Animations

Those of us who've been trying to make sense of what sort of impact destructive overfishing is having on marine life know things are bad - when you have a global fleet with the capacity to catch every edible thing in our oceans four times over, patchy regulations at best, and a massive incentive for fishermen to catch the most valuable species quickly before someone else fishes them out - it's not surprising many fish stocks are in trouble.

Wake Up, Freak Out, Then Get a Grip is a short animated film about the feedback loops likely to lead to catastrophic climate change, by Leo Murray.

It turns out that the way we have been calculating the future impacts of climate change up to now has been missing a really important piece of the picture. It seems we are now dangerously close to the tipping point in the world's climate system; this is the point of no return, after which truly catastrophic changes become inevitable.

The script, with extensive peer-reviewed references and additional information and links, is available at wakeupfreakout.org.

As you've probably guessed by now, we here in the Greenpeace UK web team love our animations, particularly if they're funny. If they're funny and they have something to say that's relevant to our campaigns, we like them even more. If they're funny, relevant and have a surreal twist to them, then we start to get over-excited and have to go and lie down for a while. Which is kind of what happened when we saw the following during Live Earth. Made by our long-time collaborators at Airside, 'a beginners' guide to giving a damn' gently ridicules some of the more excessive aspects of the western lifestyle while pointing out the positive benefits of reining in unnecessary consumption.

If you like the animation we produced (with the glorious help of Will Flash For Cash), then you can easily send it to a friend - just click the envelope icon by the title of this blog entry.

You can also use it on your own blog or website. In fact, that's the idea - we want as many people as possible to find out what's happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo and take action to stop it.