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Via New Scientist: The “hockey stick” graph, which shows a rapid rise in world temperatures over recent decades, has been both poster child for the dangers of human- induced global warming and prime target for climate change sceptics. They cite an anomaly in the graph – it does not record a dip in temperature between 1200 and 1850 – as reason to ditch the whole thing. Now new data may help explain why the graph does not record the “little ice age”.

Ocean currents in the North Atlantic, dominated by the Gulf Stream, usually keep winter temperatures in western Europe mild by carrying warm water north from the tropics towards Europe and heating the westerly winds travelling from North America. Climate scientists have suspected that a weak Gulf Stream may have caused the little ice age, but until now there has been no direct evidence for this theory. READ

Via The NYT: The Bush administration has been on a six-year campaign to expand its powers, often beyond what the Constitution allows. So it is odd to hear it claim that it lacks the power to slow global warming by limiting the emission of harmful gases. But that is just what it will argue to the Supreme Court tomorrow, in what may be the most important environmental case in many years.

A group of 12 states, including New York and Massachusetts, is suing the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to properly do its job. These states, backed by environmental groups and scientists, say that the Clean Air Act requires the E.P.A. to impose limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted by new cars. These gases are a major contributor to the “greenhouse effect” that is dangerously heating up the planet.READ, Read 2

Via Snook: The mechanics of a drag and drop are pretty interesting and most library implementations do similar things, albeit to various extents. As I explain the inner workings, I’ll touch on Yahoo’s, Mootools’, and Script.aculo.us’ implementations, what to expect, and how they differ.

A drag and drop essentially consists of a few events (and by events, I mean, moments in time, not DOM events). There’s the moment a drag is started, there’s the continuous dragging of an item, and finally there’s the moment the item is no longer being dragged (ie: the drop). The items being dragged are sometimes referred to as draggables.

On top of these events, there is also the interaction with other elements on the page; dragging over and out of an element and whether the dragged element has been dropped on top of another element on the page. The elements upon which draggable items are dropped onto are sometimes referred to as droppables. I’ll cover droppables in the next part. For now, let’s go over the draggables. READ

Via friendlybit: Many methods exist to structure your CSS. This article tries to describe the method I use. I call it the “Tree method”, since it structures the CSS like… that’s right, a tree structure. I want to stress that it isn’t my invention; I just describe and give reasons for its rules.

Everyone that has built a bigger site has had to deal with the mess CSS so easily become. There are ids and classes all over the place, and to find where a certain class is defined you usually need to use some search feature in your editor. Matching the other way, from the CSS to the HTML is even harder; you don’t even know what file a certain class is defined in. It’s a mess.

The Tree method tries to structure the CSS into logical blocks; blocks taken from the HTML. It also aims to be easy to understand for anyone. No secret codes or difficult ordering schemes. READ

Via Oceana: If you’d like to give something back this holiday season, adopt an endangered marine creature for you or a loved one. With this special gift, you’ll help us fight for the survival of endangered and threatened marine creatures and promote the health of our oceans. And with a minimum donation of $25 we’ll send you or the recipient of your choice a special cookie cutter in the shape of your adopted creature as a token of our thanks. READ

Someone mentioned ColorJack on Digg and several other color scheme creation tools were also recommended during the course of the comments that were submitted. Tool 1, Tool 2, ColorSchemer, ColorJack

Via Dustin diaz: Ok. Let’s set the record straight. There is no official guide for each and every CSS shorthand property value. So let’s work together and put one together shall we? Ok. Straight to the business. Anytime I’ve ran into a specification (besides the confusing mess at the W3C), it turns into showing off a couple of examples and you’re supposed to be set on your way. Well well. Over the years, I’ve found quite some interesting unknown quirky facts about these shorthands… hence this Guide was born. READ

Via pixel acres: If you didn’t blink, you may have noticed that for a few days recently Wikipedia’s entry for Web 2.0 included a subsection describing the visual elements of Web 2.0. Gradients, colorful icons, reflections, dropshadows, and large text all got a mention.

A few days later the “visual elements” addition had been removed after a vote by wikipedians. The objection, I suppose, is that no set of visual criteria can accurately define something as being characteristic of Web 2.0 – if Web 2.0 can be understood as an approach to generating and distributing content, then it needn’t be tied to a particular visual style.

Nevertheless, it’s true that many Web 2.0 sites do share a distinctive aesthetic. Wikipedia’s editors may not think it’s a worthy part of the Web 2.0 discussion, but I say bring it on! Let’s take a look at the some of the communication issues facing a Web 2.0 site, and see how the “Web 2.0 look” can help to solve them. READ

Via mboffin: The post I wrote about the designline concept stirred up some interesting conversations across the web. Among many of the sites linking to the designline post, a common remark was that I built the content of the site before building the design. Some saw this concept as novel, some knew in the back of their head it was important but had never before seen the benefit visually, and some saw it as a “case in point” of something they had been pushing other designers to do for some time.

In the wider field of graphic design, content-driven design is not a new concept. One of the primary purposes of graphic design is to effectively communicate your content. That this is now becoming a widely recognized concept in the field of web design simply shows that the field of web design is starting to finally mature. READ

Via mboffin: I have often wondered what it would be like to see a web site design progress from start to finish, with each tweak and change being shown as it progresses—a design timeline, if you will. I don’t mean from conceptual start to finish—from blank piece of paper to finished Photoshop image of the design. I mean from a blank browser and text file to a completed HTML file with associated CSS and images. This is something I’ve wanted to see from well-known web designers, such as Cameron Moll, Douglas Bowman, Eric Meyer, Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea, and so forth. I would love to have this kind of insight into their methodology of turning a design concept into an actual, working web page.

Not having any of the above fellows on hand to fulfill my whims, I decided to forge ahead and create a designline myself. I recently came up with a new template for members to use for their MBoffin.com blogs, so I used it as a test subject.

To create this designline, I took a screenshot basically every time I saved my HTML file. I’m one of those people who impulsively hits Ctrl-S after every tiny little change, so you end up seeing every little change made to the file as it goes. I started out with a blank text file and I go all the way to a completed site design. Check it out. READ