ICE CORE LABORATORY AND INTERVIEW WITH ROSS SHAFER
Welcome to the production blog’s first entry. Over the course of the next 18 months, we’ll be sharing our thoughts and experiences as we make the definitive film about Bill Nye The Science Guy and his quest to change the world through science literacy!
Thanks to our awesome Kickstarter community, the film is swinging into full time production. This past weekend, we went Denver to film Bill’s awesome talk about space exploration at the Museum of Nature & Science. After the space speech, we took The Science Guy to the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) where there is “incontrovertible proof of rapid climate change.”
The ice core “library” was soooo cold. How cold was it? They store their frozen “books”—precious ice cores—at -36 °C (about -33 °F). The ice cores are cross sections drilled from the heart of Earth’s most pristine information storage system: ancient, layered ice formed from snowfall in places like Antarctica and the Greenland ice sheet. Ice cores are archives of historical events, especially changes in weather and climate. Captured in the snowflakes is dust, atmospheric gases, pollen, volcanic ash, and anything else that happened to be around. Each yearly layer compressed and transformed the snowflakes into ice, preserving these treasures. Annual weather reports in layers! And so much more.
At the NICL, we met way cool scientist Dr. Jim White, professor of Geological Sciences and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. White says, “Ice cores are cool; we can measure how much CO2, how much methane, how much other gases were in the atmosphere at that time. So we can make a direct comparison of climate, which we can measure, or temperature, and greenhouse gases, and that is one of the most fundamental contributions that ice cores have made to the field of climatology, it allows us to scale: if I put this much CO2 in the atmosphere, what kind of climate am I going to have?”
“It’s a very important thing for really everybody in the world to appreciate, the astonishing accuracy of the data that come out of this technique,” Bill said, “and it’s interesting to note that the U.S. Congress has cut funding for Earth Science, and there are only two full-time employees now at this laboratory that has this priceless information about the history of the Earth. And so, it’s this thing where—if you cut funding, then climate change won’t be happening? If you don’t talk about it, then everything will be okay?”
After visiting NICL, we headed over to Ross Shafer’s house to talk about Bill’s early days in stand-up comedy. Ross was “Bill’s older brother in comedy” and is famous for giving Bill his moniker: The Science Guy. As legend has it, Geraldo Rivera cancelled as a guest on a show calledAlmost Live! that Ross created and hosted. They scrambled to fill nearly 10 minutes (that’s a LOT in TV land!). That’s when Ross turned to Bill to ask him if he could fill time doing his “science stuff”. A star was born. At the end of barn burner of an interview, he handed us a precious VHS tape of Bill’s very first appearance as The Science Guy. Look for this to make an appearance in the documentary!
We’re doing more production trips in the next few weeks, including a big shoot in Pasadena during The Planetary Society’s 35th Anniversary Celebration. Can’t wait to cut together the footage to share it with you all!
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