This video is a global warming cartoon.
From British daily The Morning Star:
Cartoons against global warming
(Monday 29 October 2007)
JOHN GREEN previews the 2008 Ken Sprague cartoon competition.
FOR all you budding cartoonists out there, now is the chance to demonstrate your talents and do your bit for the environment.
The Ken Sprague Fund has just launched its second International Political Cartoon Competition on the subject of the environment. Under the title Earthworks 2008, cartoonists from around the world are invited to submit works on the subject of our threatened environment, particularly global warming.
The competition is sponsored by the Political Cartoon Gallery, New Internationalist and the Morning Star. And the Star’s cartoonist Martin Rowson chairs the jury, which will include other leading cartoonists and personalities from progressive organisations.
The threat to our world by environmental pollution and global warming is undoubtedly the greatest challenge that human beings have had to face. Yet our governments and political leaders appear impotent, lacking in minimal imagination and without a clue about how humanity can escape this Damocles sword.
Cartoonists might not be able to change the world by themselves, but their ideas, perceptive wit and illustrative skills can alert and motivate us better than many politicians. That is why it’s hoped that this new competition will become a useful weapon in the cause of fighting indifference and ostrich-like behaviour.
Cartoons and images can carry a strong message and make a point more succinctly and effectively than long-winded speeches or meandering articles.
The Ken Sprague Fund was set up to commemorate the work and ideas of the cartoonist and graphic artist Ken Sprague, who died in 2004. His work was characterised by a deep humanity and a commitment to justice, human rights and the environment.
In 2006, the first in an ongoing series of biennial cartoon competitions was launched. This competition is one of the very few international competitions for political cartoonists and the only one of its kind in Britain.
It was launched with the theme of social justice and peace and, by the final deadline, over 500 cartoons had been submitted. They came from almost 40 countries and from over 200 cartoonists. Cartoonists from such diverse countries as China, the US, Azerbaijan and Morocco were fired up by the challenge.
What is most striking about all the cartoons is how unnecessary language or translations are. Despite cultural and language barriers, all of them use a visual imagery that is understood internationally, across all cultural, religious or political barriers and boundaries.
Three prizes are up for grabs, but the monetary prizes are perhaps more symbolic than generous. The main aim is to stimulate and encourage cartoon artists from every country to address the burning issues of our time.
It is hoped that Earthworks 2008 will stimulate cartoonists to use their pens and wit to help combat environmental devastation and give new impetus to our desperate fight to stop global warming. After all, humour is often a valuable key in the struggle of winning hearts and minds.
Further information about the competition and the fund can be found on the website: www.kenspraguefund.org. Submissions to comp2008@kenspraguefund.org
See also here.
Are men to blame for global warming? See here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Explorer says North Pole ice trips endangered
Tue Oct 30, 2007 1:31pm EDT
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) – Trips over ice to the North Pole may be impossible in summer in just a decade or two because of global warming, one of the world’s leading polar adventurers said on Wednesday.
Norwegian Boerge Ousland, who has skied alone across the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic, said he would recommend one piece of equipment for anyone planning a trek to the North Pole in a few years’ time: a kayak.
“It’s a bit strange to think that the trips I have been doing may not be possible in 10-20 years,” he told reporters after attending a climate seminar in the Norwegian parliament. “But it may well happen.”
That would end just over a century of trips across the ice — American Robert Peary was the first to claim to reach the North Pole in 1909.
“Over time I have seen the changes myself,” said Ousland, aged 45, who has been to the North Pole several times.
On a first trip in 1990 the ice was about three meters thick around the North Pole. “Now it is 30 percent thinner,” he said.
There were also far more and wider gaps in the ice with open water, requiring risky swims in a special survival suit while tugging provisions and other gear along in a floating sledge.
The Arctic ice shrank in September 2007 to the smallest on record, eclipsing a 2005 low, according to U.S. satellite data.
It is now expanding again as winter approaches but many climate scientists say that the ice could vanish in summer well before the end of the century because of a build-up of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels.
HELICOPTER TO ICE
And the summer ice now starts several hundred kilometers (miles) further north than a century ago. Few expeditions can now begin from Russia’s Cape Arkticheskiy, as Ousland did in 1990, because a helicopter ride is needed to reach firm ice.
The receding ice is also revealing new islands.
Ousland and a colleague this year, retracing a 1896 trip by Norwegian polar hero Fridtjof Nansen, found that an island called Northbrook Island in the Russian Arctic was in fact two — melting ice had exposed a channel between them.
They took a photograph of walruses swimming between the two islands. Polar bears in the region looked thin, forced to eat nesting seabirds rather than seals, which live on the ice.
Ousland said that even a trip he made with South African Mike Horn staring in January 2006 — the first winter trek to the North Pole — revealed gaps in the ice.
“It was a shock to find open ice,” he said. “We swam 5-6 times on that expedition because the ice was so thin.”
© Reuters 2007
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