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Oh, here we go with this again. Is there climate change? Is it statistically real, what about the polar bears? I came into work this morning to find a 1999 BBC article written by Dr. Philip Stott tacked to my cube wall. His position, in brief, is that the media goes mad over hyping these types of stories, and that there are many factors involved in climate change.

His article has a fatalistic position, in that he cites billions of factors which may affect climate change, but that since human activity is responsible for only some factors, why bother? He states many factors affect climate change, including “the flip of a butterfly’s wing, and volcanic eruptions.” Yes, that’s right. That’s all I saw in rush hour this morning. Butterflies inside of metal boxes, powered by miniature volcanic eruptions. This must be science!

He points back to 150 years’ data showing that the climate didn’t change that much (.3 to .6 degrees centigrade), so there must not be a problem with human activity. Stott’s position is that “climate change” is a strawman humands are unable to fight. He conflates the impact of our technological creations on the climate with natural processes, and then informs us that “playing God with one or two politically selected factors” won’t help us. Adaptation will help us, since that is what we’ve done as a species. He closes by telling us that warmer weather will be great.

Stott’s position seems indefensible to me. Because the system is large, our impact is small? And there is no trend that our impact is growing greater? No generally agreed upon idea that this is occurring? Hmm, Stott doesn’t make reference to any specific trends, studies or ideas. It’s much easier to attack a strawman than refute hard science.

Stott is a scientist, and knows an infinite amount more about the climate than me. Using that position as a bullypulpit to deny human impact on the environment is disingenuous at best.

As climate change is discussed more and more, the media will work to distort the issue to its most fantastic proportions. The problem doesn’t exist, it’s all hype—the problem does exist and it’s HUGE!

Here’s a few more British and Canadians takes on the subject. The interesting part about these articles is that they start off by denying climate change or decrying scientists as “alarmist,” cherry-pick a few datapoints describing why they feel a certain way, and then close by ignoring the evidence on the other side. Here’s one by Ruth Lea, director of the Centre for Policy Studies describing how the UN’s research is all hooey, and burning fossil fuels could actually cool the environment. See, when it’s us screwing the environment, that can’t happen. We just naturally make it better. a bank all about temperature changes that occurred without our polar bears are not dying

The bottom line is that climate change as a result of human activity is happening everyday, and we as individuals can do many things to lessen our impact. Let the media find commentators to distort the issue all they want, and people can cling to whichever data points they want. It reminds me of a lecture I attended in college by the late Stephen J. Gould, an eminent biologist. He lectured on scientific bias, and showed us slides of textbooks from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of the arguments about the scientific basis for racism ran to physiological differences between members of different races, things like forehead slope, for example. Gould showed how in the textbook example pictures the publishers used slight visual tricks to underscore the point. White skulls were shown level to an imaginary baseline, while black and Native American skulls were titled back a few degrees. In the same way, this argument is not about data, it’s about owning up to our responsibility as moral human beings.

What we know is that industrialization has led to a very different relationship between humanity and the rest of nature, and this relationship is destructive to us and to nature itself. We have 6 billion people now; in 50 years, 10 billion. Shouldn’t we invest some resources in figuring out how to lessen our impact on the environment?

In any event, here’s a link for you to help stop global warming today.

Recently, I’ve caught up with various people who’ve seen the post below about Al Gore and wondered. The problem is global, and that means it is, prima facie, beyond any single individual to change through direct action.

It’s what I tried to express in that post about the movie itself. At some point, jumping from Africa to Antarctica to Greenland to Tibet to Brazil and back, learning more information about each place and how they interrelate—it’s cognitive overload. You or I cannot individually walk about and clean up the world.

We can do many other things though, each of which has impact:

• Change our behavior. Here’s a carbon calculator, to understand where you use energy now. Wired magaine has one here as well. Even little things like recycling or eating less beef can help.


• Spend your money wisely. You are probably one of the richest people in the world. Investing a bit in insulation or weatherproofing can help the environment, and you. Eating locally grown or raised produce or animals means you pay a bit more to eat tastier food, there’s less environmental impact from shipping and storing meat and local farmers can keep farming. Everybody wins.


• Invest green. Green investments (or SRI, Socially Responsible Investments) reached $2.29 trillion (that’s with a ‘T’) in the US this year. Smart Money magazine had good things to say about it, as well. Namely, that you should do your homework on these funds, and all funds. Green funds have grown 260% since 1995, but the more that it grows and is considered a critical factor in a company’s role in society, the better. And that brings me to the last point…


• Spread the word. No one can do it alone, so each of us needs to make it a priority in our lives, the same way we did with things like cigarette smoking. People have told me this current administration will not do anything about it. That is not the point. They’re around for 3 more years. This problem is the challenge of our generation, and the generation after us. We have to transform our society, and our ways of thinking. No administration, Democrat or Republican, will make this a priority unless they see that it is a priority for their constituents. If Bush thought going green would help his party in the 2006 elections, he would be drinking chlorophyll right now.

Here’s a Sun Times blurb about Wednesday’s event with Gore. Looks like he’s not running. It didn’t feel like a campaign effort. Maybe I didn’t stress it enough when I said no secret service. He had nobody, really, with him. It was just him, doing this semi-professor, semi-white guy religious revival thing.

Of the five points former Vice President Al Gore made at the end of a question and answer session tonight, that final one sticks with me the most. After watching “An Inconvenient Truth”, I believe it. In slide after slide, fact after fact Gore lays out the case for our impact on the environment. “We’ve met the enemy, and he is us,” as Walt Kelly’s Pogo would say.

My friend, Saul Delage, had a spare ticket so I didn’t know quite what to expect. We were let in after the VIPs, so there were few seats left open. Saul was on the end of row 3, I was in the front row. The seats were comfy, but I did a lot of looking upwards.

The movie and the message is a powerful combination of moral, factual and economic information portrayed oftentimes in a stunning visual fashion. Friends of mine on the Right may dislike sitting through the mini-bio sessions where Gore explains where he’s coming from. Whatever, I didn’t like “Mission Accomplished” when it happened. Just ask them.

The rest of the movie feels a bit like National Geographic interspersed with charts and a few Simpsons-esque animated shorts. I will go and see it again, because even though he makes his case with only the most compelling of facts, it is a world wide problem. He also addressed its critics and the consequences of solving this problem. There is a decade left to address this issue before things get really bad. Bad. Catastrophic. Grim. Decade left.

The bottom line is we need to launch a campaign of national greatness, something to restore our honor and our place of leadership in the world. It has to be like Kennedy with the space program, and putting a man on the moon, and like Henry Ford and the creation of the automobile industry (though maybe not the part with Hitler and all), like Jobs and Woz with software and Martin Luther King with religious conviction. Everyone has to play a part, especially Americans, to undo the wrongs our people have committed upon this world.

We may have initially done these things through ignorance, as everyone, including the third world in places now is doing. But American ignorance on environmental issues is enforced through protectionist legislation and weak-kneed media coverage bought by corporations and the ultra-rich, who don’t necessarily like it when things change, including markets and economies. After all, Hurricane Katrina didn’t affect them much, did it?

In any event, I urge you to see the film, and to see it opening night. The more people who see it then, the more distribution it will get to the rest of the country. I am thinking we should call local high schools and colleges or something and have them watch this film. It is their world to inherit.

After the film, the neck-craning became totally worth it, as former Vice President Gore came before the audience as Al Gore, the man for a question and answer session. No secret service detail, nothing. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been patted down or something to get near him, seriously. I had several questions to ask him about his new investment fund with that Blood guy, to what Apple’s environmental responsibility is, since he sits on the board, but I couldn’t find a good way to phrase it. I’d read this Wired article and this flare-up the previous two nights, and suddenly here he was in front of me.

I was nervous, in my ratty jeans and sandals, a few feet from a man who has been a Representative, a Senator, a Vice President in the heart of political power in this country for decades. So, I snapped away a bunch of pictures with the camera I brought in. Nobody cared, but one annoyed guy when I was taking a picture of a person asking a question and forgot to turn off the flash. I’ll be posting them to flickr in a bit, since I figured schilling a bit for Mr. Gore’s movie would make up for being “that guy” with the camera.

I have never been in the presence of such an accomplished person, and I had a brief flash-back to my feelings in the year 2000. Gore made quite a few mistakes in his campaign in 2000, none of them or their scars were evident tonight.

I made a mistake, in 2000, too. When I heard the Republicans were acting up and scaring election officials, I pondered with a friend getting in a car and going down, too, to peacefully observe. I would’ve been peaceful about it, but what went down there was fraud, pure and simple, and it should not have been done. When I got out the vote for Kerry in 2004, it was to atone for that mistake and all that followed after it.

Gore would have led that program of greatness had he won in 2000, I have no doubt about it. Thos ideas had led me to vote for him in 2000, despite cringe-inducing moments like the Tipper-kiss or a few personal gaffes. I knew I had a sentence to say to him, but I couldn’t find my tongue to ask a question after I said it. Despite his accomplishments and/or despite those gaffes, he was very approachable, warm and real while speaking, and transparently good at presenting and being in public.

As Gore walked past the front row, he shook all of our hands. I told him, “You will always be my President.” He thanked me. That was my original title for this post, but “It’s a decade left” is most fitting. Despite what I said about politics, this movie is about far more than that. It’s about our survival as a species. See the movie, learn about the issue, take action. Gore asked each of us to take five friends. I’ll take ten; did I mention I have a daughter?

Update: The photos from this event are up on flickr.com now.

Hiya. I’ll be presenting on Rails, Ajax, and Universal Design at RailsConf 1.0, and I would like to get input from attendees as to what topics and concerns most interest them.

Initially, I thought to give a fairly broad overview on accessibility and usability, giving folks pointers on

• accessibility: legal frameworks, nature of disabilities and assistive technologies


• usability: how heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthroughs and other expert inspection methods can be used guerilla style with RoR


• features and trade-offs of RoR + Ajax: how to evaluate and decide when to use Ajax

Then, you’d get a resources handout with links and reference material to learn more. The goal of the presentation would be to give developers an introduction to usability and accessibility concerns as well as some tools to evaluate and improve your own web pages. In particular, we’d examine a few examples of Ajax as used on script.aculo.us and a few examples of RoR forms to understand how they’d perform for disabled users or people using assistive technologies.

That was the intial idea. The more I drill into it, the more I see there’s probably 3 hours of material there, or 3 days. Not 25 minutes’ worth, which is what I am aiming for, so we can have plenty of Q&A and some group exercises.

So, the second idea was to focus less on the legal framework for accessibility, and more on the coding of it, by creating a sample RoR application and showing where in the views you could put which code snippets, etc. I’d highlight Mark Pilgrim’s work on diveintoaccessibility.org, Jim Thatcher’s evaluation techniques, and areas within the RoR framework that support accessibility (like label tags in the scaffold view _form pages, etc.).

Attendees would walk away with some code examples, but maybe not much in the way of background.

After hearing that many of the folks at the Canada On Rails conference were relative newbies to RoR, I wondered which would be more useful—an overview of RoR and universal design, or a very discrete, yet context-less view into code that provides for accessibility. Right now, it’s a super-high level run through of all these items, and a few examples of both code and screen reader captures.

One of the most disappointing things at a conference is going to a particular session and then feeling like you missed out on a more informative one in the same time slot. To help you avoid that feeling, please give me your accessibility/usability and RoR concerns/questions below, and I’ll do my best to address them. Thanks!