animations

China is the king of coal. It is the world's biggest producer and consumer - but this reliance on coal is costing the country dear.

Because coal kills.

From the miners who dig it, to the people who breathe in its fumes, to the skies that swallow immense clouds of carbon dioxide, heating the earth and causing climate change and rising seal levels, coal takes more than it gives.

In this, the second instalment of the 'Our Ocean Wonderland' animations, Stephen Appelby considers the culinary seafood options likely to be open to us once we've emptied the seas of edible fish.

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.

Oxfam have produced this rather splendid video, Face The Music, to illustrate how the people least able to cope with this warming world of ours (and will suffer more as a result) are also the ones who've contributed the least in terms of emissions. Worth watching for the music alone, which will hopefully reach the ears of those currently engaged in the Poznan talks.

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.

For me one of the coolest things about our new-look site is that we're carrying a lot more streaming video courtesy of the good folks at YouTube. But did you know that we now have our own YouTube Greenpeace UK Video Channel?

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.

Blimey, there's a lot of talent out there... In our competition to win Glastonbury tickets, we asked you to create images and videos about climate change, anything from how it makes you feel to what you're doing about it. Video entries had to be less than two minutes long but that was pretty much the only criterion we had.