By The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell. Little Brown & Company, New York, 2023. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2023. As I write this, a massive heat dome is
2023 Likely to be Among the Coolest in 20 Years
Despite what a lot of people say, this isn’t the “new normal.” Normal would imply a plateau in conditions—and that’s not likely to happen any time soon.
The Cascading Impacts of Drought and the Role Resilience Must Play
We need to examine where we build, how we build, and how to protect existing buildings and infrastructure.
The Uninhabitable Earth: A Difficult Read, But Important
“Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fifty-fold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves.”
Heat Waves and How to Plan for Them
While I have long been loathe to oversize heating and cooling equipment, it may make sense to plan for higher cooling loads that are resulting from climate change.
Hot day in Vermont
How could climate scientists be so confident, I wondered, in predicting that 2015 would be the warmest year on record, since we were only three-quarters through the year?
In an Age of Climate Change, Passive Cooling Won’t be Enough
We should continue to strive for buildings that don’t require mechanical cooling—which usually means starting with an exceptionally well-insulated building envelope—but we need to be realistic also by providing for mechanical cooling.
Municipal Governments Working to Make Their Cities More Resilient
I came away optimistic that the attendees in the room weren’t going to simply sit by and wait for action; they were going to make it happen.
An Awesome New Tool for Mapping Coastal Flood Risk
In my opinion, there’s no more useful resource out there to help us understand flood hazards in coastal locations.
Fundamentals of Resilient Design: Wet Floodproofing
Letting floodwaters into a building is an important resilience measure, but it has to be done in a way that prevents damage.
How California Can Model Dramatic Change
America will watch California respond to the drought, and I’m hoping that that can be a model for response to the even bigger—far bigger—challenge we all face with climate change.
Proposing a Resilient America Service Corps
Along with outdoors-focused initiatives, a Resilient America Service Corps could provide the labor needed for weatherization, installing window treatments, and carrying out deep-energy retrofits.
California’s Continuing Water Woes Call for Creative Solutions
“Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.” -Jay Famiglietti, Ph.D., NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Engineering Our Way Out of Global Warming: Is Climate Intervention a Global Warming Solution That Republicans Will Get Behind?
I am all for carbon-capture—both the research needed to better understand it and the implementation of strategies that employ it. But albedo modification (enhanced solar reflectivity) is a different story.
Views on resilient design by some leading architects
There’s a nice discussion about resilient design in Metal Architecture magazine that was just posted. It features Robin Guenther, FAIA of Perkins + Will; Greg Mella, FAIA of SmithGroup; Robin Minnery, the new staff leader on resilience issues at the American Institute of Architects; Jeffrey Dugan, AIA of Dattner Architects;
