In upcoming years you will be hearing more and more about how climate change and global weirding changes what kind of houses we build. Issues that come to mind based on my own experience living in houses in New England for a few years now:
1. downpours — more and more we get rain in extreme events. No rain for a long time, the a downpour where it rains 2 inches per hour. Implications include inadequate gutters, more people wanting to store roof runoff for lawns/gardens.
“The Northeast has experienced a greater recent increase in extreme precipitation than any other region in the U.S.; between 1958 and 2010, the Northeast saw more than a 70% increase in the amount of precipitation falling in very heavy events (defined as the heaviest 1% of all daily events).”
–the regional Northeast report from the National Climate Asssessment in 2014
–http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/regions/northeast
2. tornados — it is becoming a common occurrence that we get storms with tornados. I am not sure what that means for home design, but probably something. hurricanes too will probably be more likely, which combined with general sea level rising means it’s getting a little crazy to live on the coast.
3. snowstorms — I believe I’ve read that over the next few decades that precip (including snow) will be above average. Combined with events like the “polar vortex” events that are also happening more (due to shifts in the artic) then this means that we will likely have more and more periods with deep snowpack — weeks where it snows, stays cold, snows again, stays cold, etc. So the amount of snow on roofs will pile up and we’ll have to deal more and more with roofs collapsing and ice dams.
4. heat — more and more we get very hot weather and it doesn’t cool off at night, which means for miserable sleeping if you don’t have AC and/or ventilation in each room. All sleeping rooms (especially) need ventilation air directly in the room. Otherwise (in my direct experience) what happens is the house thermostat might be set at 77 or 78 (typically comfortable in summer clothing) but the bedrooms will get warm when the doors are closed and there are bodies giving off heat, making the room warmer.
We have experienced this both in our traditionally insulated home and our superinsulated home in spring and summer.
What am I forgetting?
Filed under: erik-green, future, green
