
Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip
1 year ago
A short animated film about the feedback loops likely to lead to catastrophic climate change, by Leo Murray.
The script, with extensive peer-reviewed references and additional information and links, is available at wakeupfreakout.org/
There is now a multilingual DVD available thanks to
cinerebelde.org
The script, with extensive peer-reviewed references and additional information and links, is available at wakeupfreakout.org/
There is now a multilingual DVD available thanks to
cinerebelde.org
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Graham
Thanks anyway. Cool animation. Good luck with the film.
Peace and Love
Graham
Love and respect
Lotte
there's a button that says Download AVI version
that's how it's done!
thanks for the kind words
Leo
Peter Vogelsanger (see comment above) is very kindly in the process of recording French and German dubs of the film, which will be available on Vimeo as soon as they're ready - just check back here in a couple of weeks :-)
You need to get this used as a public Advertisement for the people, On Public Television all over the World!!
Great Work!!!!! I love it. Work well done. Nothing speaks better than the truth!!!
Eventually I'll put up a .mov version on my site, but I can send a link to one now if you like?
cheers
Leo
"Wake-up" is breathtaking. I'm an English teacher in Brazil and I've been showing your movie to my pupils, as an introduction to our classes on recycling. They love it. I wonder if you would allow us to adapt it for theater, a non-profit school play. Thank you so much indeed. Alexandre.
please by all means adapt my film - I'd be delighted. My girlfriend is a teacher :-)
Keep up the good work,
Leo
Thank you so much for your reply and permission, I'm really honoured by that. I wish I could send you a copy of the script, most of it is written in English, assuming you don't speak any Portuguese. I also have a picture of the performance, in which you can see the scenery all decorated with waste material such as cans and blankets, and a copy in real of your tipping point board. It was a very special evening, I wish you'd been there to watch it. Our students simply loved working on those ideas and images. If I ever can be of any help to you, please don't hesitate getting in touch. My e-mail is xanpadilha@hotmail.com
My warmest regards, Alexandre
Well done Leo for a beautifully crafted piece that treads the fine line between hope and despair....
nice one
L
I'm not an activist, I'm just a follower of the case, simply we have to do something; in news and Discovery Channel we hear these, in newspapers we read and so on, so as we see who has access to computer, TV or newspaper already know what the problem is, but the thing is that, not much people do any, not a single country really supports the issue, because of the companies. I wonder how to act, really, even though I'm not an actiivist like Gandhi or Luther.
What do we have to do, really and how?
is possible a spanish version?
Spanish version is on its way - watch this space wakeupfreakout.org
Enjoy!
Great Animation. Why did you choose to invert all the colors/nrgative?
Thanks for your reply. Will you please let me know if a Portuguese version is made?
Regards.
Is this film on YouTube? If it is I am ashamed to be a member because I do not thing that they have featured it, and if it is not I think you should post it there because it could make a world of difference if more people knew about this impending tipping point.
Thank you for the great film,
-Henry
Between this, that, the Turkish version and the copy on DailyMotion, the film's been watched more than 76,800 times at the time of writing! It's a good start...
I believe that this video should be shown to audiences of large numbers as it is way easier to follow than your average climate change video.
All i can say is.....Job greatly done and i hope it makes a difference no matter how small.
Was it carbon neutral to produce?
I've just spent an hour turning off everything electrical in my house. Depressing stuff. Hope we're not too late.
[rant]As usual, the solution proposed (consume less, abolish technology, live on the trees, sing African songs) is exactly the opposite of what we need. What we need is a series of major technological leaps - fusion power, large-scale CO2 sequestration, space exploration. We won't get there if we consume less - we must consume more! Historically, humans were only making big steps in technology when put into a corner (by natural disasters or a major war).
As for the world without manufacturing and airplanes and with electric power only when the wind blows in the right direction - I don't think such world is worth saving or living in.[/rant]
Sorry, I'm probably a bit simple-minded - that's how I interpreted the power station's cooling towers sinking into the ground, the chimney falling and a Boeing 747 turning into a windmill :-)
As for survival - the best bet for this is to press on the govts and politicians to stop using the green terminology as an excuse for rasing more taxes and dishing out sweet-heart deals to friends and relatives and for them to do what the governments are supposed to do - invest in science and technology and take on the large high-risk projects which private capital is unable to undertake.
i would love it if it could be shown in my school!!!!!
The film is perfect for people in the know and perhaps for the curious and open-minded who aren't. But what about the uninformed and those who positively don't want to know? What is there to engage them? With these people, a more rigorous script that did not assume the viewer was one sandwich short of a picnic, might cut more ice.
One of the central questions is about how accurately predictive the model, based on the best science we have, actually is. Sceptics will not be moved by indefinite statements about there being a potential tipping point at some undefined future time. Such people often spring from a world of market trading or politics, or some humdrum job where their future is beyond their control, where anything beyond next week is regarded quite naturally as being incalculable.
So, to me, it seems there is a need for a very clear statement about the nature of prediction which would effectively attack the basis of the facile, but exceedingly widespread, argument that if you cannot say more or less exactly when something is going to happen, then you are only whistling in the wind. Let me give you an example. A soldier going ashore on D-Day could not claim to know what was going to happen in any definitive sense. Indeed, he could build an argument, based on all the very obvious unknowns, to show that any particular prediction would be highly unlikely. Yet a person with more data would see though all this well-marshalled scepticism and be able to make a prediction, as indeed the leaders of the Allied forces did. So there needs to be a statement about the value of quoting all the science and an unashamed show of doing just that [yes, I agree, without turning the story into a catalogue of “facts”] - or at least several consistent references in the script to a place where one can read about the background supporting data, or see another video for grownups, so to speak. On top of this it is vital to positively say that there are lots of people like the soldier on D-day, who do not really know what is going on and who indulge in very logical doubting, on the basis of his insufficient data, as a defence mechanism and that this is a very common psychological reality that needs to be addressed: in short, a discussion of the dangers of holding very logical but UNINFORMED opinions which rest on obfuscation.
These are the people who need to be motivated to consume less etc. and dancing around their dimness and addiction to the inertia of their comfortable life-style by producing a dumbed-down script is to play into their problem: a world where every one is "entitled to their opinion" and all TV news has to be "balanced" etc. no matter how cuckoo the "entitled opinion" or the "balancing" story might be – in short a world where clear thinking is positively disallowed.
One needs to sharpen one's pen before it is too late and one has to sharpen one's bayonet.
PS - New Zealand
Of course there appear to be many people who are very willing to simply dismiss all scientific evidence, on the basis that everyone with any expertise in the subject inherently has a vested interest in promoting a particular conclusion, which is a tricky position to tackle with logical arguments.
For people who insist on clinging to the uncertainties that remain in the scientific predictions, perhaps Greg Craven's approach at youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg is more what is required?
Perhaps your objection to the 'dumbing down' of this video (perhaps not quite the right term) could be answered by expanding it into a whole miniseries, or a film an hour or so long, exploring the issues in more detail? I'm not sure if that would suit the style at all, or not. Equally pressing, who will pay for the expanded version? Of course, the longer it is, the less likely it is to reach anyone who is already convinced the basic message is false and/or incomprehensible...
Thank you so much for your reply and permission, I'm really honoured by that. I wish I could send you a copy of the script, most of it is written in English, assuming you don't speak any Portuguese. I also have a picture of the performance, in which you can see the scenery all decorated with waste material such as cans and blankets, and a copy in real of your tipping point board. It was a very special evening, I wish you'd been there to watch it. Our students simply loved working on those ideas and images. If I ever can be of any help to you, please don't hesitate getting in touch. My e-mail is xanpadilha@hotmail.com
My warmest regards, Alexandre
Cutting down meat consumption:
• Saves over 70% of the Amazonian rainforest from clearance for animal grazing
• A solution for world hunger: (there isn't a single hungry pig or bull in the current world but we have one billion starving fellow humans)
o Frees up 3,433 million hectares of land annually
o Frees up 760 million tons of grain every year
(half the world’s grain supply)
• Consumes 2/3 less fossil fuels than those used for meat production.
• Reduces pollution from untreated animal waste
• Maintains cleaner air
• Saves 4.5 tons of emissions per US household per year
• Stops 80% of global warming
PLUS MORE…
• Lowers blood pressure
• Lowers cholesterol levels
• Reduces Type 2 diabetes
• Prevents stroke conditions
• Reverses atherosclerosis
• Reduces heart disease risk by 50%
• Reduces heart surgery risk by 80%
• Prevents many forms of cancer
• Stronger immune system
• Increases life expectancy by up to 15 years
• Higher IQ
• Conserves up to 70% clean water
It goes direct to the topic, it explains this very complex problem in a very simple way and everybody can understand.
Global democracy will hopefully solve problems like: environmental pollution, social injustice, poverty, war, financial crisis, etc.
The aim is to set up a political system that will be able to control the market and will compensate market failure.
Feel free to join the discussion on: globaldemo.org
Also we need cool people like you making videos that f***** rock!
___________
ps: We are still working on the page. It is online already, but not yet officially launched.
cinerebelde.org - Multilingual DVD also available.
Keep up the good work. I shall be waiting for the Spanish version (I understand that it is on its way but could not find it in the site you mentioned.
Carmen Virasoro, Argentina
Hope you like it!
Regarding Alec Douglas' skeptical comment yesterday, he might want to revisit Al Gore's movie: ice cores from antartica prove that atmospheric carbon has doubled in the past 50 years over anything that's existed for at least 300,000 years! Mr. Douglas might also refer to the reports of the nobel-prize-winning International Panel on Climate Change, and to Dr. Andrew Weaver's book - 100 out of 100 renowned CLIMATOLOGISTS passionately agree on the facts. Anybody who has doubts about climate change and its potential impact should simply investigate more.
Those who are still skeptical must remember the consequences of our two options: if we do nothing and global warming does happen, we have a catastrophy. But if we act and we didn't really need to, we wasted some time but we're still here.
I coordinate a programme for secondary schools in Kenya (also runs in UK and India) and would like to run the video as the introduction for our national event for schools here in Nairobi, in mid May.
Greig Whitehead
International Climate Challenge Programme. Kenya
I only just saw this comment - did you end up using the film at your event? I'd be very pleased if you did.
Very best,
Leo
Andrew: if we do nothing our economy will spring back. Sometimes doing nothing is wiser than doing something stupid. Global warming is still fiction. No seas are rising, they are falling. Tuvalu is a sinking atoll. The poles are increasing ice. Just google "glaciers advancing" to get heaps of evidence that they are not all retreating. The real catastrophe is disappearing intellectual integrity and mass gullibility. Of course it was warmer 1000 years ago. Just google "Mediaeval Warming Period".
Alec: you made some valid points about the effects of evaporation but speaking from the position of someone who has studied a bit of Climate Change science, it just isn't enough to use decontextualised postulations about daily weather (which is linked to but not the same as climate), personal attacks on Al Gore and his film, assertions and a shift of the burden of proof to pre-framed google searches (if we type "glaciers receding" do you think we'd get the same results?).
Leo has obviously put a lot of research into this video shown by the list of peer reviewed papers he used in reference for the script. Your cloud comment though, for example, was right- low clouds do have a net cooling effect but we are increasing "water vapour" in the atmosphere as well as high tropospheric clouds (which have net warming effect) so the climate feedback model stands.
As far as I'm aware 0.7C is pretty much universally accepted as the current rate of warming over last century and the IPCC says 0.74 (ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_FAQs.pdf) Individual temperature readings need not have been to a tenth of a degree. Regional mean calculations from numerous guages are highly unlikely to produce whole no.s. If you are desperate to come up with skeptical arguments against this increase Alec, you'd do better to criticise surface temperature data gathering and previous inconsistencies of that data with satellite readings since the 1990s.
Sorry to disagree Andrew (because I'm an environmentalist myself), but lets be honest CLIMATOLOGISTS DO NOT "passionately agree on the facts"-> this has to be one of the hottest areas of science right now, so naturally there is a healthy level of debate. To defeat this corporate funded climate change denial industry we have to be willing to be transparent and honest about the progress of climate science.
What the majority of scientists DO all seem to acknoweledge in relation to Leo's film are 3 simple points:
1)The current rapid RATE of global warming can be correlated to HUMAN INDUCED record levels of green house gases in the atmosphere.
2)The climate is a SYSTEM; rapid perturbation of one component (temp) will influence all other parts.
3)There are more positive green house gas-temperature feedbacks in the climate system than negative.
great initiative!
Well I love sleeping .
Just don't feel like freaking out
and get a grip ? ... that is indeed lovely .
This message is not for me . You, big boys need to listen this whatever . I live in a poor country somewhere in Asia. If I were to add up all my shit that I put out to this world for a year. It would be less than all these commentees day worth of crap.
Now this sure does not mean I stop dreaming a million dollar house with garage full of gas loving super machines ,Oh yes for the sake of less pollution , I do promise to hang one of my 911 turbo on a wall and not put her on streets. Call it my soft side and care ,for the beautiful green in America .
Thanks once again.
Project: Southern Tier
Cross Country Bicycle Ride / Environmental Documentary Series that collects environmental perspective from the regions it visits.
vimeo.com/1709110
About the only thing it doesn't cover is the RATE at which we are adding GHGs to the atmosphere, which is some 10,000 times faster than the natural cyclic rates deduced from ice-core and similar measurements. The rate of change overwhelms the natural balance mechanisms. For example, It is not possible for carbonate rock to be weathered in 100 years to an extent that would normally take 1,000,000 years, yet that is what would be required for this important carbon sink to reduce carbon effectively.
I will be sharing this with everybody I can.
If you are aged 10-18 years and want to debate climate change ave a look at Footprint Friends...