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 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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I’m moving to a new apartment in mid-July. One of the things that I was going to do at my current residence is to install solar panels. Except that the lease has a clause about not having “large and obstructive” objects on our patios. I asked the manager if solar panels qualify as large and/or obstructive and was told in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to have them on the patio. Of course, the lease also forbids charcoal grills and I’ve seen at least 5 on other peoples patios. A couple solar panels might attract more attention than a grill though.
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Lately, I’ve been looking at the differences in the two satellite temperature records. I first blogged about how there is a divergence in the two time series (RSS and UAH) with power at 1 year. In the same post, I noted that there appears to be a step in the difference time series, but at the time I did not pursue it further. Yesterday, I finally got around to blogging about the apparent change point in the difference time series.

I think I’ve exhausted the options of looking at only the global monthly temperature anomaly time series. Instead, this post will be about spatial differences in the two records. I obtained gridded data from UAH and RSS.
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