“It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness” was a favorite Chinese proverb of the late “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schultz. Photographer James Balog must have taken that to heart as he noticed changes to the wild world he documents, and heard all the cursing during the discussion of global climate change.

So Balog took a candle — cameras, 25 of them — set up time-lapse gear and mounted them in front of a number of the world’s glaciers for over three years. And in starkly beautiful, simple and damning images, he showed the world climate change — glaciers disappearing so fast he had to re-aim his cameras just to capture their decline.

“Chasing Ice” is a beautiful documentary that follows Balog, who often works for the National Geographic, in his dogged quest to silence the blizzard of denial which the film shows is coming from one or two places — Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. In montages of TV footage, idealogues such as Sean Hannity and Limbaugh use “Al Gore” as a curse word to dismiss the overwhelming evidence and the unified scientific research that burning fossil fuels has warmed the planet and is melting the world’s ice, from pole to pole. Balog answers them with simple, blunt truth.

“Seeing is believing.”

“Chasing Ice” follows the photographer as he obtains grants and begins to work out how he’s going to photograph this process in Iceland, Greenland, Montana and Alaska. Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski rides along as Balog visits scientists who have the ice core samples than give testimony to the rising levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Film cameras sit in as Balog meets

other scientists who link the longer droughts, harsher fire and tropical storm seasons to the warming planet.

And for folks who only believe what business people tell them, there’s he head of the world’s largest reinsurance company, the insurer to the world’s insurers, to reassure them that yes, this is happening, and yes, it’s already costing us a fortune.

Balog, a photographer who trained in the field of geomorphology, realized “a powerful piece of history is unfolding,” and focused on “the most visible evidence of climate change” — glaciers, which are both retreating and “deflating,” thinning out as they rapidly melt. That’s where he and a small crew scrambled to set their cameras

Orlowski, who followed with his film camera, takes awe-inspiring photos of pristine frozen wilderness, and “the miracle and the horror” of glaciers collapsing.

And Balog, carrying on despite the danger of working on ice that is hollowing out beneath his feet, despite a knee injury that should have ended his globe-trekking across Iceland the once-frozen north, comes off as a man with a mission — sharing his footage with TV newscasts, giving talks to climate change conferences and other interested groups, lighting that single candle rather than cursing, as he sometimes does, a nation that continues to debate “evolution and whether man actually walked on the moon.”

His response to the fringe dwellers, the skeptics and dogmatic deniers could not be more succinct.

“We don’t have time.”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with moments of mild peril and a couple of instances of profanity

Cast:  James Balog, Svavar Jonatansson,  Louie Psihoyos, Adam LeWinter

Credits: Directed by Jefff Orlowski, written by Mark Monroe. An Exposure/National Geographic release. 

Running time: 1:16