See a preview clip, a behind-the-scenes photo essay (with Laurie David and RFK, no less), a reporter's notebook, and even a page of action tips with links to NRDC and the Sierra Club.  

Weird.

I realize the point they were trying to make, but standing near the terminus of a glacier during the summer, pointing to the streams of meltwater as an example of how badly the glaciers are melting is a little bit disingenuous. In the summer time, temperate glaciers will ALWAYS have some impressive streams, creeks and rivers flowing from them. They're glaciers. It's what they do.

Glaciers, especially valley glaciers, have two primary zones: The accumulation zone, where snowfall exceeds snowmelt and the glacier is actually built. Lower downhill is the melt- or ablation zone, where the ice melts. Without a melt zone, the glacier would only build, and build, and build--eventually the glacier would cover the entire Earth. Thank goodness glaciers melt, eh?

A glacier may advance or it may retreat. It may even be static, but unless something is really going wrong, they always melt at the bottom, even during an ice-age. Actually, the only difference during an ice-age is that it doesn't melt as fast as it builds, BUT IT STILL MELTS.

At one point during the show, they were standing on the Mendenhall Glacier, only about a mile from the very bottom, pointing to surface melt (a mill creek) as an example of how the glacier was melting and retreating. I know that spot well, because i spent most of last May within a quarter of a mile of that spot, on the other side of the ice. Let me tell you, if there isn't a serious amount of melting and water flow on that spot during the summer, you better not plan on moving to Juneau, 'cause it won't be there long!

Yes, yes, most of the glaciers in Alaska and around the world areretreating. Yes, the average surface temps on the planet have been increasing over the last couple hundred years. But another example they gave is equally silly:

They had some great shots of the Hubbard Glacier, used to illustrate the type of flooding that often occurs with glaciers. They sometimes damn up creeks, rivers and other waterways, often their very own meltwater. Since ice floats on water, eventually all the lakes created will get deep enough to float their ice-dams and break free. This happens on the Hubbard and is causing much controversy up there as people debate whether or not we should do something about it.

But here's the one key piece of information they left out of their report: The Hubbard Glacier has created its dam because it's ADVANCING. Again, filling and draining lakes is what glaciers do! If they advance or retreat, they will always dam waterways, then release them. Actually, without that very type of action (on a much grander--nay, biblical scale) we wouldn't have had the Missoula Floods, which formed the Willamette Valley and one of the richest farming areas on the West Coast.

But that type of accurate information would have probably distracted from the sensational point they were trying to make.

Do you realize how many exploding heads there would be if the average FOX viewer got a whole show worth of accurate information?