- I almost died in the Arctic circle and this is that story.
Do you remember in Almost Famous,
when they feed William's story of Rolling Stone;
it says I'm on a plane with Stillwater
and we're all about to die?
Well this story is kind of like that.
It's like, I am doing a documentary
on climate change in Greenland and we are all about to die.
I did this show it's called,
An Idiot's Guide to Climate Change.
And in the show, I ended up going to New York
and Iceland and Greenland to interview scientists.
Cause I'm a climate change idiot,
and I want to learn more about the science.
And we spent the day taking a boat way up the coast
of Greenland from this town called Ilulissat.
We saw these melting glaciers
and it was incredibly beautiful and very powerful.
We interviewed some scientists.
We were exploring around down the coast and stuff like that
and we were gonna have lunch with
this tribal elder at this very small town.
So the boat let us off, tribal elder was there,
and he had prepared lunch for us.
So we were gonna talk to him about climate change
and living in Greenland and whatnot.
And there was this little town that was completely desolate
and empty 30 or 40 houses.
There are some sled dogs chained up out there,
but they just leave sled dogs chained up
and occasionally feed them some meat,
that's just how it goes.
And our main boat, guy tour guide,
was like okay, you guys have lunch with him,
we're gonna take off,
we'll be back in like an hour or two,
we'll pick you up and bring you back.
So they dropped us off.
We had lunch with the tribal elder.
We finished our lunch with the guy,
we're interviewing the guy,
we've got our cameras and the guy's like,
Oh! I gotta go, i gotta run into town,
I gotta do X, Y, and Z.
So everyone gets around by boat,
so he hops in his little boat with his wife
just like a little three seater and they go up the Harbor.
And then there we are in this tiny little town
in Greenland and we're like okay,
we don't have any phone signal.
We're on this peninsula jutting out into the North sea.
Well above the Arctic circle and where's our boat.
So we wait and there's no sign of a boat.
What we do see is whales.
And not just like your typical whale siting
like out in the distance,
you kind of see how a little hump and a little tail,
in the little harvest town,
Oh, there's two of them swimming in circles in this Harbor.
It's the most incredibly beautiful thing you've ever seen.
They're so gigantic but it was like almost like goldfish
in a fishbowl they were splashing around.
We take hikes around the town, we take some photographs,
I think someone brought a kite, we would fly a kite.
The sun was starting to go down
and it's starting to get cold.
And we're legitimately getting scared.
We're like, are we going to die in Greenland?
I did consider in my head,
Wow! I suppose that if we were hungry enough,
we could eat a sled dog puppy.
I know don't judge but desperate times,
call for desperate measures.
Fortunately we did not have to eat a sled dog,
a fully five hours later, the boat comes chucking up
the coast and they came and picked us up.
And they're like, sorry, we're a little late.
I had to take my son to soccer practice
or something like that.
Some just like ridiculous excuse.
And by the time we got back to Ilulissat, the sun was down.
But for a while there for a couple of very cold hours,
I thought I was gonna die in Greenland.
(orchestral music)