videos

In the latest addition to our Cut Trident video wall, comedian and impressionist extraordinaire Alistair McGowan muses on alternative ways to spend the £97bn that the government is currently planning to blow on new nuclear weapons.

Where to begin?

There's been so much going here over the last 18 hours that I've only now found the time to write an update. Since the last post here, the Kit Kat video which was pulled from Youtube (following a complaint from Nestlé about copyright infringement) was resurrected on Vimeo and has been racking up views like there's no tomorrow - 78,500 as of this moment. Not the shrewdest move Nestlé could have made, and I liked how Canada's Globe & Mail referred to it as "a global game of whack-a-mole".

Didn't Obi-Wan Kenobi say something about being struck down and coming back more powerful than before?

It's worth stopping to think about the true price of the salmon you eat. And there's quite a lot to think about.

Salmon is one of the biggest international seafood commodities, and in the UK it's easily one of the most consumed and most conspicuous species in our supermarkets and restaurants. But the vast majority of the salmon you'll find on shelves or plates these days has been farmed rather than fished. Partly that’s because there's hardly any wild Atlantic salmon left, but it's also because salmon's popularity has grown and it has gone from being a delicacy to become more of an everyday food in the past few decades.

With Copenhagen and Christmas taking up most of our attention in the undignified scrabble at the end of the year, a few things have fallen through the gaps so I've only just seen the email from Jörg Iversen about the video he produced with Roman Rütten. They're both design students at Buckinghamshire New University and made this impressive short as part of their coursework. There's even a behind the scenes film!

This blog by Mike Gaworecki was originally posted on the Climate Rescue weblog earlier today.

All week long, the Fresh Air Center has been a really valuable place for me and Jamie to come work, especially now that we're not allowed into the conference center. Run by Tcktcktck.org, the FAC is a space for NGO and independent bloggers to work and coordinate messages.

With all the headlines about what the world will be like if we don't get a grip on climate change - how hot it will be by 2050, how high the sea levels will rise, that sort of thing - there's always an element of uncertainty. The top line figures you see in the press are usually only one of a range of figures calculated by climate modelling, producing a range of potential outcomes based on possible changes to our behaviour and the environment.

What's often neglected is a risk assessment: comparing the probability of a particular outcome against the effect it will have. Our perception of risk is very skewed - we'll panic about things like swine flu (which the chances of us dying from a very low) but we'll quite happily drive around in cars where the probability of dying in a road accident are comparatively higher.

The winning entry: My Paper Boat by Arun Bose

Remember '1 minute to save the world' - the international competition to make your own one minute film about the effects of climate change? The idea behind the project was to provide a platform to allow people to share their visions of how climate change impacts their lives - and how it will impact the future of life on this planet.

A couple of hours ago, we heard that the plenary session had been suspended. Tuvalu, the Pacific island nation so vulnerable to climate change, demanded a legally-binding agreement - not in six or 12 months, but at the end of the conference next week. It's a demand that should not, and can not, be ignored.

This goes to the heart of one of the most important questions hanging over Copenhagen and yet a group of industrialised countries - the US, Japan, Canada and the EU - stayed completely silent. Nothing. Not a whisper.

Sometimes, there is such a beautiful synchronisation of multiple ideas in a single word, I'm tempted to believe that it couldn't possibly have happened by chance. For instance, what pops into your head when you hear the word 'fossil'?

A. The preserved remains of long-dead organisms
B. A polluting fuel hewn from the ground
C. Someone who refuses to adapt and evolve even though everyone else has
D. All of the above

If you answered D, you're clearly on the same wavelength as the team handing out Fossil Of The Day awards here in Copenhagen. Handed out each evening, they go to the country which has done most to stall, frustrate or otherwise get in the way of a fair, ambitious and legally-binding agreement during the last 24 hours.