Watch Leonardo DiCaprio’s Climate Change Doc Online for Free

EcoWatch - Lorraine Chow

By now, you have probably heard that Leonardo DiCaprio has a new documentary about climate change coming out. So how can you watch it?

The Fisher Stevens-directed documentary will make its television debut on National Geographic's channel in 171 countries and 45 languages on Sunday, Oct. 30.
Additionally, in an unprecedented move, National Geographic also announced today that Before the Flood will premiere commercial free across digital and streaming platforms around the world as part of the network's commitment to covering climate change.
That means not only can you catch the critically acclaimed film on cable, from Oct. 30 through Nov. 6, you can also watch it on just about any website or device where you regularly stream online videos. The exhaustive list includes: Natgeotv.com, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, Sony PlayStation, GooglePlay, VOD/Video On Demand (through MVPD set-top boxes), MVPD Sites and Apps, Nat Geo TV Apps (iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, Roku, Android phones, Xbox One and 360, Samsung Connected TVs) and more.
Here's DiCaprio himself making the announcement:
Proud to announce that #BeforetheFlood will be available to stream for free on October 30th! @FisherStevens and I set out to create a film that would educate people on the urgent issues of #climatechange and inspire them to be part of a solution. We applaud @NatGeoChannel’s commitment to bringing this film to as many people as possible.

The idea behind this historic premiere is to educate as many people around the world about climate change and to also bring the topic to the forefront before the Nov. 8. election where a number of candidates seeking public office—including a certain orange-hued Republican—denies that climate change is even real.
"There is no greater threat to the future of our society than climate change, and it must be a top issue for voters this election season," said DiCaprio, an Oscar-winning actor-winning actor and prominent environmental activist. "Fisher and I set out to make a film to educate people around the planet on the urgent issues of climate change and to inspire them to be part of the solution. I applaud National Geographic for their commitment to bringing this film to as many people as possible at such a critical time."
"The level of support National Geographic is providing to create awareness about climate change is exactly what Leo and I were looking for when we made this film," Stevens added. "Climate change is real, and we are feeling its effects more and more every day; it's time we stop arguing its existence, and do everything we can to bring this issue to the forefront of people's minds so that real action is taken to combat climate change."
The documentary has already made its theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles on Oct. 21. It has also been shown at international film festivals, the United Nations and at the White House South By South Lawn event before President Obama.
The film is also screening at more 250 colleges and universities nationwide and being made available to churches and religious institutions via Interfaith Power and Light, National Geographic said. The network has partnered with Rock the Vote and theSkimm to allow people who attend screenings of Before The Flood to register to vote and to become informed on the issues.
"In our minds, there is no more important story to tell, no more important issue facing our planet than that of climate change," said Courteney Monroe, the CEO of National Geographic Global Networks. "At National Geographic, we believe in the power of storytelling to change the world, and this unprecedented release across digital and streaming platforms is not only a first for our network but also in our industry, underscoring how exceptional we think this film is and how passionate we are about it. We are committed to ensuring as many people as possible see this film as we head into U.S. elections."
Before The Flood, as well as the award-winning documentary series Years of Living Dangerously, will kick off the National Geographic Channel's "Earth Week"—a week of programming starting Oct. 30 dedicated to bringing awareness to issues surrounding climate change.
Before The Flood depicts how Earth is changing due to rising temperatures and how individuals and society-at-large can help preserve our precious environment. DiCaprio travels around the world to interview a number of world leaders and experts about climate change, including President Obama, former President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State John Kerry, U.N. Secretary-General Ki-Moon, Pope Francis, Elon Musk as well as top NASA researchers, forest conservationists, scientists, community leaders and other environmental activists.
The film was produced by DiCaprio, Stevens, Brett Ratner and James Packer and executive produced by Martin Scorsese. Watch the trailer here:

Watch the Before the Flood trailer – video.

Links

• Before the Flood: Leonardo DiCaprio hopes his new film will inspire climate action
• Leonardo DiCaprio says China can be climate change 'hero'
• Ice and the Sky review – a climate change pioneer's passion for Antarctica
• 13 ways the arts and sport can inspire action on climate change
• Exclusive Clip: DiCaprio's Climate Doc Exposes Destruction of Rainforest for Palm Oil as Huge Driver of Global Carbon Emissions
• Appeals Court: Animals Can Be Listed as Threatened Based on Climate Change Risk 
• Humanity Has Entered New Climate Reality Era

A 1912 News Article Ominously Forecasted The Catastrophic Effects Of Fossil Fuels On Climate Change

Quartz - Akshat Rathi

Hard to ignore. (DWF Hardie/ICI/Wikimedia)

A short news clip from a New Zealand paper published in 1912 has gone viral as an example of an early news story to make the connection between burning fossil fuels and climate change.

Published Aug. 14, 1912. (The Rodney and Otamatea Times and Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette)

It  wasn’t, however, the first article to suggest that our love for coal was wreaking destruction on our environment that would lead to climate change. The theory—now widely accepted as scientific reality—was mentioned in the news media as early as 1883, and was discussed in scientific circles much earlier than that.

The French physicist Joseph Fourier had made the observation in 1824 that the composition of the atmosphere is likely to affect the climate. But Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 study titled, “On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground” was the first to quantify how carbon dioxide (or anhydrous carbonic acid, by another name) affects global temperature. Though the study does not explicitly say that the burning of fossil fuels would cause global warming, there were scientists before him who had made such a forecast.

The earliest such mention that Quartz could find was in the journal Nature in December of 1882. The author HA Phillips writes:

According to Prof Tyndall’s research, hydrogen, marsh gas, and ethylene have the property to a very high degree of absorbing and radiating heat, and so much that a very small proportion, of say one thousandth part, had very great effect. From this we may conclude that the increasing pollution of the atmosphere will have a marked influence on the climate of the world.

Phillips was relying on the work of John Tyndall, who in the 1860s had shown how various gases in the atmosphere absorb heat from the sun in the form of infrared radiation. Now we know that Phillips was wrong about a few scientific details: He ignored carbon dioxide from burning coal and focused more on the by-products of mining. Still, he was drawing the right conclusion about what our demand for fossil fuels might do to the climate.

Newspapers around the world took those words published in a prestigious scientific journal quite seriously. In January 1883, the New York Times published a lengthy article based on Phillips’ letter to Nature, which said:

The writer who has partially discussed the subject in the columns of Nature has fixed upon 1900 as the date when the earth’s atmosphere will become entirely irrespirable. This is probably a misprint, for unless the consumption of cigarettes increases unlooked-for rapidly the atmosphere ought to remain respirable until 1910, or even 1912. At the latter date all mankind will have perished, and nothing except the hardier plants will be living on the surface of the earth.

Let’s hope the author of that New York Times article was extant in 1912 to breathe a sigh of relief that such a doomsday hadn’t come to pass. That 1883 article did end up achieving something important though: It made the conversation about the effect of pollution a lot more common.

Jeff Nichols, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, believes the source of the New Zealand news story making the rounds on the internet is an article published in Popular Mechanics in March 1912. Beyond quoting the exact same numbers, its author Francis Molena goes on to say:

A theory has been elaborated, primarily by the great Swedish scientist Arrhenius, that the earth has had a warm climate when the amount of carbon dioxide in the air was abundant, and a cold climate when it was scarce.

Nichols found many examples between 1883 and 1912, where newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Kansas City Star, and York Daily, wrote articles about what rising carbon dioxide levels would do the climate.

All through the 19th century, the increasing use of coal was hard to miss. Towns and cities across the world were becoming noticeably polluted because of factories, and later steam trains. In this light, it’s not surprising that a tiny New Zealand newspaper carried an article in 1912 about how the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels might change Earth’s climate.

Links

• Papers Past
• CO2 levels mark 'new era' in the world's changing climate
• On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground

US Court Says Animals Can Be Listed As Threatened If Climate Change Poses A Risk

Gizmodo - George Dvorsky

In a groundbreaking precedent that will likely be felt for decades to come, a federal appeals court in the US has ruled that a species can be listed as “threatened” based on climate change projections. (Image: NOAA)

Earlier today, a three-judge panel of the US 9th Circuit Court unanimously rejected an appeal launched by several oil company groups, the state of Alaska and indigenous Alaskans to prevent a Pacific bearded seal subspecies from acquiring environmental protections.
When explaining their decision, the judges said that loss of Arctic sea ice would “almost certainly” threaten the survival of the seals by the end of the century.
 Importantly, the court made its decision by looking at observational and predictive data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which included six climate models.
It’s a big victory for the defendants, the National Marine Fisheries Services and the Center for Biological Diversity, not to mention the seals themselves.
The decision reinstates Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections for the bearded seals, but it also sets an important precedent moving forward.

Protections reinstated thanks to climate models. (Image: NOAA)

“The service need not wait until a species’ habitat is destroyed to determine that habitat loss may facilitate extinction,” wrote Judge Richard A. Paez in the decision (pdf). The fisheries service “adopted the position of the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists”, while rejecting the plaintiffs’ argument against the use of climate projections.
In order for a species to get ESA protections, the court said the evidence doesn’t have to be completely “ironclad and absolute”. It simply needs the NOAA Fisheries agency to “consider the best and most reliable scientific and commercial data and to identify the limits of that data when making a listing determination”.
The Pacific bearded seals depend on winter sea-ice habitat off the coasts of Alaska and Russia. These seals gather on the ice floes over the shallow waters, where mothers give birth to pups and nurse. These flows also provide the seals with close access to food resources (such as animals that live on the ocean floor), and a place from which pups can safely learn to dive, swim and forage away from predators.
Climate scientists worry that summer sea ice across the Arctic could disappear in as little as 20 years, while winter ice could be reduced by at least 40 per cent by 2050. At the same time, the bearded seals face threats from proposed offshore and oil and gas development — areas in which an oil spill would be practically impossible to clean up.
It’s a tough blow for the energy industry, which will have to honour the ESA and rethink its plans in the region. Importantly, indigenous Alaskans will still be allowed to harvest the seas for subsistence.
Looking ahead, this precedent could see other climate change-threatened animals getting the same protections, including polar bears, seabirds, fish and amphibians. And as a reminder that climate change poses a real risk to animals, the Bramble Cay melomys was listed as extinct earlier this year — the first mammal to be wiped out by climate change.

Links

• Species may be listed as threatened based on climate change projections, court says
• Appeals Court Reinstates Endangered Species Act Protections for Bearded Seals
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• 7 Species Hit Hard by Climate Change—Including One That's Already Extinct