In 100 years or so, when Google’s autonomous robo-historians write the book on their fleshy predecessors, they will no doubt try to explain why we blew it on climate change. Why, despite decades of ever-more-definitive evidence, did the human species not take even the most basic of measures to avoid a catastrophe?

They will find plenty of blame to pass around. Our political systems, they will observe, just weren’t up to the diplomatic challenges of mustering a multinational effort — we couldn’t agree on whose fault it was, who should pay to fix it, even whether we should bother trying. Our brains proved ill-equipped to process the gravity of a long-range threat until it was too late. And our news media, the storytellers to whom this message was entrusted, were too easily distracted by more lurid dramas.

We didn’t see it coming, even though, on every other level, we knew it was.

This, as nature photographer James Balog tells us in the documentary Chasing Ice, is essentially a failure of imagination. Unless you have a glacier in your backyard, the earliest effects of a warming planet have so far appeared to most of us only intermittently, a signal lost in the noise of the daily weather.

Balog’s response to this perceptual disconnect is called the Extreme Ice Survey: He sets up dozens of stationary cameras aimed at glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and elsewhere. The cameras shoot photos every 30 minutes during daylight hours, some 8,000 pictures a year. It’s the same photo-a-day technique that so many amateur documentarians have used to create those viral videos of receding hairlines, but on a geological scale.

The resulting time-lapse movie can condense months and years into a few mesmerizing moments. Now we can watch the canary in the coal mine as it expires.

“Melt” doesn’t really capture the awesome violence of what we’re seeing. Balog’s cameras look on as the flank of an Icelandic glacier “deflates,” crumpling into black-puddled nothingness like a giant decomposing animal. A crawling river of ice in Alaska turns into a raging torrent, speeding up before our eyes. Greenland’s Ilulissat ice sheet rolls over the landscape, an endless white blanket sloughing off into the ocean. It is, as the photographer says in the film, a “magical, miraculous, horrible, and scary thing.”

Chasing Ice, which was directed by Jeff Orlowski, saves most of these sequences for the film’s climactic third-act reveal, when we finally see the results of three years of labor by Balog and his team of young assistants. The first two acts are dedicated to the team’s admirable and occasionally moderately nail-biting efforts, as they scramble over various harsh landscapes installing their cameras, battling bad weather and technical foul-ups.

Balog, a veteran environmental photographer well-known for his work in National Geographic, is now pushing 60 and has a bum knee that’s starting to get in the way of the physical demands of his work. But, perhaps because his photos reveal something enormous and terrifying that’s happening at a planetary scale, it’s hard to get too worked up about the small-scale drama of his knee surgery. He isn’t the sort of obsessive weirdo whose outsize personality can carry a two-hour documentary. Essentially, he’s just a guy doing his job, a photojournalist drawn to the ice by the charge of his profession: to bear witness.

It’s possible that the whole EIS project doesn’t really have much to add to the science on Arctic melting (doesn’t satellite imagery reveal essentially the same phenomenon?). The wider arena of climate change policy is glimpsed only in passing; there’s a montage of assorted Fox News mockery of global warming, footage of hurricanes and floods, grave promises of extreme weather to come. And Chasing Ice has little to say on solutions, so stow your geoengineering schemes elsewhere.

The film’s achievement is fundamentally aesthetic. A sequence at the end showing an enormous “calving event” might be the most astonishing thing you’ll see all year. A lower-Manhattan-sized glacier spontaneously self-destructs into a boiling sea, rumbling and roaring like an angry god as it dies. It’s a triumph of disaster-movie spectacle, all the more haunting for being real.

It’s hard not to marvel at such visuals and wonder if some of that melted ice isn’t soaking someone’s basement in Staten Island now, or whether it’s coming into your basement next year. Balog’s work makes such powerful agit-prop because, unlike the ill portents delivered by other climate Cassandras, it delivers ground truth, not doomy speculation pegged to a deadline that still at least sounds far off.

As chilling as it is to read, say, the newest report from the World Bank on how unlivable we will likely render the planet by the end of the century, there’s still that slender thread of reassurance to cling to. Yeah, we’re cutting it close, but we’ve still got 88 years to get our shit together. As Chasing Ice shows, however, the clock might be ticking faster than it appears.

For a glimpse of what Chasing Ice has to offer, check out the trailer below. The film opened at film festivals earlier this month, and rolls out in theaters in major U.S. cities on Thanksgiving Day. (Find a full schedule here.)

In the summer of 1997, fish in the Chesapeake Bay started turning up dazed, dying, and covered with bleeding lesions. The culprit was a toxic microbe called Pfiesteria piscicida, which was flourishing in the warm, polluted waterways. The one-celled organism, discovered less than a decade earlier, had already killed millions of fish in North Carolina. Now it had spread north — and it was infecting humans, too. More than a dozen watermen exposed to the microbe-laden water fell ill with sores, intestinal woes, and neurocognitive impairments such as confusion and memory loss.

By September, with a national media panic in full gallop, three Maryland rivers were closed to all commercial and recreational use. Seafood sales plummeted, as buyers swore off Maryland crabs and other bay delicacies. An investigative commission blamed the outbreak on high levels of phosphorus, a byproduct of the region’s vast chicken industry.

Take that kernel of reality, add steroids, CGI, and the herky-jerk verisimilitude of the found-footage horror genre, and you have The Bay, director Barry Levinson’s spookily plausible exercise in old-school cautionary eco-freakout. The film hits theaters this Friday, Nov. 2. Here’s the trailer:

For viewers familiar with the 70-year-old director’s work — whether his autobiographical “Baltimore Trilogy” of Diner, Tin Men, and Avalon, or commercial entertainments like Rain Man and Good Morning, Vietnam — The Bay is a striking departure, a low-budget gross-out in the vein of recent horror hits like the Paranormal Activity franchise (whose creators, Jason Blum, Steven Schneider, and Oren Peli, serve as co-producers here).

The premise: A young TV newscaster witnesses a mysterious environmental catastrophe over the Fourth of July weekend in a small town on the Chesapeake Bay, an incident that is only exposed three years later via a WikiLeaks-esque data dump of footage. Instead of toxic microbes, the monsters of The Bay are parasitic isopods — evil-looking sea lice that look like overgrown pillbugs. Juiced by the chemical-laden chicken manure that’s been dumped into the waterway, the isopods start breeding like crazy and infesting human hosts instead of fish. Bloodbath ensues.

That last bit isn’t super likely to happen, but Levinson insists genially that The Bay is “85 percent real,” in part because the project began as a straight documentary about the environmental challenges facing the Chesapeake Bay. He switched tack after watching Frontline’s 2009 report “Poisoned Waters” and concluding that he wasn’t likely to top it.

The PBS doc cataloged the real-life horrors that bedevil the bay three decades after the passage of the Clean Water Act: frequent fish kills, lethal algae blooms, oxygen-depleted dead zones, and the near-elimination of life-sustaining underwater grasses and wild oysters, which once acted as a natural filtration system.

“Forty percent of the largest estuary in the nation is dead,” Levinson says. “But where’s the outrage? I’m a storyteller, not an activist. So I thought, what if I took all that information and put it into a fictional device?”

The Bay is a clever composite of the real and imaginary. Levinson liberates his movie from the physical limitations of the found-footage conceit — call it the Cloverfield conundrum — by assembling a documentary-like collage from multiple perspectives: TV news footage, cell phone videos, closed-circuit television, cop car dash cams, and Skype conversations between exposition-spouting CDC scientists and a plucky ER doc who tries in vain to figure out what’s eating his patients.

The film, Levinson says, layers 21 different kinds of cameras and forms of media: “I looked on it kind of like an archeological dig.”

The plot borrows beats from zombie movies, Cold War atomic scare pictures, and ’70s-style eco-fables, but the strongest echo might be the first hour or so of Jaws: There’s even a doofus mayor who labors to keep a lid on things even after the tourists start dying.

And, yes, The Bay is scary, inasmuch as a movie about tainted seafood could be. It’s no mean feat wringing chills from the placid, bathtub-warm Chesapeake, which must be the least-frightening famous body of water this side of Walden Pond. Levinson compensates by focusing on icky, small-scale body horror, as victims use their cell phones to document the nasties gnawing through their innards. In one memorable scene, a fist-sized isopod leaps from the mouth of a striped bass and tries to nosh on a fisherman.

A leap of the imagination? Perhaps, but for those who recall the pfiesteria scare, it’s haunting to see infected striped bass again. During the summer of 1997, scenes of striped bass (known locally as rockfish) covered with bloody sores were go-to b-roll on the evening news, shorthand for an ecosystem gone horribly awry.

And the notion that new bugs could jump from animals to humans is all too real. It’s called zoonosis, and it’s the kind of stuff that keeps infectious disease experts (and readers of David Quammen’s new book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic) awake at night with fears of superviruses breeding in distant rain forests. The evil genius of The Bay is that it projects this abstract unease into what is essentially America’s backyard swimming pool, turning a beloved watery playground into a literal reservoir of disease.

Typically, Levinson’s films get a hero’s welcome in his home state, but this one might be an exception. The Bay was actually shot in coastal South Carolina, which makes a convincing stand-in for the Chesapeake, and no doubt allowed the filmmaker to avoid some awkward conversations with Maryland’s tourism authorities.

He still hasn’t heard anything from the Maryland Film Office or other state boosters. “I have a real love for Maryland on a lot of different levels,” Levinson says. “But what are you supposed to do? Stay quiet? Do nothing? The thing is, all of these problems [with the bay] are correctable. We’ve just been kicking them down the road.”

See related slideshow.

Last Friday was a tough day for fans of sun-sourced electrical power. On Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers were beating up on two executives from Solyndra, the defunct California solar panel manufacturer whose bankruptcy is proving to be such a headache for the Obama administration. Meanwhile, a mile or so away, the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, a biennial eco-jamboree for renewable energy technology, opened to the public under murky skies and clammy sheets of rain.

Where’s your sun now?

This is the fifth Solar Decathlon, a 10-day event featuring 20 teams of college students who have designed and built solar-powered homes. It’s an educational and promotional endeavor, designed both to stoke public interest in solar technology (which, despite recent growth, still accounts for less than 1 percent of U.S electricity production) and prepare American kids for their future jobs laboring in the great clean-energy factories. Previous decathlons were held on the National Mall, where crowds could marvel at the “solar village” of gee-whiz houses temporarily installed in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol.

That bit of awkward political symbolism was missing this year: The competition was shunted off to West Potomac Park, over a mile from the nearest Metro station and safely out of sight of Republican congresspeople. Amid the crappy weather on opening day, only few intrepid visitors wandered around in the gloom as student-competitors mopped their houses (note to future designers: gutters!) and the arrays above struggled to gather stray photons.

But the sun returned, as it so often does, and on Monday came busloads of D.C. schoolchildren and sundry solar aficionados, many grizzled enough to date to the Carter-era solar boom.

For green-home geeks, the Solar D. is a dream date: a carbon-neutral compound of cool little eco-cabanas bristling with induction cooktops, bioremediation systems, and all manner of nifty energy-saving technology. Considering the logistical challenges — the homes are built off-site and trucked to D.C. in pieces to be reassembled in a public park — these are remarkably finished-looking structures. Most are variations on the Ikea-minimalist school of industrial chic, with more stainless steel and horizontal wood slats than a warehouse full of Dwell back issues. But a few oddballs stand out: CalTech’s CHIP is wrapped in tufted vinyl “outsulation” and looks like an upholstered shuttlecraft; the engagingly Canadian TRTL, from the University of Calgary, boasts a tipi-inspired domed roof.

The competition itself is part technology shakedown, part reality show. In addition to testing the homes’ architectural and engineering fundamentals, organizers put teams through their paces by making them host dinner parties and movie nights for rival competitors. When I strolled the grounds on Monday, the University of Maryland’s handsome WaterShed, which is surrounded by a constructed wetland of grey-water-filtering foliage, sat atop the leaderboard. Maryland is a previous decathlon contender, narrowly missing first place in 2007, and the team was gunning for a win this time after hitting high scores in the hot water and home entertainment contests.

But the People’s Choice Award votes were going to the joint across the street, Appalachian State’s Solar Homestead, a rambling collection of boxes with a great big shady porch, an outdoor kitchen, and a tiny in-law apartment. Maybe it was their eager outreach (team members were handing out mirrorized folding hats) or their underdog spirit (Appalachian State University doesn’t even have an architecture department), but these guys were charmers, and their house was so cool I wanted to load it onto a flatbed and drop it in my back yard.

Such real-world usability is a new emphasis this year: For the first time, the decathlon added an affordability contest. Teams that manage to build houses for $250,000 or less get maximum points, with deductions for more expensive homes. That tweak seems to have weeded out some of the more impractical creations. In 2009, a German team triumphed by entering a two-story cube swathed entirely in solar panels. The DOE says that this year’s entrants are about a third cheaper than previous homes, and several hew to the “passive house” model — hyper-insulated structures with minimal energy needs for heating and cooling, so their PV panels are smaller (and cheaper).

One of these budget eco-bungalows will actually serve as a home after the competition ends. The Empowerhouse, from Parsons the New School for Design and Stevens Institute of Technology, was developed in partnership with Habitat for Humanity and will be shipped to a low-income neighborhood in D.C., where a family will move in. It shared first prize in the affordability race, with a price tag of only $230,000.

On my way out, I joined some orange-clad young Tennesseans offering tours of the University of Tennessee’s Living Light, a cool little house with an iPad-controlled kitchen and self-draining bathroom. But it was the home’s solar panels that caught my eye: They were from Solyndra. UT’s house is the only one at the decathlon to adopt the innovative American-made design, which uses a network of cylindrical tubes that collect light from every angle, not just when the sun in directly overhead. (Perhaps not unrelated fact: Living Light’s $470,000 budget left it dead last in the affordability derby.)

UT junior Patrick Tormeno alluded only briefly to the Solyndra situation as he showed off the array overhead. “It’s kind of a bummer,” he said. “But it’s a really great product.”