahmaputra and Ganges in India, Indus in Pakistan, and others. This is an introductory three-minute trailer:
See web-only content:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/01/tibetan-glaciers-impressive-videos/9281/
There is a lot more, and a lot that's more dramatic, at the project's main site, here. I recommend spending a minute with the interactive opening-page splash shot, which allows you to run your mouse over a photo of Mt. Everest and watch how its surrounding glaciers have changed from 1921 to 2008.
This past August, during the Beijing Olympics, Michael Zhao of the Asia Society posted a wonderful series of daily shots of air-quality conditions in Beijing in the months leading up to the Games. They showed, among other things, the minimal correlation between what was officially a "blue sky day" and how the sky really looked. (The photo-chronicle is ongoing.) Zhao has also put together the Glacier project and really is demonstrating the potential of online video to dramatize public issues everyone "knows about" but has a hard time visualizing. Making these issues vivid is a necessary though not sufficient step to getting something done about them.
UPDATE: Have swapped a version with English subtitles for the previous Chinese-subtitled trailer. Ever considerate!
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/01/tibetan-glaciers-impressive-videos/9281/
