If your own research persuades you that the Earth truly is warming, then watch a sadly beautiful and terrifying thing: time-lapse photography recording glaciers melting around the world.

This is a film presented at TED by photographer James Balog with the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras aimed at vast bodies of ice, all now receding at a fearsome pace.

Scale is a problem in such a whiteout landscape: despite the graphic benchmarks added to the film, the mind can’t quite comprehend how much ice we actually have in this world, and how much we’re losing. But the film does convey a sense of vast drainage, and the grief of massive loss.

At minute 7:10 Balog presents a really useful graph of the planet over 400,000 years, showing the temperature, CO2 and sea-level curves. You can pick us out at the far right end, we’re the huge spike.

Let me warn you that if your reading and reason don’t yet tell you that global warming is ON, then this footage won’t persuade you.

And if you read the viewer comments both at YouTube and at the TED site itself you’ll be bewildered by the debate still raging among non-scientists. Perhaps you’ll be dismayed at the failures of this communication age to disseminate reliable information. Maybe even you’ll despair from the argumentative ignorance of people.

But if you want to learn, read my previous post and click all the links and see for yourself what peer-reviewed science massively concludes.

And then come back and weep.