BRAGBOOK: How You've Adapted To Climate Change

What I've done so far to adapt to climate change is miniscule and probably will be so in the future given the limits of my personal resources. We did a major efficiency upgrade in our heating and air-conditioning system as well as upgrading the efficiency and reliability of our emergency generator in order to improve our ability to withstand heavy weather events. I've also started installation of solar thermal panels for producing hot water for domestic use. We are trying to limit actual energy consumption with a number of other small changes in household and automotive energy use.

I'm retired so can put more time into efficient recycling of household waste and scrap

In addition I've put a lot of energy and money into clearing trees and brush around our rural home to improve protection against wildland fires which are increasing in frequency in our geographic location.

For the future I have some plans to come up with an everyday driver that gets substantially better mileage, further improve house insulation and add to existing water storage capacity (I have a well and 5K gallon tank.)

As to "jawboning", I doubt if my talk or writing is changing many minds; but hopefully my creative side has given a few sound bytes for others to use. The one part of my talk that I think is accomplishing something is the encouragement I give to my son and his work, of late in the solar panel industry. He's a capable mechanical engineer at the top of his game; but in spite of a 4 year stint at Solyndra as an individual contributor of some merit he couldn't overcome the tide of a failing business model. I continue to encourage him to stay with the "green" industry in one capacity or another; however, he is now attracted to a business that is much less affected by the winds of politics and fickle public opinion. ….. Ed Weldon

Nothing, Ed. That is because nothing really has changed in a way that is out of the ordinary (here). Even so, there would have to be evidence that extraordinary climate cycles were here to stay and not simply a aberration in the weather.

Nevertheless, we are planning changes to the homestead to make the cost of living lower. Getting our hot water from the sun is one thing. We have sun most every day in Florida.

When prices drop on photovoltaic we will probably add panels with an off-grid system to provide some limited emergency power.

I have been slowly replacing lamps with LED. We are beefing up emergency stores (food, etc.) as a precaution for any bad weather (i.e., hurricanes).

I am focusing on things that make life better for day-to-day living and adding a more robust toolkit for emergency needs (which has the highest return on investment), but as far as climate change goes, the rate of predicted change is so slow that I don't expect to have to make any fundamental changes in my lifetime.

Since you changed the title and thus the question, my answer is:

What climate change? Nothing has changed down here, so there is nothing to adapt to.

You've had serious drought conditions and wildland fires in Central Florida in the last few years. I don't recall anything like that in the mid 1960's when I lived in Florida not in the intervening period when I've lived in California and have been very conscious of wildland fire news anywhere in the nation.

That sounds llike a change in climate to me. But is is arguably a short cycle climate response as opposed to the long cycle effect postulated for man causes effects. If you live in an urban setting such changes may be less noticeable than they are to us rural folks and people in occupations affected by weather.

Ed Weldon

We had one large fire near us, but I honestly haven't lived here that long and what seems long to us is but a wink of the eye to Earth.

I would almost dare to say a wink if anything is far too long of time frame in comparison to the estimated lifetime this planet has presently logged in.

If the 4.5 billion years or so this planet has been in a solid state of being was condensed down into one years time the midpoint between the last two ice ages would have been roughly only about three and a half minutes ago!

A Chronology of the Earth

When I lived in Florida I had a heat recovery unit (HRU) installed on my home heat-pump HVAC system. In the summer it took the heat given off by the AC phase to heat water, so my regular water heater almost never ran in the summer -- free hot water. In the winter it took some of the heat generated in the heater phase to help heat hot water so in the winter my water heating bill was tiny. The HRU paid for itself within 3 years.

Where I live now -- I've changed out some incandescent light bulbs for fluorescents. I don't like them.

GA! USBPPORT and Anonymous.

Whether there is global warming or not, reducing one's energy consumption is important.

It would be interesting to calculate the payback for different technologies used to save energy. Their effect on quality of life and security is also important but should be considered separately.

I believe that AC and heat pumps are the equipment where it is the easiest to recover large amount of energy. It certainly beats the lighting by a high factor.

House insulation is another important area.

A desuperheater for the hot water is a $500 option when bought with the heat pump or AC unit. The average family in Canada spends about $300 a year on hot water. We certainly save half this cost. The payback is about 1.5 year. I had mine for over ten years without any problem. One simple heat exchanger and you save hundreds of dollars a year in hot water bill.

Up north, we often heat the swimming pools. I actually dump all the heat from the AC to the pool using a large heat exchanger and don't need any other heat source. Free heat! Initial cost ~$2000. Similar to an electric heater. Payback? 2-3 years.

Has anyone done a calculation for CFL or LED lighting taking into account the effect of the losses on the heating and cooling cost?

I have been using CFLs for some years now. One or two died young, but I have otherwise had pretty good life out of them. I've had to play around with color tones ("daylight" looked too industrial in the dining area, for instance).

This is Ketchikan, which is mostly cool but seldom really cold. The thermostat is around 60-65°F. We simply wear a sweater or vest indoors, just as we would outdoors much of the time.

I'm presently in a rental with inefficient heating, but if I can build my dream retirement chalet, it will have an air-coupled heat pump.

I like the CFL's not only because they cost less but also because the produce less heat. The little task lamps in my workshop (for the lathes, mill, drill presses, grinders, workbenches) do not heat their shades too much, are nicer to work near in the summer and don't cry to be shut off immediately. I use them over my model train layout and that keeps summer temperatures in my train room tolerable. I have had infant mortality problems with perhaps 10%; but that is less now than when they first came out.

Oh yeah, I can leave more lights on when the generator os running the house. ......Ed Weldon

Nothing. My decisions are made on the reality that I percieve/live and simple economics.

I look forward to heating my house with wood for another winter.

If there's one thing that made my home so efficient to heat, it was framing with 2X6 for the extra insulation space. My heating cost/consumption is well below average, whether I heat with wood or electric. (Firewood started to become scarce and expensive when oil went sky high a few years ago, and everybody switched to wood..)

By mostly working at home, I've avoided the commute for quite a few years.

This year I got back to growing my own vegetables, and hardly bought any imports since the spring. (We are not self-sufficient in this region, the vast majority of food is trucked in.) I'm growing open pollinated and heirloom varieties, to select and save seed from the ones that do well here, and share with my farmer friends. No pesticide or chemical fertilizers ever in my garden.

Hi Ed,

Good post, but I can only report my own simple changes.

The first area is general lighting. 90% (figuratively) all our home lighting is now florescent, that largely because more formats are becoming available. One area that may be hard to touch is my unheated workshop, which has both florescent lighting for the warmer months, and incandescent for the cold months ... not sure how to solve that.

Another area is recycling. That should be nothing new, but generally anything out of our 'norm' or 'traditions' doesn't happen. Now, after some time to 'learn', the recycling has become the 'norm'.

Thanks for the post ... it will be interesting to see what is reported.

Kind regards ....

I can think of lots of areas less worthy than mental exercise for your efforts. ........EW

GA from me.

Why does making prudent decisions have to tie in with saving the planet?

You're just doing what works and saving yourself money.

This is a loaded thread..................hence my weak attempt at humor.

So far, here in England where I live we havn't seen any so-called climate change, so I haven't done anything!

As others have said, not because of climate change, but to be "green" and save money, I have 12'' of insulation in the Attic and use some fluorescent lights. I have a big tree in front (east side) which gives some shade and reduces my air conditioning consumption. I have a walk-out basement so there are 2 stories taking sun on the south and the west sides. I put a cover over my deck which shades the sliding glass door on the west in the summer. I have a grapevine which runs along wires. This shades a lot of the south side and about a third of the west side.

I am in the process of painting the lower portion (stucco over concrete) white. When I put my hands on the original gray portion in the afternoon, it is noticeably warm. The white part feels like nominal (10-20 degrees cooler.) Next spring I plan to paint the upper potion (bricks) white on the south and west sides. I believe this will lower my air conditioning bill a lot. The grapevine is a lot of work to keep trimmed.

When in High School I often walked by a Bank made of red bricks. After they painted it white, the reflection of heat was very noticeable. It didn't have air conditioning, and a clerk told me that the painting had reduced the indoor temperature by 15 degrees.

How am I adapting? What exactly am I adapting too? A supposed human induced climate shift that could takes many lifetimes to happen that wont negatively affect those of us who don't live by oceans or in already nearly intolerably hot and/or nearly uninhabitable locations already?

Just for relative example of a change how many of you would drop over dead if the typical temperatures you see every day of the year where increased by say 10 -15 degrees F over what you see now let alone the supposed 1 -3 degrees F they think it could?

For me this is what I would see, on the coldest days of winter here that would mean it would only get down to around -20 F instead of around -30F. Well thats not going to inconvenience me any. In the hottest days of sumer I would see a few weeks of 100 - 115F instead of 90 - 100F. Nope that wont kill me either nor will it bring any of the other life activities I enjoy to a halt nor will it kill off vast amounts of plant or animal life in the area either. (Dang my electric bill would go up some but then I do have my own wind power to compensate for that anyway). For the rest of the year what I would see is many more days of warmer more pleasant outdoor activity's along with faster growing crops in the fields!

So what am I doing to adapt? Well I find that the climate change by human actions theory to be highly skeptical at best but in good scientific interests I am trying to accept that theory and follow through on willingly and knowingly pushing that change forward to the best of my abilities and resources not slow it down or stop it.

As far as my personal adaptations first off I have been taking emissions control systems out of my vehicles and the vehicles of anyone who asks in order to lower personal fuel consumption just to save money and believe me I have done a lot of them over the years too!

Second, I drive more now since I can afford more fuel!

Third, since I am driving more I wear out tires more so instead of sequestering that carbon in my old tires, plastics, and garbage,by putting it in a dump which I have to pay for I light it all up on my boiler to produce additional heat for me in the winter and to cut down on my wood burning efforts or just toss it in the burn barrels in the summer!

Fourth, to further cut down on heating fuel costs I am going to be switching to burning more coal now and will be installing a new coal fired heating system in a family members garage soon.

Lastly I am open and willing to share any information that I find to be scientifically plausible that suggests that we do not make enough of a difference in the grand scale of how this planet works in order to hopefully further inform others that what the present political based agendas and biased science is not accurate or correct or is at minimal highly biased and one sided in the equations/opinions of how things apparently work.

You can love me or hate me I really don't care either way but do know that good science and scientific process has error factors and variants in it that when dealing with very large scale complex systems, such as planetary climate and life cycles can easily and typically have +- margins of error of over 70+% either way, which means that if one part of the whole function only accounts for a few percent at best in theory its greatly swamped by the unknown variables in that +- 70+% that cant be accurately or precisely measured.

If you want to know more about my opinions and views and how I come to them feel free to read my many comments and posts I have made here relating to my views of environmental numbers and other such things. I am not hiding anything from anyone about what I think and why I think it at this time.

I can't say that I have made any difference in climate change. I can't say that I have NOT made any difference in climate change, either. I don't take as many trips on airliners as I used to when employed in the "high-tech" world, but the plane still flies, so I can't say I've done any good there, except to lighten the load on the plane by a couple hundred pounds.

I think tcmtech's approach to the climate picture is a little arrogant, (and maybe slightly overstated for effect) but I can't wag my finger at him and say that what he is doing will kill us any quicker. But, if everybody here in Phoenix had his attitude we'd be running with the headlights on 24/7, due to the horrible pollution, but he won't care.

I still think Yellowstone will kill us before the climate does.

I don't see my views as being any more overstated and arrogant than that of those who seem to think that what they perceive to be happening in their or someone else's backyards as a negative impact on themselves should be reason for me to change my life let alone spend/waste more of my time and money on things that neither of us can or could presently prove to matter on the grand scale of things.

Science is neither good or bad and so is change. Its all about how you perceive it. Whats a bad thing to you and your part of the system may very well be a vast improvement to countless others in different parts of the system as a whole.

What that means is good scientific analysis and process does not favor one part of the equation and ignore others rather it must account for all parts or the equation or it is otherwise incomplete and the answer is invalid.

I have no desire to debate science with a tire burner. Do you smoke, too?

Actually, you should be driving with all the car lights on 24/7. This reduces your chances of accidents by about 25% according to an European study. It is a good investment even if it cost you $5 a year in fuel and $10 in bulbs. One small accident avoided more than pay for a lifetime supply.

The Canadian government picked this up and forced manufacturers to have "day time" running lights. Unfortunately, the bureaucrats screw up even the good ideas and didn't ask for the red positions lights at the back to be on as well. Now, we have plenty of car drivers who think that their lights are on at night but their rear is all dark and invisible... It would have been simpler to just ask for all the lights to turn off automatically when the engine is stopped like on most European cars but they had to ask for another position on the switch that confuses the average driver.

Well, now, let's see about that. Burning the extra fuel needed to run the lights all the time on 25 million cars is surely adding much more junk to the air than tcmtech's tire burning madness. He probably disables his daytime running lights, too.

So, in the end, maybe more lives will be lost due to the added air pollution than will be saved by the running lights.

Go figure.

If you want to save people from air pollution, ban smoking, new furniture, new carpets, and all the cleaning/perfume sprays. Force everybody to live outside of their homes because they are usually more polluted than the air by the highway.

The 100W or so of lights on your car represent 100w/(50HP x 750w) = 0.27% of the fuel consumed by the car.

How much pollution is caused by repairing car accident?

What about the personal injury and death?

Don't get carried away. I was merely pointing out that each time we do something like daytime running lights, there are unresolved penalties that must be paid. I hate those metering lights at freeway entrances. They cost millions of gallons of gas to be burned in the name of "smooth merging".

Do they save lives, no!

Never mind, I'm loosing my objectivity and I have to go get burgers and hot dogs for today. It has cooled off to 110°F today, so cooking outside will be fun.

Have a good lunch!

(Don't burn too much gas on the BBQ... Ha Ha!)

Thanks! You, too.

I cook with mesquite wood, harvested from trees/brances that blow over in the downtown area where I work. My crews keep me well supplied. What we don't use, goes in the landfill.

Cheers.

Once again I think you are asking the wrong question [see revised title]

Your question is needlessly provocative

no surprise you get TCM's usual, he believes ripping everything emission related will always reduce consumption, which is only correct in some cases, no amount of evidence to the contrary will change his mind [ask K Fry], placebo's are powerful things

"no amount of evidence to the contrary will change his mind [ask K Fry], placebo's are powerful things"

Ah! Now you are getting it!

The main reason I took the strongly opposing side to this is to show that just as you perceive me to have a biased/placebo effect going on so do most everyone else who is in this debate. The difference is I am at least dimly aware of it and used that knowledge of it to show that we all have preconceived and highly biased opinions about what each and everyone of use sees as scientific process or lack there of.

What I perceive behind most peoples actions are no different than mine, I just tend to be more open about my real reasons which as with most everyone else is to reduce my financial expenditures in any rational method I can. Calling it 'Going Green' is purely secondary feel good paint to cover the main reason which is I as well as most everyone else does not like spending money on stuff that we do not view as personally gainful in some manor.

Am I really a tire burning lunatic? Well thats for me to know and everyone to guess at. (BTW defeating the emissions systems on Fords does really give noticeable gains but no it does not work equally on all brands of vehicles. Most but not all.

I didn't call you a lunatic, just a tire burner.

If I remember your boiler set up

the tire burning is probably not that big a deal, the thing runs hot

just south of Ed is Kettleman city, where they burn thermally oxidize all manner of hazardous shyt legally

it's all a matter of perspective

Hey now don't be giving away my secrets.

I don't want people to stop thinking about the other side of this debate namely the what if scenarios where the overall good of humankind could very well be served gainfully from a climatic upswing in average year round temps!

I am just trying to use a little 'other side of the coin' perspective to help people realize that not everyone has the same views, goals, opinions, scientific reasonings, data, personal preferences, etc etc etc just because the media and politicians, and their gullible followers regardless of occupation, keep trying to paint one picture and say that it is the only one. That in itself does not mean that there are not other ones worth looking at!

To be truly scientifically minded one has to look at all of the parts of the whole body of information, even if they do not find some parts to be tasteful or initially agreeable with, otherwise its not science they are following but religion.

Your question is needlessly provocative

Exactly. My carbon footprint is fairly tiny compared to most. However, I don't do anything I do because of climate change..............it's purely economics.

Nor do I sport bumper stickers and tee shirts that proclaim that my way is the greatest.

Just for the record ........ "Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the "average weather," or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.[5]"

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate

I highlighted the main point in bold. .............So for practical arguing points I think d/dt for the 30 year runing mean of any specific measure is the most relevant statistic. .......Ed Weldon

That may be a tough one.

For one thing, 30 years represents most of my life span (so far) and probably the same for most of us.

Second, most people move more than once during that 30 year period. For me I have moved multiple times and lived multiple states across the USA. I simply do not have enough consecutive data points to draw from.

Third, for the few of us that may have remained static for the last 30 years they must rely on memory of the past, which will be impacted by many other personal factors in one's life.

I have seen far more pervasive changes due to urban sprawl in the areas I have lived. New roads and new blocks of homes change the landscape considerably over the period of a few years to a few decades.

You make a very interesting point. For the major portion of the population changing climate is something they cannot perceive themselves for the reasons you cite. An oldster like me who has lived 33 years of his adult life in the same place and who is an observer of weather and local nature conditions is a rare bird in today's American society. It is perfectly reasonable for people to be sceptical of such a point of view.

The other point is that not all of us are suffering from the effects of even 30 year mean climate change. Some benefit as has been already suggested in another topic. There is a zone of land that is experiencing shorter winters and longer summer growing seasons without the drought conditions that are showing up in lower latitudes.

Where I live in coastal California we are beginning to see a summer cooling trend unlike any in the past 30 years. We are also seeing a longer and better defined sunny rain free winter weather break centered around the beginning of January when a general high pressure zone prevails over the West Coast and the jet stream seems to run over the state of Washington and down into Colorado.

Ed Weldon

You should have posted this caveat in the OP.

No reasonable person would assume that a period of 30 years could define any climatological trend that would impact any conditions on the surface of the planet.

lyn - I never even though about the exact definition of climate until today.

Not sure it pays to think too deeply about the question one poses on CR-4 other than laying out the details of what is a specific technical discussion.

Anyhow in this thread it's pretty apparent to me that most of us have done the same kinds of things for reasons that have more to do with the cost and/or scarcity of energy and the desire to show off our engineering skills a bit rather than some actual or anticipated climate change. So we are quickly off into some friendly philosphical meanderings having only a sideways relationship to the OP.

Ed Weldon

Well,

After all there's not too much we can do individually to solve these problems in 30 years.

Short term fixes won't do it.

America has bigger problems to deal with in the short run and the solutions are going to require everyone who has any comfort zone left to give up some of it. That includes the people who obsess over global warming and many other environmental issues. ...... Ed Weldon

For the record.... 30 years is a blink of an eye to world climate. If we had climate change, we should be breaking records at least once a month if not once a week, and the record we break should be last year. That is not happening. Whenever I hear we broke a record it is usually 10 or more years ago, and often over 50 years. Anybody have any real data on that?

I work at home which saves me maybe 2 gallons a day on fuel for my truck. My wife works about 1/2 mile away and walks to and from work, weather permitting (usually with me and the dog). I live in town now (instead of up in the mountains) and have a supermarket (with clothing, hardware, pharmacy, furniture, appliances and electronics) about 2 blocks away, several restaurants, and a pub. My total annual mileage has gone from ~30K to ~3K miles. My seven year old truck will probably outlive me at this rate. Before I relocated I was spending ~$1500 per month for electricity, propane, gasoline and firewood. I think it's down to ~$150 per month now.

I've replaced almost all my incandescents with CFLs, and the others with quartz halogens. I turn them on only when I need them.

My house has 6" walls with R-19, R-30 in the attic and sub floor, and dual glazed windows. The furnace is high efficiency natural gas, the type with a plastic exhaust pipe that emits steam like a slow boiling tea kettle. The house is smaller than I would have liked, but that's part of why its so efficient. I moved to an area with mild weather, and use the air conditioner a few days a year.

I recycle cans, paper and plastic bags. The local trash company isn't set up to recycle glass bottles, so I leave them by the street in a bin for the homeless people who get cash for them at the market. I collect odd pieces of metal and wood to build things I need (or want).

I grow as much of my fresh vegetables as the weather will permit on my 1/4 acre lot, using my own compost as fertilizer.

I buy local as much as possible. For things I can't get locally I do as much shopping as possible on the internet, which saves a lot of driving time and fuel. Since the UPS and Fedex trucks stop by just about every day (for my business) the extra fuel for delivery is minimal.

To be honest I've made these little changes mostly because I was tired of pissing money away. I decided to rent rather than buy because (1) I'm a compulsive remodeler, (an expensive and wasteful hobby) and (2) I don't ever want to be a prisoner to the real estate market (it took me over two years to sell my last home). But I did select the location (Willamette valley) based on climate models, looking for a place where fresh water would likely be available and where a little heating up would not be a big problem. In the process I've seriously reduced my 'carbon footprint', and my personal share of the balance of trade deficit. If AGW is real (and I suspect it is) then that's another benefit.

I think we all have a tendency to get sucked into consumerism in the developed world (I certainly did), and the contagion is spreading rapidly. But maybe I was lucky to have parents who grew up during the great depression. Even though my family made decent money they were reluctant to buy anything new. As a kid I learned to make my own toys, work in a garden, fix things that were broken, and entertain myself. It felt awkward growing up that way since most of my friends had 'cool new stuff' (as seen on TV) and I had 'weird old stuff'. Now that money is tight I feel pretty good about it. It hasn't been a difficult transition to me - more like getting back to my roots. Anyway that's about all I have to brag about at the moment...

I haven't changed anything since I haven't seen any changes.