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Climate Change: Up Close and Getting Personal

The ongoing debate on global warming doesn’t make much sense; but the responsibility of designers is clear.

Penny Bonda -- Interior Design, 10/2/2006 9:55:00 AM

According to the Department of Energy, residential and commercial buildings account for 40% of total energy consumption in the U.S.

U.S. Electrical Energy Consumption
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration; graphics by Architecture 2030

Months ago I wrote a column on climate change. My approach was not to question that climate change is happening—I truly believe that it is—but rather why we in the design and building industry should care and what steps we can take to slow its progress. Later, I also responded to a reader’s request and encouraged folks to see Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

I’ve received a retort from a reader—a global warming skeptic—who presents his views by referring to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. Professor Lindzen is articulate and his arguments persuasive.

I happen not to agree with him and neither do the vast majority of climatologists. A group of NASA scientists, headed by climate specialist James Hansen, released a report last week asserting that the Earth is the warmest it’s been in the last 12,000 years. “If further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know,” Hansen predicted. “The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today."

He is referring to changes currently happening during our lifetime.

Other recent developments lend credence to the argument.

One of the UK's best known entrepreneurs, Sir Richard Branson announced that he will invest $3 billion to fight global warming by committing all profits from his travel firms, including Virgin Atlantic Airlines, over the next 10 years.
The Clinton Climate Initiative has formed a partnership with 22 of the largest cities in the world to reduce carbon emissions and reduce energy use.
Wal-Mart, an organization fiercely focused on cost-cutting, has committed to reducing energy use in its stores by 30% as well as increasing the efficiency of its vehicles.
In support of the rapidly expanding interest in green homes, the USGBC and its partners recently committed to launching a campaign to educate consumers about the benefits of green homebuilding and to drive the kind of change needed to reduce energy consumption and global CO2 emissions.

A recent editorial in The Washington Post advises caution against making predictions about the hotly debated direction of global temperatures over time but concludes, rightly so in my opinion, that there is a decent chance that the NASA analysis will prove correct. Others are convinced that it’s the current speed of global warming that’s so alarming—0.7°C over the last 100 years, which historically has been the change per millennium—not per century.

If so, the preponderance of evidence suggests that we must act now. To a large extent, the responsibility is ours—the designers of buildings. According to the Department of Energy, residential and commercial buildings account for 40% of total energy consumption in the U.S. The statistics for electricity use are even more compelling.

Buildings can be designed to use less energy and even to become carbon neutral, using no fossil fuel greenhouse gas emitting energy to operate. The benefits go well beyond mitigating climate change: lower energy costs, cleaner air, better indoor environments, and freedom from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

A great source for information on these issues as they pertain to designers is Architecture 2030, a non-profit, non-partisan and independent organization, which seeks to conduct research and provide information and innovative solutions in the fields of architecture and planning, in an effort to address global climate change,” according to its founder, New Mexico-based architect Ed Mazria. “Stabilizing emissions in this sector and then reversing them to acceptable levels, key to keeping global warming to approximately a degree centigrade (°C) above today’s level” is the organization’s mission.

The question becomes, why wouldn’t we do this? My rebuttal to the global warming skeptics became personal in August when I traveled to Alaska and witnessed for myself the receding glaciers in Prince William Sound. Though the evidence of climate change hits between the eyes in our northern-most state, its dire effects will be felt around the globe. As former President Clinton said at the launch of his climate initiative program. “It no longer makes sense for us to debate whether or not the earth is warming at an alarming rate, and it doesn’t make sense for us to sit back and wait for others to act.” Designers take note.