Red is hot, and blue is cold. Seemingly everyone knows this. Even though blue light has a higher energy, and thus temperature, than red light. Watts has a recent post about Color and Temperature: Perception is everything. He questions, “Is it just me or does there appear to be a warm bias in the color temperature presentation of the majority of providers shown here?”

I have previously posted a couple thoughts on the use of color when presenting figures to the public; for example Using Color Contours to Improve Public Interpretation of the Temperature Record and Using Color to Visualize Decreases in Sea Ice Extent. Color is not just a way to make a boring figure pretty. The color has to add information. For instance, in his Color is Everything post, Watts shows current (at time of posting) national temperature figures from several sources.
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Via the Scientific American Observations blog comes news that during its 2009 season the American Le Mans Series will be introducing a Green Challenge. Details can be found on the ALMS website.

I must admit that I like racing. Not because I’m a fan of watching car drive in circles using internal combustion engines that produce unnecessary CO2. Or that the fuel they use could be used for many other more useful purposes. I don’t know why I like it; I imagine its for similar reasons that I like other sports such as baseball. It’s just fun to watch sometimes.
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This is another post on a meme that just won’t die. That would mean it’s about finding a linear fit of a short, noisy time series, right? That’s what started it. Further blogging revealed that ignoring the temperature data from GISS and NCDC, which coincidentally both show warming, probably isn’t a good idea. But nope, that’s not what really got me.

That’s going to be a yearly thing for a while. Last year it was cool to be finding 10 year trends. Now it’s going to be 11 for a bit. And next year it will be 12. For 10 year trends, the excuse was that it was a nice round number. I’d like to hear the excuse for this year. Perhaps, “I needed to include the large El Nino in 97/98 in order to get a negative trend”. Although, “11 is a round number since I count in base 11″ would sound a little better.
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This post evaluates 5 of the carbon footprint calculators that are listed on this site by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They have many of them, but I chose 5 to review based on a few factors. The first was that it had to be for the United States, and specifically Arizona. There are some available for worldwide audiences. Secondly, because I could not review all of them in a timely fashion, I quickly browsed through them, which offered a quick judgment. If they didn’t seem on first glance to be in the top 5, they were not evaluated in detail. Lastly, if there was any barrier to use, such as registration or payment, it was not reviewed.

On to the reviews!
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