This simple video explaining the carbon cycle from the World Meteorological Organization – WMO.

A simple but effective analogy explaining the difference between weather (short term patterns) and climate (long term patterns). Clip was taken from the recent science TV series Cosmos.

In this talk at Google HQ, serial big picture author Jeremy Rifkin talks about how the internet is changing our society and our economy. More specifically, how the internet surrounding information communication has radically changed how our economy functions and how this will spread into a future “Internet of Things”, doing the same thing to the economy of physical goods. In other words, a fundamental driving force that will rebalance the foundations of capitalism, potentially making it unworkable and create a world that is hard to envisage today.

The term “marginal cost” refers to the cost of producing an additional unit of a product and capitalism is all about reducing those cost to maximise profits. Unfortunately when these costs are driven down to near zero, the product can them become free. Think of the internet. It doesn’t really matter if the website serves 100 people or a million, the (relatively) fixed costs of production remain the same and each additional person served costs virtually nothing. This is having a profound impact on people’s quality of live in two ways. 1) people are able to access that service for free or very little, in theory making their lives better. But it is also 2) causing many people who were traditionally employed in that industry to not have a job anymore. Near zero marginal costs combined with the ability to easily access the related service is wiping out middlemen and this phenomenon is set to continue as it spreads from industry to industry.

Here lies the fascination in this concept, just how will the world adapt to a new economic paradigm? Will it be a bumpy road or a smooth one? Will this make our quality of life richer or poorer? Will we need to foster the creation of government or co-op organisations to provide the more critical functions (such as journalism)? It is a very big idea and is one that is worth being aware of when trying to envisage the future.

Here is another one from Uli Henrik Streckenbach just because I love his work so much. Unfortunately it is in German, but the visuals should still give you an idea. Hopefully the video will be narrated into english…

Another fantastic video by German boy Uli Henrik Streckenbach. All about the carelessness in which our limited amount of topsoil is treated.

An amazingly animated video by Uli Henrik Streckenbach from Berlin about the extent of overfishing and how the EU parliament can do something about it.

As one of the few to have predicted the 2008 financial crisis, Australian economist Steve Keen has something real to say about the un-sustainability of our current financial system. “Debt that can’t be paid off, won’t be paid off” is essentially the focus of this interview and he talks about how the financial system has allowed levels of debt to reach astronomical levels and in doing so the industry has become parasitic in nature. He argues that a modern debt jubilee (cancelling of debts) is a much more preferable outcome than 20 or so years of slowly paying off the debt in the usual fashion, and the economic stagnation that will accompany it. It will take a bold idea such as this to avoid living through another economic depression.