Busting the climate deniers via Youtube

This post is my contribution to Blog Action Day

Youtube is really really really big. In the US searches on the site are around a quarter of all Google searches.

In this environment battles range as users debate issues via their own video creations whether via talking head to webcam or produced-up little films. Amongst the hot topics is climate change.

Peter Sinclair aka greenman3610 runs a graphic design and animation studio in Midland, MI and produces the very effectively done 'climate crock of the week' series. An activist and writer for 30 years in the areas of energy and environment, he is best placed to tear to shreds the sort of unscientific, unresearched nonsense on climate change which appears in the media frequently enough to feed a weekly series.

Battle, on Youtube, often involves DMCA, (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) claims against a video which usually results in it being removed from YouTube.

The DMCA, (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), was originally intended to protect copyright owners from internet abuse, but has systematically been used improperly, notoriously by authoritarian religious groups and cults (Scientologists) and people such as creationists, in order to restrain criticism and free speech on the internet.

This is what happened to Sinclair in July when he criticized and parodied the work of well known climate denier Anthony Watts, and his "SurfaceStations.org" project.

Copyright law allows for critical review, parody, and transformational use of material.

Sinclair filed a 'counternotice' with Youtube, affirming, "under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled."

Two weeks later Youtube told him, "this content has been restored and your account will not be penalized."

What the silencing attempt resulted in was greater traffic and visibility for Sinclair's videos. This has also been the case with other great science defenders using Youtube, such as Thunderf00t, an English-expat who takes apart creationist.

In his latest piece Sinclair takes on how one of the world's most respected and experienced climate modelers, Mojib Latif's observations in September on natural climate variability were misinterpreted by climate change deniers.

Ironically, Latif's message was precisely that natural variations in the long term warming might be misinterpreted, by the media, out of ignorance or malice!



Earlier he took on Channel Four's unfortunately resonant film 'The Great Global Warming Swindle'.

The park that's in the sky

New York's fabulous new High Line park has finally opened, well a section. It's up in the sky along an abandoned elevated railway which runs 22 blocks to the Hudson River.

Here's the blog post I did about it last year:

• Monty misses the High Line

Here's a load of pictures of the new park.

*wallpaper's take on the High Line:



A four-minute fly-through animation of the design for Sections 1 and 2

Another way to look at lawnmowing

The great Michael Pollan interviewed by Bill Maher about the new documentary Food Inc.



Here he explains a plant's-eye view in a fantastic TED talk.



"I'm a dupe of the lawns, whose goal in life is to out compete the trees"

"Looking at the world from another species point of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance"

Incidentally, WTF can't Oxbridge do something like TED online?

Your emissions are killing me

These two maps show, firstly, the world in terms of carbon emissions and, secondly, the world in terms of mortality as a result of climate change.

They come from a study published in the Lancet (pdf / more).

Humbled somewhat?

In an editorial (registration required) the Lancet identifies:

• an astonishing lack of knowledge about how we should respond to the negative health effects of climate change
• we have an immense task before us to address the inadequacies of health systems to protect people in countries most at risk
• technologies have to be developed out of greater research investments into climate change science, better understanding about how to deliver those technologies in the field, and a more complete appreciation of the social and cultural dimensions into which those technologies might be implanted
• there is a political challenge in creating the conditions for low-carbon living

As a leading foci for discussion on health, the Lancet is calling for nothing more than a bringing together of the disciplines of disease, food, water and sanitation, shelter and settlements, extreme events, and population and migration in this challenge.

And it says:

Too many doctors have been silent for too long about the importance of climate change to the future of health and health services.

HT: Ezra Klein

Climate change in the abstract

This chart is adopted from a survey, conducted by George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication. It reveals that Americans are concerned about global warming in the abstract.

The further we get out from the individual, the more impactful people think climate change will tend to be.

These beliefs are not necessarily irrational - climate change probably will have more impact on the developing world than the developed one, and it almost certainly will have more impact on our children than it does on ourselves.

Conclusion? Climate change advocates need to find ways to personalise the terms of the debate.

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.


HT: FiveThirtyEight

Rainforests and royalty: when 'bottom up' isn't all that

"One of the Internet's strengths is that it can help diverse communities to come together to insure that everybody's views and actions can really be made to count."
Prince of Wales

As you'd expect the Prince of Wales' online rainforest campaign attracted huge media attention. Like undoubtedly thousands of others this prompted me to visit the website rainforestsos.org. Unfortunately that's where the problems start.

Yes, you can sign something, add your email address to the pile, and pass on a message to friends (which does have the facility to load your address book) but apart from that it doesn't appear to be enabled to let you do much else. You can sign up to be "able to record your own frog message with The Prince's Rainforests Project frog" ("and we will be in touch as soon as this section of the site is live!") and the sidebar says you can "grab our widget and place on your social network page or blog so you can count how many people have signed up because of you."



What the latter loads is a really over complicated widget with what appears to be either a slow host or a 'straining-to-cope' host (I suspect the former). As I've noted before, you really don't want a slow host for widgets as they will crash/slow down any web pages who chose to use them.

As it was, the click on 'grab this' did nothing, so I don't know if they were offering what should be the standard armory of virality: various sizes, various levels of complication (and code size) as well as various banners.

Other absent standard stuff are links to youtube, myspace (which was trailed in the PR) etc. There are design issues and navigation issues too.

Some press claimed that Charles' crew had hired Obama's crew to come up with this campaign. Surely not? This is way below par for them if that's truly the case.

And not just because of the website mistakes. The main thrust of the online US election campaigns (not just Obama's, Hillary's too) went beyond 'raising awareness' to connecting people so they could do stuff together, like get people onto electoral roles or to knock on doors.

I suppose it's difficult for the Prince to encourage people to lobby the powers that be but the impression left is 'support me in doing good work on your behalf' - and that's hardly "bottom up".

The breathing earth

Watch in real time the earth's CO2 emissions, birth and death rates by country at this fantastic website.

This website was captured using screentoaster.

How to grow your own fresh air

Researcher Kamal Meattle shows how an arrangement of three common houseplants, used in specific spots in a home or office building, can result in measurably cleaner indoor air.

I have been saying for ages that unions should make all offices have plants in them. I'm amazed that people tolerate the shit air around much office machinery. Not just this but, as Meattle, explains there's a proven business case too.

"The unemployed builders of Europe should be insulating all the houses of Europe"

Climate change is real, as anyone who has been to the Arctic knows. But we live in a world which is a little distracted at the moment by, er, global economic meltdown.

In this situation, the coming disaster of climate change has disappeared as ordinary people worry about now (rather than, say, their children's future). Short-tern profit, which is a big part of the banking disaster, also applies to the way the oil corporations operate, and they are the ones fueling climate change denial.

So it's a little difficult, given the usual politics, which we're still in, to get any buy-in to the sort of real meltdown which we face.

Waiting for a trip to Antarctica, to view the pools of melted water accumulating on the glaciers, Baron Nicolas Stern could have been speaking to the four winds in saying that if we don't deal with climate change decisively, "what we're talking about then is extended world war."

Later, at dinner, the heavyweights heard from smaller or poorer nations about the trials they face as warming disrupts climate, turns some regions drier, threatens food production in poor African nations.

Jose Endundo, environment minister of Congo, said he recently visited huge Lake Victoria in nearby Uganda, at 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) a vital source for the Nile River, and learned the lake level had dropped 3 meters (10 feet) in the past six years _ a loss blamed in part on warmer temperatures and diminishing rains.

In the face of such threats, "the rich countries have to give us a helping hand," the African minister said.

It's not happening. And western electorates just aren't interested (except in drought-ridden Australia), therefore their politicians aren't either.

Stern, drawing on the accumulated evidence, says:

"People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move if you talk about 4-, 5-, 6-degree increases" _ 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And that would mean extended global conflict, "because there's no way the world can handle that kind of population move in the time period in which it would take place."

And this won't affect the UK? Our elderly future and the future of our kids?

So why aren't the various economic 'bailouts' focused on, as Stern puts it, getting "The unemployed builders of Europe insulating all the houses of Europe"?

Music: R'n'B does climate change

I love this.



Actually has decent lyrics. Lots to laugh at but lots to admire too.

"We're surrounded by fire ... please send help"

My heart sank today on reading of the death toll in Australia's bushfires. Hundreds of houses burnt to the ground and no end in sight.

I was never close to a bushfire in my time in Sydney but during one year fires raged in both the national parks to the north and south. In the north they spread into the ravines which divide the suburbs, coming within maybe ten kilometres of the city centre.

They were so big that in central Sydney the entire sky at night was red, everywhere you looked except east. And in the air was smoke, embers and bits of burnt vegetation.

Sydney is a huge city, maybe seven times the size of London. And across the whole area people could see and feel these bushfires. This gives you some idea of the scale.

It's the same in Melbourne now, many kilometers from the fires.

To give you some idea of just how terrifying it is to be in the middle of this listen to this call to a Melbourne radio station made by a woman trapped in a house with eight others surrounded by flames. Fortunately this has a happy ending as her young brother manages to drive a tractor through to save them.

There's also a lot of social media reports: Google organised map; Twitter; Flickr; Facebook group.

"One thing about Mother Nature. When she gives you a kick in the guts, she gives you a kick in the guts."

CFA bloke speaking to a community in Victoria

Bushfires in Australia are completely natural. Many plants require them to reproduce and it's amazing to see ravaged eucalyptus forest relatively quickly coming back to life.

But there is real reason to suspect that the combination of a severe lack of rain, incredible temperatures plus very strong winds which have worsened these fires are not entirely natural. Studies have shown an increased risk across south-east Australia due to climate change.

Australia Greens Senator, Bob Brown said:

Global warming is predicted to make this sort of event happen 25 per cent, 50 per cent more.

It's a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change.

Ninja McDonnell

John McDonnell: what a hero.

Hoon: what a dick.

Living at -60°c

In Tok, Alaska, you put cardboard or leather across your car grill: "Otherwise, when you are driving, the cold outside air is forced into the car, quickly cooling it down until you literally have no heat."

Also: "The outer walls on our house are 12 inches thick. My husband says this is not typical. Usually, walls are 6 inches thick, I believe. But the foot of wall between us and the cold is why we can stay so warm in the house."

Heading to the general store:



A lil' reality check for us chilled out Brits :]

Artifical leaves in 20 years

Yeah, but. We need MAJOR carbon reductions very quickly (if it's not already too late) and we hit peak oil in a few years (if we haven't already).

This guy's Obama's new energy secretary.

Think 'glass half full' ... think 'glass half full' ...

HT: Andy Sullivan

NY Times: Iraq war ends

A brilliant satire with a fake website and 1.2m fake copies handed out on the streets.

It's the product of The Yes Men, whose job is:

Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.

Famous past hoaxes include Dow Chemical apologising for the Bhopal, India chemical disaster.

“We still don’t know where the bottom is”

HT: Crooks & Liars

Mort Zuckerman talking about the Fannie and Freddie Mac bailout.



The bank deregulation fallout (which G.Brown may have had a hand in). Been there, done that?

Here's the legacy for the grandkiddies: disastrous climate change and massive debt. Could we be more selfish?

‘The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.’
John Kenneth Galbraith

How not to do video about recycling

Two local councils, Wyre and Flynde, are in the Mail after producing a DVD guide to recycling. The negative story says that it cost just over £2k but I suspect that's less than the total cost. And for that they got 1000 DVDs.

Who uses DVDs as promotional tools these days? DVD content's best served up online in nearly all circumstances. The council didn't put the video on YouTube - humour website Anorak's done that, so it's been 'virally enhanced' I suppose. Though not for the reasons they'd like.

At the time of writing Wyre's homepage link about the DVD is crashing and Flyde's link is to PR that says 'the video is available to view on the website', then links straight back to the homepage ... there's no obvious link to the 'video on the website' and I also notice that the PR asks residents to 'call the council' - rather than or as well as email them.

Doh!

A few points ...

• Why is every council doing this separately? Good on the two councils for sharing the cost but what - really - is the difference between vast numbers of councils on what goes in what bin?
• There's also extensive message duplication - and dilution - about this issue with countless other departments and agencies saying exactly the same stuff.
• This means the resources and talent hire to really get strong messages out, do the research and target just aren't there.
  

I know how hard it is to track down UK digital resources for reuse on green issues like recycling. There are some but I should be fed up hearing from some central agency pushing a selection of useful and preferably tailorable resources at me - I'm not.

There are a few councils trying things out - applause - and a few doing stuff like YouTube channels. Allendale has one video which made me laugh and actually has viral potential I think:



It doesn't have the views though yet to make much of a case for bothering. Neither do any of the others who have YouTube channels [Aberdeenshire, Allerdale. Birmingham, Bolton, Bristol, Cambridge, Charnwood, Darlington, East Devon, Essex, Hammersmith and Fulham, Hillingdon, Newham, Norfolk, Ryedale, South Norfolk, Swansea] - Newham being a noticeable exception, with Bristol having a couple of hits.

So how do you increase those view numbers? The key requirement is 'seeding' (and having a plan at the get-go for how to get stuff seen). This mean:

• tapping into social networks and local websites, forums and blogs - promote the thing in the place people already are, online
  
• give the embed code to the local/regional paper(s) and other media
• using email - internal and external
• posting to other video free spaces than YouTube using cheap tools like TubeMogul or Vidmetrix or HeySpread
• you need to make syndication easy - promote and encourage the embed code and encourage subscription to your channel
• create a short, preferably memorable, description which can be passed around
• tag the video correctly with good keywords
  
• you can pay numerous agencies to do all this for you - and maybe pay them on results.

Of course it helps if the content's great but agencies know you need to learn and get better, plus you need 'product' out there and some of it will hit home and boost everything else. Amateurish also has a different meaning in this space. That Allendale video is delightfully amateurish - and that helps, it's received as authentic.

There's also a lot of other tricks which professionals use - like making sure the exact middle of your video is right as that's what produces the YouTube thumbnail, designing it so it can be 'remixed', beefing up the comments and ratings yourself and using shock headlines - but those are best left to said professionals.

The shortlist above might sound complicated, it might sound hard, it might sound time-consuming - but why are you producing this stuff in the first place? You want it seen by more than a few councilors - who are impressed until the local paper or, worse, the Daily Mail comes a-knocking and a-cursing about 'wasting tax payers money'.

Postscript: I asked Richard Steel of Newham if he knew why they'd had hit videos. In comments he's said he's going to ask around. I just dug a bit deeper and I think I can see how. Most of the videos actually have numbers similar to other councils, but several have large (for UK eGov) numbers - one is 26k. But these are from a local entertainment event run by the council and are linked from numerous other sites including Facebook and are of BBC Asian Network stars (I assume). One is on a site in Vietnam.

Bristol have one minor hit about Getting Caught - Graffiti and the Law but it appears this got to 18k not virally. No Facebook/Bebo I could find. Here's the PR. Something must have happened to push one of these vids numbers way above the others. The only thing I can spot is a technorati post and video response.

Both, I think, show how with the smallest ammount of even inadvertent seeding, video view numbers can be pushed above the very low levels most council's are currently getting.

Postscript: And another: Barnet.

Scrapbook clips catch up

I've been repeatably hearing a bizarre (to my ears) ad running on the Olbermann netcast - Kraft 'natural, 2% milk' cheese with ... drumroll ... "no added growth hormone". Only in America?

I shouldn't mock. We have crap food here too. But something called Velveeta, which "doesn't need to be refrigerated after opening"???

Google has launched a Elections Video Search gadget which use speech recognition.

Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

+ Google kills the Google bomb :{

Hah (sorry, shouldn't laugh).

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail.

US 'Department of Homeland Security' is seriously suggesting that airline passengers wear 'security bracelets' which would deliver taser-like shocks if they 'fail to comply' - seriously.

Here's another shock horror story in 'the war against tourism':

And it wasn't enough for another woman to show TSA agents nipple rings that set off a metal detector. The agents forced her to take them out.

Mandi Hamlin said, "I had to get pliers and pull it apart."

In Chicago, people like Robert Perry are subjected to exhaustive security checks. He was patted down, his wheel chair was examined and his hands were swabbed, all in public view in a see-through room at the security checkpoint. Perry, 71, is not alone

"It's humiliation," Perry said.

Perry was also taken to a see-through room by a TSA agent when his artificial knee set off the metal detector.

"He yelled at me to get the belt off. 'I told you to get the belt off.' So I took the belt off. He ran his hands down over and pulled the pants down, they went down around my ankle," Perry said.

At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear in public view. He asked to see a supervisor. That made things worse.

Tracey Ullman has a great character, Chanel Monticello, taking da piss outta this shit.

Delightful story about how Karl Rove, aka 'Bush's brain', threatened a webbie:

If he does not "'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio".

No wonder they're losing online, who'd want to work for them?

Computing magazine had a good-news story about the NHS IT project - the biggest non-military IT project in the world - focusing on Homerton Hospital. All great, practical, working properly, stuff. Pity that a/ it's not easily found on the web and b/ Labour is making nothing of it.

eGov: New figures from NWEGG shows that:

A ‘self-serviced’ web transaction is 24 times less costly than a telephone transaction and 46 times less costly than a face - to - face transaction.

According to the Daily Mail (FCS):

Ministers had so far failed to put sex education on a statutory footing in the national curriculum.

AND

Attempts to search for advice on school computers were often frustrated by filters which block sites containing sexual words.

New York Times piece on the challenges of being a Tekkie in Kenya:

Consider Wilfred Mworia, a 22-year-old engineering student and freelance code writer in Nairobi, Kenya. In the four weeks leading up to Apple’s much-anticipated release of a new iPhone on July 11, Mr. Mworia created an application for the phone that shows where events in Nairobi are happening and allows people to add details about them.

Mr. Mworia’s desire to develop an application for the iPhone is not unusual: many designers around the world are writing programs for the device. But his location posed some daunting obstacles: the iPhone doesn’t work in Nairobi, and Mr. Mworia doesn’t even own one. He wrote his program on an iPhone simulator.

Here's good CRM for you. From an email:

We couldn't help but notice that it's been a while since you've visited Current.com, and it's bumming us out.

If you have a moment, we'd love to hear from you about your experience on Current.com, what did or didn’t work for you, and how we could make things more enticing for you in the future.

Lincolnshire is truly pioneering with eGov. Apart from the ads they are:

As part of their “Accessibility tested by humans” strategy, Lincolnshire’s website will be tested every 3 months by a panel of disabled users with disabilities ranging from cerebral palsy through to dyslexia. Results will then be published on Lincolnshire’s website for anyone to see.

I completely agree with this more 'social' attitude to accessibility.

Here's Whitehall's approach:

The draft had threatened to switch off non-compliant websites altogether, warning: "websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names". The final guidance issues a similar warning, but using the softer formula 'may be at risk' instead of 'shall be subject to': "Government website owners are reminded to follow the conditions of use for a .gov.uk name (Registering .gov.uk domain names (TG114)). Websites which fail to meet the .gov.uk accessibility requirements may be at risk of having their domain name withdrawn".

Monbiot point:

A few weeks ago the writer Mark Lynas found a counter-intuitive revelation buried in the small print of an ICM survey. The number of people in social classes D and E who thought the government should prioritise the environment over the economy was higher (56%) than the proportion in classes A and B (47%). It is counter-intuitive only because a vast and well-funded denial industry has spent years persuading us that environmentalism is a middle-class caprice

How guardian.co.uk stays atop the pile:

In the past two months, we have started to combine search engine optimisation - talking to the news desk on the paper about SEO-friendly headlines and underlining SEO with our subs desk [on the website] - with our marketing and pay-per-click activity. If you do two to three small things at one time that can be very significant.

Etre (newsletter only) had a great post about 'cognitive illusions', relating this to usability. Citing Bruce Tognazzi from 1989 it notes that:

1) Users consistently report that using the keyboard is faster than using the mouse.

2) The stopwatch consistently proves that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard.

This illusion reveals a much more important learning: Users' perception of reality and reality itself are not the same thing - which means that you should always verify their claims through research. You should also take pains to validate your own intuitions, because even when you're certain of something, you can still be very wrong.

Etre's blog had an interesting post about a new ATM interface for Wells Fargo. ATMs are thirty years old - proving that usability is an ongoing and never-ending process.

Dave Briggs is running an event in Peterborough relating the ReadWriteWeb to the needs of local government. Check it out.

Featuring case studies from both local and central government, practical exercises to learn more about how social media could be used within a local authority context and plenty of time for networking and chats over coffee.

eGov AU on why UK lgov sites are better than Australian ones. Unfortunately he cites Redbridge :{

Information ain't free. After a long break with no email, I had a notification about a citation of that suicide and the internet BMJ article (which I went to work on). But of course I couldn't read it because JAMA's medical research is behind a paywall.

That's cleared some clips :}

Just this to add - from the online journo Michael J Totten: The Truth About Russia in Georgia:

He raised his hand as if to say stop.

“That was the formal start of the war,” he said. “Because of the peace agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay, so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on Tskhinvali. Now stop me.”

“Okay,” I said. “All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.”

“I'm not yet on the 7th,” he said. “I'm on the 6th.”

“Okay,” I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is true.”

Thomas Goltz nodded.

Notes on a Dirty Island

Bill posing with Wombles

Notes on a Dirty Island was a really good Panorama fronted by Bill Bryson about litter.

Yeah, I can't link to a persistent video and - of course - I can't embed.

[Shakes fist] C'mon BBC!

You will find it on iplayer and a google video search, but not for long. Otherwise, here's the sole YouTube clip.

In an otherwise excellent report there was one aspect very noticeable by its absence - the responsibility of business. The sole aspect which covered this was about bottles and cans and how a deposit scheme is opposed by industry because it's "not profitable". And seeing someone like Joan Ruddock parroting this industry line summed up nu labor's creepiness like nothing else.

The issue isn't just lazy, chavvy Brits. It's also the producers of products taking some - any - responsibility for what happens after they're sold. Think rubbish around fast-food outlets and you can see the area Bill chose to ignore.

This was the only thing which marred an otherwise excellent. rare raising of this usually ignored agenda.

China and smog

Here's Manchester's Oxford Road in 1910



Pierre Adolphe Valet
'Oxford Road, Manchester'
Manchester Art Gallery

Here's Linfen, China: 'the most polluted place on earth'.