Coming to you from the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, with news and updates on happenings and important topics from the event...
My first session today was Marketing and Sustainability: The tools + tips to tell your story.
This was an interesting session with presenters from Herman Miller. Gabe Wing, Herman Miller representative, spoke about storytelling, and HM's Earthright Strategy:
- transparency
- collaboration
- resource responsibility
- community driven
The idea being to "make a living or make a difference". Find your bee story - Look it up on the Herman Miller web site.
My late morning session was on Climate Change. This was part of the Master Speaker Series, with Katherine Hayhoe as the presenter. She is a scientist at Texas Tech, and involved in the ATMOS Research.
To pull out the bullet points of her presentation:
- Climate Change - it's the biggest health risk of the century
- It is the story of Energy Industrial revolution: coal, natural gas and oil
- 41% of US energy use is by buildings
- Energy use has increased by 400% since the 50's in the United States
- The invisible problem: invisible heat-trapping gases - Carbon Dioxide
- The United States has produced 30% of greenhouse gases over past 30 years. This is a higher level of GHG production than that of any other country.
- For the past 8,000 years of Earth's history, CO2 levels have varied from 180-300 in their historical ranges. In 2014, CO2 levels are now at 400 ppm.
- Our planet has seen a 43% increase in greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution
- The data shows a 30-year trend that is clearly warming
- Ice Age causes: changes in the earths orbit, tilt of axis wobbles and over long periods of time (1000's of years) the earth does gradually cool or warm.
- Temperature was trending down over last 6000 years, indicating a cooling cycle, until the industrial revolution. Now, temperatures are clearly and abnormally at higher degrees.
- Natural cycles move heat around the planet, but they do not heat or cool the planet over all. It is a transferring system; up one place, down another place. (Like El Nino)
- Oceans have absorbed a lot of the heat, more than the land.
Science shows that more than 100% of our planet's warming is caused by humans. The sun is in a cooler natural cycle, and axis wobble is in a cooling cycle, yet the long term trend since the beginning of the industrial revolution (the large extraction and burning of fossil fuels) shows greater warming, overcoming all the natural cooling trends and more, into a greater warming trend than is natural.
We are facing 3 choices when it comes to climate change
- mitigate - reduce emissions
- adapt - to the changes (our current infrastructure can not cope with changes to our climate)
- suffer - some suffering is inevitable; how much is up to us
For more information, visit www.katherinehayhoe.com
Stay tuned, as I'll be returning tomorrow with more topics and discussions from the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in New Orleans!
Michael Carlson