Amplifying Feedback Loop

A animated short film featuring contextualizing the magnifying "domino effect" of the causes and effects of the Climate Crisis. Presenting the human causality of a deteriorating biosphere, poetic visuals present the intensifying real-world outcomes and guide towards de-escalation through unified community-led solutions.

Nearly 70% of the U.S. population today wants to take action to help reverse Climate Change but has little understanding of the outlets in which to effect positive change. There is also the other segment of the populace that does not understand nor believe the Climate Crisis is present.

This animated project aims to connect to the public to both inform and mobilize viewers towards community-based change to counter the current positive Amplifying Feedback loop of Climate Change.

What are the major causes of the Climate Crisis?

NASA state’s the following:

“Human activities (primarily the burning of fossil fuels) have fundamentally increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, warming the planet. ”

Director’s Statement

Amplifying Feedback Loop was inspired by my time living in Shishmaref, Alaska and witnessing first hand just how rapidly the climate was changing. Speaking with local peoples who had subsisted on the lands since time immemorial, I was stunned by how the change in expected patterns of life was impacting their ability to harvest and survive from the land. Instead, they now often relied on more costly food stuffs flown in, which many struggled to afford due to their remote location. Through mounting concern and a desire to contribute and understand more, I participated in a workshop through the University of Alaska Fairbanks  and GLOBE/NASA Earth Signs. This taught citizen science, how to measure the world around me and discussed the very real effects of climate change on our planet—namely through the imbalance of a human-caused amplifying feedback loop.

Climate feedback loops are “processes that can either amplify or diminish the effects of climate forcings.” Feedback loops are processes that make the impacts of key climate factors stronger or weaker. This starts a cyclical chain reaction that repeats. There are two types of loops: positive and negative. Negative feedback is a process that causes a decrease, or actions to be used as an effort to stabilize the Earth’s Climate System. A Positive feedback loop accelerates the response to the climate factor (such as carbon-based emissions). This feedback loop increases initial warming and amplifies it with each subsequent return through the looped system.  We are currently living within a positive feedback loop that is contributing to climate change, with primarily the burning of fossil fuels as the cause.

This animated film, while it cannot hope to be the solution, is intended for the viewer to recognize that the main element to climate change is human action and inaction. Our collective action has caused a quickly expanding and multiplying heating in our planet through the use of fossil fuels. An overt lack of accountability of corporations, governmental bodies and capitalistic tendencies to seek profit over health, has punished the average individual but none more so than the vulnerable and underprivileged, such as BIPOC communities. But, in this we are also the solution—and our action to drive and put pressure on administrators, elected officials, and to take stands via using our voices down to local level can being to create negative-forcings, actions that could help our communities survive and live more harmoniously with the land by not only protecting the planet and its inhabitants, but creating better human-led infrastructural change, as evidenced through the U.N’s 17 Climate sustainability goals.

 The viewing of this work is meant to share hope but also act as a reminder that, for those who are ready to create change, it can only be done through collective community action.