There's little argument anymore about the Earth getting hotter. The real questions are: how much of this climatic change is natural, how much are we contributing to the problem and what are we willing to do, both individually and collectively, to slow the meltdown?

We look at geologic signs of "The Big Thaw" in the Northwest (i.e. melting glaciers, shrinking fisheries, oceanic changes, disintegrating forests, predictions about decline in snowfall).

But to do this right, we need dramatic pictures and stories to show the viewer this is real. Good examples would be the annual breakup of sea ice off the coast of Alaska (which happens weeks earlier than it once did) and the warming of Barrows, Alaska, the northern most city in the US where the temperature has risen about 5 degrees and sea level has risen 8 inches in the past 3 decades.

Many scientists from the University of Washington are studying these and other ecological challenges.

We'll search for more examples closer to home. Global warming isn't a belief system as it once was; it has become an observable scientific fact. We'll learn what we in the Northwest need to know about Global Warming.