Evidence That You Will Probably Face Record Tornadoes And Hurricanes Because of Climate Change

It can be extremely difficult to get people to understand that climate change will affect their own lives. I notice people talking about how they need to stop climate change for the sake of their grandchildren. I also notice that most of the people who say things like this still drive around alone in their cars. Grandchildren dying when people are dead does not seem to be enough motivation to actually take effective steps to stop climate change.

I believe we will not get enough people acting to stop climate change before it is too late to do any good, unless people understand that their own comfort and maybe even their lives are at stake because of climate change. 

I want to use this blog post to show people some things that are happening that might help them to understand that they may die and certainly will have a miserable time surviving unless they make major changes in how they live, in order to slow and stop climate change from getting so out of control that it will not be possible to prevent the Earth from becoming difficult or impossible to keep humans alive here any more. 

Even if you can't get motivated enough to change your behaviors that are making climate change get rapidly worse and kill off the human race after you die, these links I intend to give you in this post should help you to understand that you may not be able to survive your normal life span, or will have a very hard time living as long as you are meant to, unless you make big changes in what you do now.

The first link is to a story about an enormous glacier, the biggest on Earth, that is breaking up much faster, than even the most pessimistic scientists expected it to. The reason that this matters to you is that this glacier is in the Antarctic. The polar regions affect weather all over the world. Such a large chunk of polar ice will affect your weather in a very bad way. It will make the storms that you get now, much worse and if you thought you did not need to worry about tornadoes and hurricanes in your area, you will soon get them.

Another bad thing about this glacier melting is what the amount of water in it will do to the oceans of the world. It will speed up the rise in sea levels. That will force more people than ever in history to move to keep from being drowned. 

When large numbers of people find themselves forced out of their homes, this usually causes wars. We already have plenty of wars, but this will mean a great many more of them. It is hard for any country to stay out of wars if they are nearby. Climate change means that so many people will be forced to run for their lives that it is unlikely that many countries will be able to avoid being drawn into wars.

Here is a link to information about the giant iceberg that broke off in Antarctica.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/02/26/us-antarctica-iceberg-idUSTRE61P15H20100226

Here is a link to an artist who uses altered photos to show what west coast cities will look like as the oceans rise. http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/nickolay-lamm-west-coast-sea-level-rise-pictures-20130711

He already did illustrations of what the east coast will look like as sea levels rise. They say in the accompanying text, that these photos are what it will look like IF sea levels continue to rise. They only go up to 25 feet. Some scientists think sea levels can rise up to 50 feet. 

We can be quite certain that sea levels will go up over 5 feet no matter what we do, because it is already too late to prevent that much of a rise. All that we can manage, if we make serious changes overnight is to stop sea level rise from getting to the highest levels, like 25 feet or more.

Chances for an overnight change of behavior world-wide, don't look too good for now. The longer we wait to change what we are doing now, the worse the sea level rise will be.

I have already posted about how sea level rise is affecting the world right now. An example of this is what is happening where I live in Alaska. We have over 180 villages in Alaska that will be flooded by the currently expected rise in sea level. Two of them, Shismaref and Kivalina were already scheduled to be evacuated over two years ago. Some of their buildings have been falling into the ocean every time there is a big storm.

The villages in Shismaref and Kivalina have not evacuated because they want to save their villages by moving them to the mainland. The state of Alaska does not have enough money to move all of the threatened villages. The state wants to move the villagers to bigger towns on the mainland and let the villages die. If you want to know more about it, you can look at my posts about it. This is happening in other places in the world, but not as fast. Climate change is faster in Arctic regions like Alaska.

The next link is only a sample of what can be expected because of climate change. The link is to a tornado in Oregon. This has not been a normal occurrence in Oregon. It will, be though. There are lots of other places that are getting their first tornado and can expect to get more of them because of climate change. Places that are more used to tornadoes, can expect to get a lot more of them and worse ones as well. 
http://www.weather.com/news/tornado-central/oregon-tornado-mcminnville-jun2013-20130614

This post is already a bit longer than my old ones used to be and it would become a book if I put in a lot of examples of places that need to get used to tornadoes. I will probably do a post that is only on this subject. You need to look them up yourself, for now though. 

Scientists do not know exactly what weather will do because of climate change. They only know ideas of major trends that will happen. This is because having polar ice melt so much and so fast is already causing unpredictable weather. It will only get more unpredictable. 

An example of what could happen is that areas that are dry could become wet and vice versa. Oregon rainforests could become deserts and Florida swamps could become dry. The Mojave Desert could become wetter and so could the high plains desert in Nevada. If you live in areas of the world besides the USA, just think of the places that you know of that have extreme climates and imagine them going to the opposite extreme, or back and forth and in between.

Having schizophrenic weather will make it so much harder to raise enough food that millions more people will starve and even people who have comfortable incomes will feel the pain in their wallets. This will put more elderly people at risk of hunger, and as Baby Boomers retire, if that is you, you could be hungry too.

In the USA, elders are having to choose between paying for medicine or food. It will only get worse as climate change makes food production harder and more expensive. The increasing scarcity of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal will cause power costs to increase which will make for an even larger jump in food prices along with everything else getting more expensive because of transport costs going up.

There are other problems that climate change will make worse in the near future, but they can be harder for an average person to understand. I will see if I can start explaining it here for anyone who want to know. I am a bit discouraged about doing this because so few people do want to know. The majority of the human race seems to prefer ignorance to understanding and working on our problems. We do not have long before this approach will prove fatal to the human race. We won't all die right away, but it will be as certain anyway. 

I posted a while back about a comparison of the human race treasuring it's ignorance, making us too much like a sheep that drowned in a creek that went through an alfalfa field that my family owned. The sheep died unnecessarily in spite of great efforts by me to save it. I am afraid the human race is preparing to die in the same way, through stubborn stupidity.

This blog is part of my efforts to try to keep the human race alive. My health problems are getting worse, so I don't know how much longer I can continue this part of my efforts, but I will do so as long as possible and I gather it will live on as long as Google does.  :-p I hope it helps. 

If you are reading this, you can be part of the solution to this problem of climate change. Learn to walk lightly on the Earth and take better care of it.

What Will Climate Change Do To You And Other People?

I am going to try to put this information into words that are easy to understand for normal people who are not rocket scientists. I think it is a bad idea to leave out most of the people on Earth from understanding this important stuff that affects all of us. 

I am not telling you this to discourage you. It is the opposite. I think that there are things we can all do about this problem. I am not saying it will be easy, or that we will like doing them. We need to do them anyway, in order to survive.

I got this information from my class on the Health Effects of Climate Change. It is taught by a Medical Doctor who takes care of children and a scientist who has been studying what is happening to our air for about 35 years. Both of them want more people to understand this stuff also. 

There is a problem with them doing this. They are very very smart and have a hard time putting things into language normal people can understand. I am having trouble myself, but I already knew a lot about it before, so that helps me out some.

This particular bit of information that sorts out what will happen to us because of climate change was written by another Doctor, Anthony J. McMichael. Here is a link to it in case you want to see it yourself: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1109341

The part that I am basing this on is in a little part that you have to click to see in the article. It is in a table, that you can make full screen on your computer so that you can see it better. It is called, "Table 1. Categories of Climate-Change Risks to Health, According to Causal Pathway.

The table sorts the health problems that we will get from climate change into three areas. 

The first one is called, "Primary" health problems. This is things that climate change does that will get us and our health directly. His categories for this are: heat waves, extreme weather events, and temperature-enhanced levels of urban air pollutants.

Not everyone will understand about what heat waves do to your health. I have been in more than a couple of record-breaking heat events. If you have not, I can guarantee you won't like them. The first one I was in was in a town where we got a 30 day long triple digit or higher spell of hot weather. That means it was 100 degrees Farenheit for 30 days in a row with no cooling off.  (100 degree Fahrenheit = 37.7777778 degree Celsius).  As if that wasn't bad enough, the same place set another record for 40 days of triple digit heat while I was still there. I could not get out of there fast enough.

You may think you don't have to worry about this in your area. Wrong. Climate change is going to cause record heat all over the world. You are not likely to escape it, especially if we don't get busy and stop making climate change worse.

"Extreme weather events", means we will get more, and worse, of the kind of weather we already hate. These are weather events like hurricanes, tornadoes, storms, floods, etc. An example of the kind of "extremes" we will be dealing with are hurricanes like Sandy. 

Sandy set all kinds of unpleasant records for size. In case you don't already know, Sandy reached all the way from the East Coast of the USA to our far inland state of Ohio. This is an area bigger than many of the countries in the world.

I believe it was last year, 2012, where the USA set a world record for tornadoes. We had over 800 of them. We not only got more tornadoes, but they did more damage and covered a much bigger area than is usually affected by tornadoes. People got hit by tornadoes, who thought they would never see one.

Whatever weather we are used to is getting hotter, colder, wetter, bigger and worse in every way we can imagine and climate change will keep making this worse and worse for the rest of our lives.

"Temperature-enhanced levels of urban air pollutants means that if it is hotter, breathing polluted air in cities will make you sicker and kill more people than it already does. There was a woman who lived in that city with the triple digit heat records who was killed this way. 

She already had asthma and other health problems. She was the single parent of three little children, the oldest a toddler. She was found dead in her home with her children crying over her body. This one incident is almost enough to make me cry while I write about it. She is only one person and her children are only three more people. There are more like them and there will be a lot more. 

We need to stop climate change from getting worse so we don't get endless numbers of children crying over dead mother's and father's bodies or parents crying over dead children. We can work to stop this sadness from continuing and spreading.

The next "Causal Pathway", is the secondary risks that get us indirectly. The ones mentioned are, "food yields, water flows, infectious-disease vectors, and intermediate-host ecology". This means things like the drought that hit over 90% of all of the agricultural land in the USA last year. The USA normally exports food and feeds people in other parts of the world. The USA is not even doing a good job at feeding its own people because of that drought. That means people in other countries are going hungry because of our drought.

The drought in the USA also caused food prices to go up all over the world, because there was less food to go around.

Water flows does not mean only drinking water. It includes things like water for growing food, or cleaning,
or manufacture. 

"Disease vectors", means things that carry a disease to you. An example of this is the bubonic plague a long time ago in Europe. Rats were supposed to have carried fleas that carried the bubonic plague germs inside them. The rats took the fleas wherever they went. The fleas jumped off of the rats and bit the humans. When the fleas bit the humans, they gave bubonic plague to the humans. Vectors are the "middlemen" of disease. 

When climate change warms up places that used to be colder, it makes it possible for animals that could not live there before, to start living there. That can include disease-carrying vectors, like rats.

"Intermediate host ecology", Whoops. Sorry. The fleas are the prime vector and the rats that carried them were intermediate hosts. The fleas only stayed on the rats for a short while. The normal home of those fleas was another kind of rat. That short stay of the fleas on the European Roof Rats made them intermediate hosts.

The last category of bad things that climate change can do to your health and the health of everyone else, is called Tertiary. That means, "thirdly". The third group of bad climate change health effects can be things that are harder to pin on climate change, but still would not happen without it.

This third group of climate change bad health effects are things like, "mental health problems in failing farm communities, displaced groups, disadvantaged indigenous and minority ethnic groups". There is a subset of this third group, that I will cover next.

I get to see a lot of the mental health problems similar to the ones mentioned. Alaska still has a lot of people who live in small remote communities, who have never been to a big town and who live lives that are not a lot different than before Alaska was invaded by white people.

Over 180 communities in Alaska are being flooded out by rising ocean waters. Two island communities have already been scheduled to be evacuated. Their houses have been falling into the ocean every year when the winters storms hit them. 

Big chunks of their land disappear with the storms and even without the storms. These two islands will probably be completely underwater soon. These two island villages are called, "Kivalina", and "Shishmaref". I have already posted about them. Both are trying desperately to raise money to save their communities.

The government of Alaska just wants to move these people into the big cities. The people who live in these flooding villages mostly do not like this idea. Some of them speak their native languages as the main language in their villages. They are afraid that their languages, customs, and ways of life will be swallowed up by the big cites just like the ocean is swallowing their villages back home.

Some of the villagers who are being flooded, have already ended up in the city where I live. I see them on the bus, and at the bus stops and in the stores. 

They often have a dazed, lost look their faces. Some of them hide it better. Some have never seen a bus, let alone ridden one, or figured out how to do it. They can have the same sort of trouble shopping in a huge department store for the first time, or times, or even forever.

I believe this is culture shock. I have probably experienced a little of this sort of thing myself. It was not as bad for me as it is for the villagers. I had already moved around a lot when I was a child and seen lots of different things. It was easier for me than it is for them. It was enough so that I have some idea of how they feel. It is only a small reflection, though.

This same sort of thing is happening all over the world. Some Pacific islands have already gone under the ocean, and only have bits sticking up for a few months out of the year. The people were evacuated to New Zealand and other places. One of these islands was Tuvalu. I already posted about it, and the people I met in New Zealand.

The last part of the third group of health effects from climate change are called, "consequences of tension and conflict owing to climate change-related declines in basic resources (water, food, timber, living space). This is a fancy way of talking about war and the kinds of things that go along with it. 

Not many people are going to simply give up when they see their homes being gobbled up by the ocean, or they see their children going hungry and starving to death in front of their eyes. They will fight to get what they need. They will kill other people, or die trying to get what they need to stay alive.

It is something we have to expect from climate change. Lots of people will die fighting over what they need to survive. This will get worse and worse as climate change gets worse and takes away more of what more people need to survive.

You can try to hide from all of the bad health effects of climate change, but it will not work. If you want to have a decent life much longer, you will have to change what you do. 

Almost everyone on Earth is now making climate change worse. We are doing it very fast. Even the most pessimistic, depressing predictions of what climate change would do in the future have turned out to be too optimistic. We are wrecking our home, the Earth, very fast. It is happening much faster than even expected.

Because of the speed with which we are making climate change worse, we do not have much time to make our changes before it will be too late to fix it. We will all have to work together to do fix climate change. First we have to stop making it worse. 

The changes that we need to make in what we do are not Rocket Science. They will not all be changes that we will like, but we can't live without the changes. It is time for us to get busy making them.

Save Yourself fFom Starvation As You Age

As you grow older you will probably become less able to work and earn money. This is normal. This does not make it good or something for you to look forward to. There have been scandals in the USA where it was (re)discovered that elderly people were forced to buy dog food to eat themselves because of not being able to afford meat for humans.

Social safety nets, that give food to people who would have starved to death in the past, have increased worldwide. You may be depending on one of these safety nets to keep eating as you age.

This is not a good idea. Climate change is already making food prices go up all over the world. This will get much worse. As prices continue to rise, there will be more need for the food from social safety nets because of more poor people needing food, and less food and money to spare for social safety net programs.


When you do things to stop climate change you are protecting your own food supply, now and in the future. 



We need more people who understand, care about, and are willing to act to stop climate change. It is in your own best interests to be one of these people. Your own future depends on it.

Climate change is raising the average temperature of the whole Earth. One of the easily predictable results of a rise in the Earth's average temperature is drought. Your food supply will be harder to keep coming to you when there are more droughts.

Plants need water. If you want to eat plants or animals that eat plants, you need water for those plants. This is true even if your food does not come from your own area or country.

In 2012 the United States had a very bad drought. Ninety percent (90%) of the cropland in the USA had a drought last year. This used up all of the food stored up by the government to give to poor people. It was not replaced. Food banks all over the country are already running out of food to give poor people from only one year of drought.

Since the United States is a food exporting country, this has driven up food prices all over the world. This situation will last at least the rest of this year without another drought, because of limited supplies to food manufacturers in the United States. We can expect a continued rise in overall food prices for the rest of this year.

This is just a sample of what we face with our food supply as droughts occur
more often and in more places in the world. If you want to keep eating, you need to learn more and take action to stop making climate change worse.

Change In Blog Posts

I have mentioned my plans to change this blog. I plan to split this blog into several different ones. I may leave this one intact and may or may not continue posting on it.

I believe I will stop posting here so frequently while I am working on the changes. I intend to drop down to once a week and see how that does. Wednesday seems like a good day for me at this time. I don't intend to post again on this particular blog until next Wednesday. If something arises that I believe requires a new post before then or between regular Wednesday posts, I will put one up as an extra post.

I will be working on some of the new blogs and if I am ready with any of them before next Wednesday, I will notify readers on here with links for those who are interested.

The most likely one to be posted first will be the one about my cats. Since one of them is 23 years old, I want to get the blog up while he is still around. I want to try to get videos of him up. He does lots of tricks and talks and is always doing cute things. The younger one does the same things, but not as much. He is just learning and doesn't like doing tricks as much. He learns fast when he wants to though.

I may try out different blog subjects for the split off blogs and see what happens.

I wish more of you would read my disaster preparedness posts. People who do not make any efforts at emergency preparedness have a much lower chance of being able to survive the more frequent, larger, and more widespread disasters that will be our new normal. 

I cherish some hope that some of you are getting your preparedness information elsewhere. It isn't a big hope, but I will take what I can get there.

Earth Day Preparedness

In honor of Earth Day, I would like to remind you that if we don't take care of the Earth, it can't take care of us.

We depend on the Earth to provide us with air, water, food and all the other necessities of life. Playing Jackstraws, Pick-Up-Sticks, or Jenga with what we need to stay alive is not a good plan. Sure we can keep removing parts of the systems on Earth and see how long we can survive, but it is a pretty dangerous game. If things start collapsing in this game, they can land on our heads.

I don't feel like nagging. We already know we have a very bad problem with climate change. If you don't know this yet, you must be on another planet already and there is no use trying to talk to you about it.

In this post I want to encourage people who are discouraged about the immensity of the problems we face. 

We human beings may be obnoxious critters, but we can really move the Earth when we make up our minds to do so. This is fortunate since this is about what is required now. :-p

There is a fairly new organization that got their name from the center of the problem with our air and with climate change.Their name is 350. They are named after the 350 parts per million that scientists have agreed for some time to be about the upper limit of how much carbon is safe for us to have in our air.

350 was formed for the purpose of stopping and reversing climate change before it is too late to do anything about it. We already passed 350 parts per million a while back. If we do nothing, it is already too late to fix climate change and we are doomed. 350, however, tells us that not only can we stop adding more carbon to our air, but we can reverse the almost 400 parts per million we have in the air. 

We can get our air back down to 350 parts per million of carbon in our air. We can then keep going and make it even better than 350 parts per million and make our air better and reverse the trend of climate change.

This does not mean that this will be easy. It will mean we have to make big changes in how we live. It is something that gives us a chance to save our civilization and a lot of lives, human and other kinds of lives. These are changes we can live with. 

Please think about becoming part of a solution instead of part of the problem. One easy way to do this is to go to the site for 350.org and sign their petition to stop the XL pipeline. They will explain why we need to do this. It is very urgent, if we want to stop and reverse climate change. A few little clicks of your mouse can begin to make a difference. Go to 350.org and make yourself count.

Why Does The XL Pipeline Matter To You?

The XL Pipeline matters to everyone in the world because it comes from very dirty Canadian tar sands. This is not a slur against Canadians. It is just about those tar sands they have.

The Canadian tar sands do have oil in them and they have a huge amount of it. The problem is that the oil in those tar sands would destroy your engine and just about any other engine, unless it is cleaned up a lot in order to use it.

The very large amount of dirty tar sands oil only makes this all worse. 

We have already passed the safety limit on how much carbon pollution we have in the air of our whole planet. Scientists who do their own thinking, agree that this upper limit of carbon atoms in our air was reached, and passed at 350 parts per million. We are already up to close to 400 ppm now.

It is believed that it is possible even at 400ppm, for us to undo the damage to our air and reverse climate change back to the safe level of 350 ppm. 

The vast amount of very dirty Canadian tar sands oil must be cleaned by processes which are themselves very polluting. Then if we add burning the still somewhat dirty Canadian tar sands oil to the pollution created when it is burned for fuel we will be in deep doo doo. 

All of that pollution both from cleaning up the Canadian tar sands oil as well as burning the oil itself will push us so far past a point of safe return, that there will be no turning back on climate change. It will officially be tipped into a vicious cycle. Climate change will then cause changes in the earth that will further heat up the earth, which will cause more changes to heat up the earth, and so on.

We are making our own warm place that we would deserve to spend eternity. We have taken a beautiful planet, the Earth, and rapidly destroyed it, mostly during the last two generations, starting with Baby Boomers parents, the War Babies, generation, and on through the Baby Boomers. 

The next couple of generations, the Gen X'ers and the Millennials, are not guilt free, but have not really had the opportunity to do as much as the last two generations.

"Why, Yes"! I do have something in mind that you can do right now to help with this problem. I am going to offer you a chance to throw your weight behind something that might help stop the XL Pipeline. I believe this is true even if you are not in the USA or a citizen of the USA.

It is a link to allow you to pick from several pre-written emails to send automatically to people who need to know how you feel. This is to help those people understand that there are a lot of other people who care about our survival, by slowing and reversing climate change instead of making it worse.     

You can make your "voice" count by doing a few clicks with your mouse. Be sure to sign here:   http://act.350.org/go/2889?t=2&akid=2908.854924.16Zi5X

Here is my two cents that I added to the form letter emails they have available on their site:
"Getting the oil into The Keystone XL Pipeline is bad enough, but we might as well bend over and kiss our posteriors goodbye if we use all of that dirty oil. 

If you are responsible for setting an irreversible climate change that will spiral out of control, you may be able to live with your numb stub of useless conscience. You may not be able to live with other people who survive the onslaughts of the disasters that are becoming a way of life already. In between running for their lives from climate disasters, they will be thinking of you. It won't be good thoughts. "
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

The Future Can Be Great If We Live

There are all kinds of scientific advances that we are on the verge of. If we get all of them we can feed everyone good food without wrecking the Earth and have as much power as we all need and get it without harm to us or our environment. 

The tricky part of getting all of that good stuff is whether we will kill ourselves off before they arrive.

Right now most people are spending our natural resources as if there is no tomorrow. That, of course, can mean there will literally be no tomorrow for the human race. This doesn't mean that we will literally die tomorrow or even next year. We may even get a decade or so before things get really bad.

That delay in consequences for what we are doing now may be our undoing. People are not generally thinking very far ahead. Most grocery stores only keep about three days of food on hand. Other kinds of stores may plan a little farther ahead, but a year ahead is long-term planning.

The worst problem with this short-term thinking is that we are doing damage that is about to reach a tipping point where it can't be fixed and the end after that, will be certain.

It is easy to think about what we want right now. It is harder to think about what we will have to have for tomorrow, next week, month, year, or a decade from now.

We need to think fast. We don't have much time to learn to do that. The sands in our hourglass are running out and most of us aren't even paying attention. Not paying attention can mean paying with your life later.

Now is our chance to reduce our carbon footprints to save our Earth and ourselves. We are starting to see how many lives climate change can take, and this is only the warm-up for it.

Christian Earth 101

Being a Christian, you know what Genesis says. It goes into a lot of detail about how Gd made various parts of the Earth and the life upon it. Every time Gd made something, he said it was, "Good".

Does that sound like somebody who wants His property wrecked?

We are not being very good property managers. If we really love Gd, why do we want to treat Him this way?

It seems odd to me that so many devout Christians are not concerned about what is happening to the Earth. There are even holdouts among Christians who say they do not believe that climate change is real.

I have been trying to figure out how it is possible that Christians can manage not to believe that climate change is happening. My best idea is that they are people who never watch the news or read newspapers or listen to the radio. They would have to live somewhere that weird weather is not going on also. 

That last one is also hard to figure out. I don't think there can be anywhere left that is not having bouts of very strange weather. I read something by someone who wrote that they think climate change is not happening because getting snow in normally warm places means it can't be happening. No, I am not referring to the warm place in the afterlife, I mean southern areas of the USA, or possibly desert areas like Arizona or Nevada.

I think that when people were still calling the weird weather, "global warming", that might have caused some confusion. People have stopped talking about "global warming", and use, "climate change", instead. 

Climate change works much better to describe what is happening with our weird weather than "global warming". The reason for this is that even though the Earth really is getting hotter very fast, it is not even, and not steady, and the hotter spots don't stay put.

The way that scientists study climate change is confusing until you find out more about it. They collect temperature patterns from all over the Earth. Then they add all of the temperatures and average them to get the temperature of the Earth. 

This average temperature of the Earth is higher than ever before in recorded history. It is also getting higher faster than even pessimists expected. 

Very bad things can happen when temperatures change on the Earth. One of these, that is already happening, is with things we depend on to make the air that we breathe. Some of these things that make the air that we breathe are trees and other plants. 

We are used to thinking about trees and other plants cleaning our air. There are other living things that make even more oxygen than trees do. They live in the oceans.There are zillions of tiny microscopic sea life that make more oxygen for us to breathe than big trees do. 

Part of our problems that we are busy making for ourselves is those tiny oxygen makers in the ocean. They are not as strong and adaptable as humans are. When the ocean temperature changes even a few degrees they start dying. This is already starting.

I don't want to write any more about the bad things that are happening with climate change in this post. I have written about that already. You can read it later if you want to.

I want to say why Christians might want to take better care of the Earth. I have only said enough to give you an idea that we are not taking very good care of the Earth lately.

The whole Earth belongs to Gd. Most Christians will agree with that. We have been given stewardship over the Earth. We are sort of resident managers. That is our "dominion" over the Earth. We are supposed to be loving caretakers.

I like to think we have a lot closer relationship with Gd, than a resident manager and a property owner. I think love is and should be involved.

When you love someone you want to know everything you can about them and find ways to please them and help them to be happy. 

Gd is the Supreme Artist. The Earth is His Art. I love the Earth because it is a reflection of its Maker. I don't think everybody has to think and act the way I do, so I don't think all Christians have to love the Earth for the same reasons I do. 

I don't even think you need to love the
Earth at all to be a good Christian. I do think you at least need to respect it as Gd's handiwork that we are given to care for. 

It beats me how anyone can say they love Gd and not respect his work given to us for safekeeping, the Earth. We need to show our love for Gd with our actions as well as our words. 

Diatomaceous Earth For Survival

Diatomaceous earth is wonderful stuff. It is pretty cheap compared to medicine or even herbs. After all, it is dirt, fancy dirt, but nevertheless, dirt. It stands to reason that it should be dirt cheap. :-p

I drink some diatomaceous earth almost every day. I read that it has caused some people's hair to turn back to their original color instead of gray. I don't know how much of this to attribute to diatomaceous earth, but I have very little gray in my hair, when my contemporaries are either using hair dye or being quite gray.

I was not that interested in using diatomaceous earth for the purpose of preserving my youthful hair color, but I can't say I object to that additional benefit. 

One of the things diatomaceous earth can't do a thing about is keeping you alive when the ability of the earth to maintain your life is being destroyed. You need to add some other things to your health regimen besides what you eat, drink and how you exercise. Taking care of the earth is taking care of yourself.

I love old cartoons and often apply things I see in them to my life now. One of these lessons that is good to share with you to explain what I am talking about is one where Wiley Coyote had the Roadrunner cornered out on a rock overhang high above a valley. 

Wiley Coyote pulled out a saw and began sawing away at the rock to make the Roadrunner fall. The problem that Wiley Coyote didn't notice is that he was sitting on the same side of the rock that he was sawing away on. When he sawed through it, he had nothing left to support him either.

We human beings are just like Wiley Coyote, sawing away on our support, (the Earth,) when we still need it. 

We saw away at the Earth every time we do things that increase climate change and cause other kinds of environmental damage.

The world we live in is a complex and rapidly changing place. It can easily make one feel too overwhelmed to face it all. It is a great temptation to just hide your eyes and focus only on what you need to survive right now.

We need to pry our hands away from our eyes enough to see what we need to survive. We can not be Wiley Coyotes, sawing away on our support, the Earth, when we still need the Earth.

There are lots of things you can do to help save our support, the Earth, that will make your life better right now as well. I have found and included many of those in my blog posts. Many other people are also working on this problem.

Look around a little and pick one small change and make it part of your life. Once it fits into your life you can go on to the next one. Any journey must start with a single step.

Stay Warm And Save The Earth!

Stay warm and save the earth! One of the  easiest ways to help save the earth is to use less fuel to heat you home. It just requires turning down your thermostat. That is one of those things that can be easier to do in theory than in life.

Once that thermostat is down and the temperature inside your home drops along with the thermometer, you may want to turn it back up because you feel cold. It can take a while to get used to lower home temperatures. There is no need to set yourself up for the failure of your good intentions.

There are lots of things you can do to feel more comfortable with a lower temperature in your home. You might as well set yourself up to make it easier for you and your family to be comfortable with the lower home temp.

Wearing a hat to keep your head warm is the most difference a single clothing item can make to help the rest of you feel warm as well. A fuzzy fleece hat or cozy knit one are good choices. If you feel very cold, you might want to opt for extra insulation in your warm hat.

I make my own hats and plan to offer free plans on this site to help you to make your own hats as well. Once you know how to make your own hats, it gives you more choice to get the colors and fabrics you like and save money as well. There will be both sewn and knitted and crocheted hats offered on this site for you to make.

My favorite item of clothing to wear to keep comfortable at lower home temps is a vest. I prefer fleece, but also make knitted or crocheted ones. I intend to either offer plans or patterns on this site to help you make your own vests or links to other sites that will offer free patterns.

Warm scarves do a lot to make you feel more comfortable at lower home temps. Scarves are nice for new knitters or crocheters because the straight lines make them easy to do for beginners. Your first scarf may be a little wavy along the edges and have a few other problems, but it will work to keep you warm anyway.

I also like to wear footgear to keep my feet warm for comfort in lower home temps. I do not knit socks yet, but I have crocheted slipper socks. 

I just bought ready made leather soles with fleece lining and pre-punched holes to knit or crochet into. It came with directions for the knit or crochet tops for the slippers. I like the nubby multi-colored yarn that I chose for the slippers. They are warm and comfortable to wear. I bought those from a Tandy store. 

If there is no Tandy store near you, they have an online catalog that you can use to order from them. Tandy is a company that specializes in leatherwork tools and supplies. 

When you feel very cold, you may need to do more to keep your body warm as you become accustomed to lower home temperatures. One of the items that helps with this problem is a heating pad. They require very little electricity to run for a long time and do a lot to help raise your core body temperature and make you feel warm. I sometimes use a heating pad while sitting at my computer for a long time. A hot water bottle will do the same job. They have heated items made for the microwave that you can wrap in a towel and use to keep warm. 

I have made my own and may offer instructions for these. It isn't rocket science and you probably don't really need any instructions. The most important part of using these safely is to put a cup with water in it in your microwave along with the heater. The material I put inside mine is rice. It can catch fire when re-heated several times, without the cup of water in the microwave with it.

These rice stuffed heaters for the microwave are nice for sore spots where you have arthritis or soreness from exercise or something else. I have made these for gifts that were appreciated a lot.

The items I have mentioned in this blog post can be purchased easily, but it is more satisfying and fun to do yourself. You can also save a lot of money by making them yourself and use recycled materials to help the Earth even more.

But What Can I Do About Climate Change?

No, you can not fix climate change all by yourself. If you change what you do that is making climate change worse it can help to stop climate change. A lot of people all doing as much as they can about climate change is what it takes to fix our climate change problems

Climate change is happening so fast that we need to do as much as we can as fast as we can. If we don't do that, we are toast.

Your personal part of this solution is to change how you live so that your part of the problem becomes a solution. You can learn how to live so that your carbon footprint is as small as possible. If enough of us do this we can reduce the carbon in our air to low enough levels to start reversing climate change.

The biggest thing you can do lower your carbon footprint is to stop using fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are gas, oil and coal. If your heating and cooking in your home depend on fossil fuels, you can find ways to reduce or stop using them.

One easy way to begin this process is to make sure your home uses as little energy as possible to keep you warm. Lower your thermostat. You can wear warmer clothes to stay comfortable. You can do things to make your home more energy efficient as well. All of these things will save you money as well as help save our planet.

Moving ourselves and our things around costs a lot of money and is even more costly for what it does to climate change.
We need to get off of our dependence on guzzling a lot of fuel to get around. We should be walking, biking, and using public transport.

You will have to get used to walking, biking, and using public transport as gas and oil prices rise due to their increasing scarcity, anyway. You might as well start a little early and save some money.

You can save up your gasoline money and use it to buy a good bike or a solar system for your home. They have dropped prices on solar energy equipment lately, so you can get your own more easily now.

You can reuse and recycle more than you have in the past. They have an amazing array of blogs devoted to making useful things out of things we are used to throwing away. 

You can start working on keeping your own usable discards out of the local landfill. Freecycle is the name of an international organization dedicated to helping you with that. You sign up to get on a freecycle email list for your area. They send you lists of items people are offering with a contact email to arrange a pickup for the item offered.

If you want an item that is offered, you email them and ask if it is still available. They let you know if it is still available for you. Then you arrange where and when to pick up the item(s).

If you want to offer an item, you write a post to the local freecycle group and the moderators either tell you to correct it, or they post it.

Many thrift stores and charities will come to your home to pick up items that you wish to donate to them. I have found one that I like a lot and am on their regular route. 

Some of the things that I recycle and reuse are my no longer used clothing and other fabric items like old sheets. My current project of this sort is curtains. I live up near the Arctic. That means that during the summer we have very long days. There are few hours of darkness. This can make it harder to sleep because of all the light in the bedroom.

I am layering some of my old fabric discards into curtains thick enough to block light from my windows. Light blocking curtains are ridiculously expensive and the fabric to block light is not a lot better. Putting several layers of fabric stacked in between the curtain fabric and the lining does not show and look ugly, but it can block out the light.

My windows need at least four layers of fabric to block the light well. If you want your curtains to look pretty and full they need to be three to four times the width of your window. 

Two extra layers of fabric between the lining and the curtain material is a lot more fabric. I am running through a lot of old sheets, pillowcases and clothing. This is a much more satisfactory use for them.

I plan to post in more detail on how to make hats and vests, etc. to stay warm when you lower your thermostat. 

Stay warm and save the earth!

The Enemy Is Climate Change

I was thinking about things lately. If the human race is going to survive we will have to give up fighting each other and work on keeping all of  us alive. Our enemy is climate change, not other people.

There is a video that I have loved ever since I first saw it years ago. I call it the,
"Trudge. Trudge." video. It kind of gives an idea of what we need to do.

Here is a link to it on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciXKsDhDV-0

We all need to face this problem and get to work on it fast. There is not much time left for us to make the changes we need to stop climate change from getting so much worse that it will not be possible to stop it. 

Human beings are not yet able to live without the Earth. We can not live if we change the Earth so that we can not live on it any more. We are busy doing that now. We have already passed a danger point that can make climate change speed up faster than anyone expected, even the pessimists. 

This danger point is having too much carbon in our air so that it causes the warming of earth to speed up out of control. The danger point of the amount of carbon in the air that we already passed is 350 parts per million carbon molecules. We have gotten up to 392 already. It is possible for us to get it back down to 350 by making very fast changes by not putting so much carbon into our air.

This means we have to stop using fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. It won't be easy to do because we are used to using a lot of fossil fuels to live. We have forgotten how to live without fossil fuels.

It has only been about two generations that have been very dependent on fossil fuels. 

For most of the history of the human race, we have lived without much or any use of fossil fuels. It is not as if we can not survive without fossil fuels. It only means we have to live differently.

The internet is full of clever ways to stop using fossil fuels. We are not using these wonderful ideas. We need to do this to save our lives and keep human beings able to live on Earth.

I have already written about some of those clever ideas to avoid the use of fossil fuels. One of these is the, "Rocket" stove. Many of you have already looked at my posts about rocket stoves. I have several of them posted on this blog.

I hope more of you will look at rocket stoves and figure out how to use one yourself. Many youtubers have done this and made amazing improvements in rocket stoves. People are now working on pellet fed rocket stoves. Some of them are making pellets out of waste paper, sawdust, grass clippings and other wastes.

Some of you readers can surely come up with other good ideas to make rocket stoves better, cheaper, and easy to make and use. We all need you. The whole world is waiting for you.

O GD! O GD! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!

This may be a very short post. (* See note at end of post.) I dislocated a bone in my hand and it is incredibly painful to touch type. I am doubtful I can hold my train of thought while typing with the hunt and peck or two finger methods.

I did discover that by pushing on the underside of my hand with a pencil eraser, I can make something in there click and it feels good again for a while.
It may be a hint to give it a rest so it will stay put. lol. That might be sensible. I don't know that I indulge in that virtue all that much. This pain is persuasive, however.

I did the eraser trick and it was better for a minute. Now not so good again.

I was thinking about posting about discouragement because of people not dealing seriously with climate change, when we are so close to a dead end on what we can ever do about it.

We are almost to the point where not much we do will make a difference any more. The stuff we need to do to head that off is not going to be easy and we have a very short time to do it. 

The chances that we can get enough people to pay attention, accept the problem, and care to do anything about it before it is too late are not good. That isn't even allowing for actually figuring out what to do and doing it.

We know a lot of things we can do right now to stop or even reverse climate change. Very few people are doing those things. It will require most, or all of the human race to get to work on climate change in order to make any difference in the time we have left.

It reminds me of a movie I like a lot. The captain is piloting the ship in dire circumstances and is poker-faced as he wrestles to save his ship. A guy next to him, says something about the captain not acting very concerned. The captain said, "How's this: O Gd. O Gd. We're all going to die." 

That is the situation. O GD! O GD! WE
'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!! lol. We really need that in a few headlines. It isn't that we will drop dead immediately. We will have plenty of time to have horrible lingering deaths and watch our children and grandchildren die before they have a chance to get old.

I am mostly a peaceful type. I am a vegetarian and have taken spiders outside and and let them loose.

I do believe in gun rights and self defense. I am just fine with shooting somebody who breaks into my home or otherwise threatens my life or my loved ones.

I noticed that more people are peacefully protesting about climate change now. It is even happening all over the world. Peaceful protest is a nice idea, but it takes a while. I doubt we have a while.

It has occurred to me that the "Earth First" movement may have been ahead of its time. It makes me wonder if they were headed in the right direction. If any cause is worth putting your life on the line,  maybe making it possible to sustain life on Earth is it.

People fight over all kinds of things. Maybe we should set all of the other reasons aside and just all fight to stay alive and make it possible for future generations to do the same.

* Note: I must have been crazed with pain, (yeah, that sounds good,) but I did not set my automatic post right and when I checked it, I missed that it didn't work. I am sorry for not getting my post out on time. My hand is okay for now, thanks.

Save Your Posterior And Polar Bears' Too

In case you don't already know, our letters and petitions to President Obama and all of the other work done to stop oil drilling by Shell has been a success! We won for this year. 

They won't just give up and go away, however. We need to keep going to protect ourselves and our victory. Here is the text of my personalized form letter to President Obama:


I am watching the effects of climate change in my home in Alaska. Climate change is going faster here than anywhere in the world. Since the Arctic is the "weather factory of the world" according to climatologists, when our weather goes crazy so does everyone else's. Everyone loves polar bears and wants to save them, but if they go so does the human race. We need to save our own bacon along with theirs.

I am writing to ask you to move forward on two key issues related to America's Arctic -- please take action to protect the Polar Bear Seas (the Beaufort and Chukchi) and the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

Thank you for the bold steps you have taken in recent weeks to protect our special public lands in Alaska: finalizing the Integrated Activity Plan for the NPRA, which protects 11 million acres in the western Arctic, and rejecting the land-swap and road in Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. 

Please keep taking such bold steps for America's Arctic. Act to keep oil drilling out of the Arctic Ocean, keep the Arctic's fossil fuels in the ground to prevent disastrous climate change, and move towards permanent protection of the coastal plain in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

Now that Royal Dutch Shell has given up on drilling in 2013, it is the time to act on the Arctic Ocean. Please cancel Shell's drilling permits and do not move forward on any new permitting in the Arctic Ocean. Shell's efforts have proven that the oil industry cannot drill in the Arctic Ocean. 

The Arctic faces a double-whammy of oil development and climate change. Closing the Arctic Ocean to oil development moves towards a solution for both. I urge you to ensure that any new ports in the Arctic Oceans do not facilitate industrial development and that the port siting process is not driven by private economic interests.

The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one of the most iconic wild places in America. I am counting on you to move forward with a strong Comprehensive Conservation Plan for the Arctic Refuge that recommends Wilderness designation for the coastal plain.


My own part is in red. The form letter continues in the blue print. 

Here is the link if you want to add your two cents: https://secure.sierraclub.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=10437&autologin=true&s_promoCode=s_src%3D213CRHAN03&arg1=v2

Eating Up Our Futures

Yesterday I posted that I am not sure whether it is worth continuing this blog since readers don't pay much attention to my posts about climate change and the environment. There is no point to being prepared for other emergencies if you ignore the one that will kill you no matter what else you do. That one is climate change.

Climate change will not go away if we ignore it. It will only stop getting worse faster if we change what we are doing. This will require a whole new way of living. A little change will no longer do. The longer we wait to change, the worse the problem becomes. 

News people and people they cover say things about how we need to work on climate change for our grandchildren. That is total cr*p. We need to work on climate change for ourselves. More and more of the people who are alive now will be killed by the results of climate change from now on. 

Maybe you are feeling safe because you have not been hit by a super hurricane, super storm or swarm of tornadoes yet. You had better get over that safe feeling. Those aforementioned weather problems are going to keep getting bigger very fast. They will cover a lot more area. The place you live can become part of where those hurricanes, storms or tornadoes go.

If you think you are absolutely certain not to have any of those problems there will be other problems that can still get you. Drought, record heat spells, fires and power outages can reach areas not yet bothered by the storms and tornadoes.

There is one problem the news media are not mentioning. It is food. Growing food depends on the weather. You can not raise much food when the weather is totally unpredictable. The drought last year covered 60% of the agricultural land in the USA.

Food is one of the major exports of the USA. Last year's drought will have a big effect on food prices worldwide. Prices have already risen from it, but this year will show it worse. This is only the beginning of this problem. 

Food will become more and more scarce as climate change increases. Prices will go up even if you can get food, so more people will go hungry and starve.

There are fewer people raising food for the rest of the human race than ever before. We are very dependent on lots of machinery to raise our food.  

All of that machinery is adding to our climate change.

That isn't even getting into how we ship food clear around the world. It is normal to have food from many different and distant countries on our plates every day.

We are eating up our futures. We need to think about tomorrow, now.

Your Survival - The Real Costs Of Shark Soup Can Be More Than You Expect

Photos were recently posted of thousands of shark fins drying on roof tops in Hong Kong. The fins are often hacked off live sharks which are then thrown back into the ocean. This practice will soon result in extinction of many kinds of sharks. 

Humans have already caused climate change with our careless behavior. This shark killing is another careless behavior that will end up harming humans. 

All the systems on earth are balanced. When we take out too many parts of these systems, the whole system can crash. 

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1119063/outrage-over-hong-kongs-shark-fin-rooftop

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRxix6g1glNg_vphE676qMMvQCZA3wcCfg50515JgNpLnFJlS0v

Simple Pictorial Equation

Some "people" really are too stupid to live.

The human race is not advanced enough to live on other planets. We only have the Earth for now. It does not make good sense to destroy the one planet we need to live on.

Climate change is speeding up even more than pessimistic scientists expected. The only way for the human race to survive, is for all of us to stop what we are doing and work together as hard as we can to stop climate change and begin a repair process. 

This will not be easy. The hurricanes/cyclones, tornadoes, forest fires etc. which are the consequences of climate change will kill a lot of people before we can stop the progression of climate change and begin to make it better.

We can't escape the consequences of climate change. Neither the moon, other planets, or shelters on the Earth will protect us from the consequences of climate change. We all have to face it. We are running out of time to do this. Waiting much longer will be fatal for everyone.

It is time for us to face the problem of climate change. We don't have time to keep hiding this necessity from ourselves. We must start now.

Consequences Of How We Live

This post is the most difficult one I have written so far. I expect that once I post this, my readership will go away and my written "voice" will be gone.

This will not be the first time I have tried to get this message out. It has never worked very well before. I am going to try again anyway, because it is so important. It is so important that it is worth making this my last written message.

There is no soft way to put this: The United States is under a curse. The people of the United States did this to themselves. It does not come from me, I am only telling you what is already here. It does not come from Gd. It comes from many choices that were made over and over by the people of the USA.

The largest part of the climate change on the earth comes from the choices made by the people of the USA. We, the people of the USA, enjoy the highest standard of living by the largest group of people in the history of the earth. We have maintained this high standard of living by using more than our share of the natural resources of the whole world.

Most of us, (people of the USA), have not paid much attention to what it takes for us to enjoy our luxurious standard of living. We simply demand it of our political leaders. 

Some of what it takes for us to enjoy this luxurious way of life is not pleasant to look at. People die so that we can continue to enjoy our deluxe way of life. We turn our heads away and our lives go on as usual.

Every time we eat a hamburger that takes the resources needed to stay alive in a far away country, we bear the responsibility for those that die as a result. 

Every time we drive 20 miles, for an unimportant errand, and burn precious fuel that is more and more scarce, we are responsible for what happens to the people who have that fuel taken from their countries. 

If you choose to look, you can see terrible costs of the way we live. There are pictures and videos of poor people dying because they try to fill a tin can with fuel leaking from a well or pipeline in their own country. They are not trying to get rich. They are only trying to stay warm or cook.

This happens to keep our prices down at the gas pump. It makes me sad to sit on a bus bench and watch every single car going by with only one person in it, hundreds of cars, almost empty, all using up their cheap gas.

I have heard the objection raised against a cruel Gd, responsible for cursing people who do not worship or believe in him (her). I am not speaking of what happened in the past. I am not dealing with the past. 

I am talking about choices that people made in recent times and are still making now. Our choices make things happen. Our choices bring consequences, those amount to a choice to curse ourselves with those consequences. 

These consequences are regardless of our spirituality, churches or lack of, how we worship, don't worship, or look at the universe. Some of us have tried harder than others to do less harm and lessen the consequences of our lifestyle choices. I don't think any of us have done as much as we could have. We all bear responsibility for the consequences/curse that we bear.

Some of these consequences are easy to see. The easy to see ones are extreme weather due to climate change. We are seeing more hurricanes and bigger ones. We are seeing swarms of tornadoes, hundreds of them, all at once or one after another.We are seeing tsunamis doing more damage than we are used to. We see land being swallowed up by rising oceans.

We see glaciers, sea ice and arctic and antarctic ice disappearing at incredible speed. Drinking water is being ruined by careless behavior with mining, industrial and residence wastes. We are losing water that we need to keep our low food prices.

We turn our heads and refuse to look at the true costs of our cheap food, consumer goods, and fuel. Many of the things that we take for granted as part of our normal lives, have blood on them, whether we choose to see it or not.

We bear responsibility for that blood, whether we choose to see it or not. If you want to start looking at that blood and the true costs of the way we live, I have included some links to get you started:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xu1qfa_us-supreme-court-hears-shell-torture-case_news

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqywex_fuel-anger-protests-rock-nigeria_news

This video offers the clearest and easiest to understand explanation.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrafxq_riz-khan-the-other-oil-spill_tv



This article tells us some important truths, regardless of what we might think of who tells us.
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/World_News_3/article_7886.shtml


This article has a video with it that is short and easy to understand. It tells some of the real costs of cheap hamburgers.
http://www.berkeleyside.com/2012/08/10/news-group-serves-up-the-hidden-costs-of-hamburgers/

I hope that your reading this will make a change in your life. Doing the same things we have been doing may cost our lives. We have to do better.

I published an extra post about dealing with hurricanes today. I also have older posts about them. They include information and links for before, during and after hurricanes. If your local officials say to evacuate, please do so. It may save your life.

Even More Ways To Keep Your Cool In Hot Weather

Many countries and cultures of the world have invented ingenious ways of keeping cool in hot weather. Since we can expect hot weather to become hotter and more widespread because of climate change, we need to start using this pool of accumulated knowledge.

Hawaiians use Lanai style buildings to keep cool. I saw a building built in this style in a very hot part of California. It worked well there also.

Here is a quote about how the Hawaiian cooling architecture works:
"A traditional 'Tropical 3 Pitch Roof'' design features a shaded lanai facing South, which produces a cool ground.  Then convection draws the hot air out of the peaked roof and brings the cooler air into the living spaces.  HPA’s Energy Lab building resonates with the Tropical 3 Pitch Roof design.  The mauka (mountainside) winds travel over the roof creating an augmented vacuum.  This vacuum in the broken peak is even more effective than the original 3 pitch roof design."

The quote is from the energy lab at Hawaiian Preparatory Academy. Here is a link (There are pictures.) :
http://www.hpa.edu/academics/energy-lab/about-lab


Here is a traditional approach to cooling from India:

"Award-winning architect Manit Rastogi, who designed the academy, explains that baoli -- the Hindi word for stepwell -- are bodies of water encased by a descending set of steps.

Green lessons from Mughal architecture

"When water evaporates in heat, it immediately brings down the temperature of the space around it," he says."

This quote comes from this site:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/ancient-air-conditioning-architecture/

The quote below comes from the same source. 
"Centuries ago, latticed screens or "jaali" filtered direct sunlight into the palaces. The effect was decorative and helped reduce the heat."

Here is a quote from a site about traditional Iranian desert architecture:
"The buildings in the Iranian desert regions are constructed according to the specific climatic conditions and differ with those built in other climates. The desert buildings are equipped with air traps, arched roofed, water reservoirs with arched domes and ice stores for the preservation of ice. The operation of modern coolers is similar to the old Iranian air traps which were built at the entrance of the house over underground water reservoirs or ponds built inside the house."
Here is the site it comes from:
http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Architecture/wind.htm

There is an excellent 12 page PDF that covers the basics about how you can save up to 88% on energy cost by the choices you make when building a new structure. The decisions are divided into three tiers. 

The first tier is architecture itself. They assert that you can save 60% of future power use in the building by architectural choices to do with heating, cooling, and lighting.

The second tier is natural systems such as passive heating, cooling and daylighting systems. They say you can save another 20% of future energy costs in this stage.

The third tier is engineering, or design of mechanical equipment used in the building. The authors say you can save an additional 8% of future power needs in this stage.

There is a nice graphic of how this works and what is involved on page 9 of the PDF. It can be found here: http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/93/04700480/0470048093.pdf

It is suggested that the remaining 12% of normal energy needs can be easily met by use of renewable and local energy sources. I think this information is necessary to consider for people to have a chance to have a good life. That makes it disaster preparedness and risk reduction. 

We do not need to waste world energy resources the way we are doing now. It is possible to be comfortable, happy and healthy with much less energy use than we use now. I hope you will think about this and pass it on and put it to use.