For Washington Post Opinion, a struggling mapmaker makes a plea to stop climate change, because there are no more suitable colors left in the spectrum to show hot:

My point is, unless you are here with some kind of innovative new color that is clearly hotter than red and won’t create these ambiguities, our only alternative is to stop climate change. If you won’t do it for the charismatic megafauna or the less charismatic fauna of normal size, or for your grandchildren, or for yourselves, do it for me, the guy who designed the heat scale for weather maps.I know this is a stupider reason than the reasons that already exist for you to take action, but people often do things for asinine reasons that they would not do for good ones, so maybe if you think about me having to color the map a confusing shade of vermilion or cochineal or, I guess, go back around? I have nothing! you will take pity in a way that you didn’t when human beings were literally dying? I don’t know, man. I’m not sure how many more heat waves like this my map can take. And that is the problem, of course. My map.

This is very important.

Tags: climate, color, humor, Washington Post