Paul Gilding on his weblog, introducing a co-authored report released earlier this month on how humanity might approach the problem of not annihilating itself:

We were actually surprised by the outcome of our work, which showed that not only is One Degree and 350ppm possible, it is surprisingly achievable and practical. It certainly requires that we act very soon and that we act with a level of determination and commitment not seen since WWII, but it can be achieved. In recognition of this comparison, we called our paper The One Degree War Plan. It is a plan that shows what humanity can achieve — and we believe will achieve — when it develops a rational response to the climate threat.

The authors are releasing this work “for general public reaction and comment.” They outline their take on the current status of climate change, and predict what the global public response will be between now and 2020. From the paper’s (PDF) introduction:

Given the physical momentum for change already in the climate system and the continuing lack of action on the scale and with the urgency required, it is now too late to prevent major disruption and damage in the decades ahead, as a result of inaction over the past several decades. We believe there will now be an ecological and economic crisis, of a scale that is significant in the history of human life on earth.

But we certainly do not believe it is too late to prevent the collapse of the global economy and civilisation.

One of Gilding’s main arguments is that the modern world remains steadfastly organised for industrial production, “endless” economic growth and increasing consumption, and that for humanity to take genuinely effective steps to avert runaway warming (that would likely destroy the civilisation) will require a coordinated reorganisation of social and economic systems around the world.

Randers and Gilding compare their survival strategy to the allied mobilisation during WWII, and military metaphors (“war plan”) are, well… we’ll see if that works, and if not I suspect they’ll adapt. Also, I don’t think that their invoking of governmental responses to the financial crisis as an example of reactive capacity will go over well in the U.S. But that’s a minor quibble, I suppose.

One degree and 350 are the new symbols, and what they will come to signify — hope, propaganda, doom, deliverance, fate, Armageddon — is yet to written, though whatever the answer I’m starting to think it will happen in my lifetime.

See also: The Great Disruption, Background Briefing, June 14, 2009.

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• Black carbon earth

The Australian Government wants to censor the Internet and the push seems to have gained ground because of concerns about child safety. The proposal calls for mandatory ISP filtering of Internet traffic that is supposed to prevent access to “illegal material” (content featuring child sexual abuse) and child-inappropriate material (pornography).

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is at the centre of a growing debate about the true scope and feasibility of the plan. He has equated it with similar systems in countries like the UK, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand, but there are fundamental differences. Australians won’t be able to opt out. According to network engineer Mark Newton, in a recent opinion piece for ABC News:

In actual fact, none of the countries Senator Conroy cited have anything like what he’s proposing for Australia. [...] The only countries which feature government-imposed internet censorship are nations which place more emphasis on opinion suppression than internet access, such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Newton points out that Conroy has used the term “illegal” in the Senate to refer to a government blacklist of material designated as “prohibited” (deemed unsuitable for children). Former Senator Andrew Bartlett recently echoed criticism about where such a censorship plan would end. Not to mention whatever they mean by material that is “inappropriate:”

The catch-all nature of the term “inappropriate” gives me concern. I have little faith that the current government will prove much better than governments everywhere, and be unable to resist the urge to continually increase the scope of what they try to control.

Beyond this, it seems highly unlikely that the plan can be implemented as intended. ISPs hate it claiming that filtering will be extremely costly to implement, easy to circumvent and would likely yield a lot of false positives (hundreds of thousands?). The Angry Aussie says it best in a recent rant:

If you put some filter between the big wide Internet and the poor little defenseless Australian users it would strangle our already shit Internet access, let a bunch of stuff through anyway, be trivially easy to get around, and would block sites that shouldn’t be blocked. In other words, there is not a single thing an honest person can recommend about this approach.

Way to go Labor. I bet this will haunt the Rudd government if it goes much further. Why not spend the $189 million on building media literacy instead?

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• Kids these days
• The current days of the Internet
• The accessible presidency

It was all over the news yesterday: the Washington Post is calling it the YouTube Presidency. When it comes to embracing the web as a medium of goverment the new administration is off to an ambitious start:

Throughout the Presidential Transition Project, this website will be your source for the latest news, events, and announcements so that you can follow the setting up of the Obama Administration. And just as this historic campaign was, from the beginning, about you—the transition process will offer you opportunities to participate in redefining our government.

In terms of web accessibility they are doing pretty well, though there’s room for improvement with the video. There’s no captioning (either open or closed) on the President-elect’s first web video address, but there’s a full transcript of it on the web site, and it looks like they’re doing this for all of it. Hopefully the producers will move towards closed captioning as a serious accessibility measure. The WCAG+Samurai guidelines, for example, note that a separate transcript, either in plain text, HTML, or some other format, is not a substitute for captioning or audio description. (Conforming with WCAG 2.0 will require captions, as well.)

YouTube released closed captioning for video in late August, 2008

Meanwhile, it looks like the equally ambitious Commitment to Accessibility is a good sign and will bring the U.S. in line with 136 other countries on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This statement claims that change.gov itself is the first step in this direction, which shows how an organisation’s approach to the web can be viewed an indicator of its approach to the broader issue of accessibility:

The Obama Administration has a comprehensive agenda to empower individuals with disabilities in order to equalize opportunities for all Americans.

In addition to reclaiming America’s global leadership on this issue by becoming a signatory to—and having the Senate ratify—the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the plan has four parts, designed to provide lifelong supports and resources to Americans with disabilities. They are as follows:

First, provide Americans with disabilities with the educational opportunities they need to succeed.

Second, end discrimination and promote equal opportunity.

Third, increase the employment rate of workers with disabilities.

And fourth, support independent, community-based living for Americans with disabilities.

This commitment to accessibility for all begins with this site and our efforts to ensure all functionality and all content is accessible to all Americans.

Also, I can’t resist mentioning that change.gov developers are using jQuery and Thickbox (both of which I use and love) for a small set of site behaviours, and it looks like they are taking progressive enhancement seriously: there is no JavaScript within the body of the page. They are even writing the Thickbox class names using unobtrusive techniques. The outgoing_links() function, for example, detects offsite links and, if you click on one, presents a Thickbox modal window to let you know that you are about to leave the site. They don’t add anything to the markup to trigger this, other than the external link itself. Regular expressions are used to determine that it’s an offsite reference.

While I’m geeking out on the site I might as well mention that the HTML is fairly lean, a lot of <div> tags but that’s about it. The number of HTTP requests is moderate, so it should load in a reasonable time for most visitors. Using CSS sprites for the menus could get this down a bit. You can get around the site okay in Lynx, too:

On a technical level I have to admit that I haven’t really looked at whitehouse.gov, which would be a logical point of comparison, but a brief inspection of the homepage shows that the body markup is littered with document.write in video playback scripts (ew), and uses the occasional table for layout (shudder). The government is required to make it’s own sites accessible because of Section 508, but the use of these two techniques strains the intention somewhat.

In contrast it’s the “music behind the words” of the commitment to accessibility that sets change.gov apart. The Transition Project web site isn’t perfect by any means (it doesn’t validate, lacks captioning on the video, and there’s the inexplicable use of a non-existent element called links^† in the page body) but the developers are following design principles that make content access the first priority, and when it comes to your (future) government you have got to respect that.

Looking at the bigger picture here—the user experience and technical implementation of change.gov, the use of YouTube and the ongoing commitment to web video, the success of the Obama campaign online, the use of social web technolgies, the policy positions set forth, and the sheer amount of content being generated by the Transition Project—this is what Brian was talking about when he said that November 4 was a good day for the Internet. The new administration gets it.

Update 1: The latest video posted on change.gov supports YouTube closed captioning:

This is great to see.

Update 2: As of today (November 20) the original video also supports closed captioning.

† What the? This is the second time in 24 hours: first <sarcasm> and now <links>. How many people are making up their own elements, and, more curiously, why?

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• Support ‘Captioning Sucks!’
• Links: captioning, accessibility, reading, etc.