Conceptual shelters that will protect us all from the perils of our rapidly changing environment: rising waters, extreme heat, rampant pollution and overpopulation
Posted 10.18.2010 at 12:40 pm
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The Oasis: The Positive Impact House harvests energy and water from the environment for self-sufficient living. Kevin Hand
PROBLEM: DESERTIFICATION / SOLUTION: POSITIVE IMPACT HOUSE
DESIGNER: ROBERT FERRY
One of the paradoxes of global warming is that even as it leads to flooding in some parts of the world, it will lead to severe water shortages in others. According to the United Nations, climate change is likely to reduce rainfall in drylands, which cover 41 percent of the land on Earth, including much of the American West. In 2007, the U.N. estimated that desertification could eventually affect some one billion people in at least 100 countries.
Yet architect Robert Ferry of Studied Impact Design, which operates out of Pittsburgh and Dubai, proposes that deserts need not be unlivable, or even uncomfortable. His Positive Impact House, a 3,200-square-foot single-family home, is not only designed to draw enough water and cool air from the environment to sustain five people, it will also send energy back into the grid.
Surplus Power: Roof-mounted solar cells and eggbeater turbines together generate nearly twice the house’s daily energy needs. Kevin Hand
Most of the year, the natural flow of air through the house’s windows would be enough to cool it. But during the hottest months, a fan would draw hot outdoor air into an underground chamber, where the temperature is 50ºF to 60º year-round, and then into the basement and up through floor vents. As the cool air warms back up again, it rises and escapes through a 200-square-foot interior courtyard, whose slim vertical cavity would create a wind tower.
Roof-Mounted Solar Cells: Kevin Hand
Nearly all of this technology is in small-scale use today. A nonprofit group called FogQuest is harvesting fog to provide water to Ethiopian villages. In Zimbabwe, the Eastgate Centre shopping mall uses huge, perforated, chimney-shaped structures to draw air in from the outside. (Zimbabwe is hot, but air that moves is cooler than stagnant air.) And in Orange County, California, the Groundwater Replenishment System makes sewer water suitable for drinking (gwrsystem.com).
Breezeway: In the hottest months, a fan draws air through a naturally cooling underground tunnel into the basement, where it rises into the house by way of floor vents. Meanwhile, 18-inch-thick, rammed-earth walls help keep the house cool during the day and warm at night. Kevin Hand
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Please see www.studiedimpact.com/residential1.shtml for original architect's illustrations. And for more information about the house and the active and passive integrated systems, please download the PDF file at: www.studiedimpact.com/images/PIH_Details.pdf
Robert Ferry, RA
Studied Impact Design
Attention the message above is a spam, to see the architect's work go to www.stephanemalka.com/ .
To have a direct link to self-defense go to:
http://www.stephanemalka.com/2010/05/auto-defense/
Uh, neither of you are spam. You're both different architects that are featured in this slideshow.
Maybe read the entire article before throwing out accusations.
Pwned
They should combine the nyc cables with the rainbow houses, rather than have the rainbows on the sides of skyscrapers, string cables between buildings and have them just suspended there.
Lol.
Really?
I agree! pwned! xD
Why don't we try to fix the climate change problem by maybe...recycling? Eco-friendly machinery?
I am guessing that human impact on environment and the growing population density problem could be answers with enough M.O.A.B.'s, and F.O.A.B.'s.
Instead of the normal reduce, reuse, and recycle. We should change it to reduce humans, remove some humans, and repair the earth. Get the pop back down to those magical balance numbers and force stop growth that is beyond life balance.
What happens to cable-tethered buildings during a hurricane? I hope the designers put some thought into storm-proofing!
Instead of the normal reduce, reuse, and recycle. We should change it to reduce humans, remove some humans, and repair the earth. Get the pop back down to those magical balance numbers and force stop growth that is beyond life balance
[URL="http://www.ogameoyun.com"]ogame[/URL]
www.stephanemalka.com/ .
Instead of the normal reduce, reuse, and recycle. We should change it to reduce humans, remove some humans, and repair the earth. Get the pop back down to those magical balance numbers and force stop growth that is beyond life balance
ogame oyun oyna
Lets pay women in poor over populated countries to get Depo provera shots every 3 months. Cheap and effective way to control human population and human/woman rights in those countries.
Quite native answers. If you believe in climate change models, and today stopped all modern life you would find that the 2080 problems will still come about because of the fact that there is already enough green house gases for that. And all anyone is currently talking about is decreasing the rate at which we increase the green house gases. And frankly even if we dedicated everything we had to the problem we would probably end up with nothing (economic suicide). Most of the money would be better spent and projects like above to handle the new world instead believe that humans are smart enough to know how to correct it.
As for cutting back on the population. Humans (especially in some parts of the world) are no different from deers, they will stop having kids when they starve to death. The same places that population is expanding out of control believe in large families and don't care what the women want let alone contraceptives.
Who cares, the worlds gonna die in 2 years anyways.
You idiots actually believe in climate change? Wow. Why are the icecaps bigger now? Why is the global temperature been going down over the last 7 years? And yes, the polar bear population is growing too. There is absolutely no evidence of global warming. Never has been and it will never happen. Besides, in 2080 we'll have been moving on to other planets.
These ideas range from silly to stupid - with little room inbetween.
1) Why the magnetic suspension? Do you love extra costs? Do you really think that old towers with saturated foundations can handle the strain? Floating housing cabled together would make much more sense in cost and safty.
2) I can see how happy the Franks would be to desocrate their symbolic structure with an internal trailer park. Cities so crowded that people attach to the sides of buildings like roaches? This has no hope of implimentations as it makes even Japanese minimilist modual micro-apartments seem charming.
3) Grid positive houseing only works when they make up a small amount of the grid. The variability alone is a grid-based nightmare. Far better to have a battery bank to charge and draw from on location and not be tied to the grid at all. The grid free homestead does have a great deal of American appeal, but will never be affordable enough for mass habitation. Geothermal heating/cooling works MUCH better with a liquid medium - just moving air will not create enough energy exchange to have a meaningful impact.
4) The flower walls are too structurally complex and, thus, ultimately fragile to ever be useful on a structure's surface. A simple series of gutters would catch as much water. Solar panels that can be pushed out as windows would do the rest - at far lest cost or fragility.
Practicality without asthetics, concept without practicality, and plans devised without a though of costs comes together to create this buffoonery.
"You idiots actually believe in climate change? Wow. Why are the icecaps bigger now?"
Why are you still beating your wife?
Arctic sea ice volume is near record lows: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
Antarctic ice is increasing on the antarctic plateau due to increased precipitation(warmer air contains more moisture) and shrinking at the edges. The net effect is a loss of ice mass: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/416685main_20100108_Climate_1.jpg
"Why is the global temperature been going down over the last 7 years?"
Because you don't understand statistical significance and like to cherry-pick among the noise?
I remember your ilk insisting on starting as a baseline in 1998, an unusually strong el niño year(which means the oceans absorb less heat than usual as opposed to a la niña years where oceans absorb more heat). When that got taken out you had to start the same dishonesty all over again from a new baseline year.
Let me demonstrate the method: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1980/to:2010/plot/gistemp/from:1990/to:1995/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1981/to:1986/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1998/to:2001/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2005/trend/
Those are 4 cooling "trends" from 1981 to 1986, 1990 to 1995, 1998 to 2001, 2002 to 2005.
The problem is that they're not trends; it's just taking a noisy time series and starting from outliers to the upside and drawing a trendline to nearby outliers to the downside. The underlying trend is this, and pretty soon your dishonest cherry picking is revealed(which is why you people keep having to start over from a new baseline year in order to claim that cooling has occured).
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1980/to:2010/plot/gistemp/from:1980/to:2010/trend/
Why is there this noise? One of the major reasons is that during a la niña more heat is absorbed by the ocean, cooling the air; during an el niño the opposite happens and less heat is absorbed by the atmopshere. Some years more sea ice breaks up and melts due to the action of wind, sometimes less. Some years there's a volcano erruption that lofts lots of sulfate particles high the atmosphere that cause a temporary cooling. Sometimes the solar output is a little higher, sometimes it is a little smaller. These sorts of events add lots of noise to the time series both to the up-side and down-side; so you have to have a longer time series to overcome this variability and see the underlying trend.
"Besides, in 2080 we'll have been moving on to other planets."
It's quite possible that we'll expend a trillion dollars to send a dozen people to live on Mars for a few years; but then we'll get bored and go home.
Don't count on space elevators, terraforming or mass migration to space habitats in our lifetime.
Climate change is nothing we can stop anymore at this point.
And one could argue why should we even try? I think unless nature throws a devastating disease our way, we will manage to kill ourselves in a gigantic war over resources long before climate change can do that.
And who cares about the environment in a war? It'll just end with us.
The solution?
The only possible way I see would be to drastically reduce the human population. Drastically, by 99.9%!
The best way to do this?
Possibly by castrating every man on earth. This way, no one would have to die of unnatural causes. This would have the added benefit of a much more peaceful world until mankind is (almost) extinct, and the entire action could be accomplished in - ONE day!
Crazy thought, of course. But one that would work!
Think about it, we would not be the only great civilization which had left the planet: The great Mayans, Persians, Romans, Mongolians, Egyptians, Greek ... all but gone.
But none of them took the entire natural environment down with them, we are to be the first to manage that - if we continue down the current path.
The people who would survive are those who should: The native people in the most remote regions of earth, who still truly practice carbon neutral living - as they always have.
Controversial thoughts, I know ... but what do we have to loose? Half of us nothing at all - and the other half (myself included) just two ...
@JPnyc
You are quite possibly the dumbest blogger I have ever read on this site, which is saying a LOT!
Why don;t more people doubt climate change? One or two big institutions are paid by the government to prove the theory, they have been caught hiding evidence that doesn't support their theory and the government wants to start a trillion dollar tax based on this. Gore has made $125 million personally off of this boondoggle and the carbon trace scheme would generate trillions more for "carbon traders"
climate change is fact...just because the politics suck does not change this...over-population is the root cause...trying to midigate the worst of what is coming is prudent...it will not be cheap but is necessary to have any chance of saving the worlds ecosystems that we are a part of...just because this is inconvienent is just tuff sh*t for us
HAZE:
Really? The world is going to end in 2012? Just because one group of ancients didn't bother writing more years down, doesn't mean that I'm going to buy a gun and blow my head off Jan 1 2012 at midnight. I'll just go to Wal*Mart and buy a new calendar like I do every year.
And ooo, look: I can write the number 2013, guess that makes it exist after 2012...
And to the rest of you climate fret-ters:
Climate change is inevitable. Unless we wipe out all humans, there is always a human footprint on the Earth that causes change. That's not to say that humans are the cause for an Ice Age. Think about it, we weren't around in the numbers we have now to cause a global disaster during the last Ice Age, so why is it humanity's fault that the Ice Age is a direct cause of our population going out of wack?
There is nothing anyone can say based on "studies" that makes up for the fact that change is inevitable and when it happens it happens. It's happened in the past, and it "could" happen again. Stop freaking out about it, enjoy your life and be aware of your surroundings. Death is just another part of life, so get over it.
@drchuck1 "Overpopulation" has nothing to do with global warming. It does not matter if you burn all the coal in 100 years or if you burn it all in 200 years. What matters is that you burn all the coal.
If you want to make the argument that a transition off fossil fuels is faster with less people you have to do some serious legwork here.
Note that it's not the clock you are racing against in the transition off of fossil fuels, it is the fossil fuel consumption. If you have half as many people it will take less than twice as long to consume as much fossil fuels, because they'll simply reach a higher per capita rate of consumption.
With less brains one would assume that innovation will be markedly slower, but by how much? The extremes are that the rate of innovation is directly proportional to the population and the other extreme is that the rate of innovation depends only on existing technology and is invariant of the size of the population. On the first extreme you'd end up consuming more fossil fuels before a transition from fossil fuels was feasible. On the other extreme you would consume less.
Until you pony up I will treat the population hysteria as unfounded BS.
Let's see.
Observed sea level rise < 3.0mm per year [1].
No evidence for any acceleration based on modern instruments [satellites + ARGO sea sensors]
For 2080:
70 years * 3.0mm per year = 210mm = 21cm = 0.21m
So < 21cm by 2010.
For those still using the BI system, that's < 8.3 inches.
Yep, we must start construction of those floating buildings right away.
______
References
[1] Global and Planetary Change
Sea level budget over 2003–2008: A reevaluation from GRACE space gravimetry, satellite altimetry and Argo
A. Cazenave a,⁎, K. Dominh a, S. Guinehut b, E. Berthier a, W. Llovel a, G. Ramillien a, M. Ablain b, G. Larnicol b
a LEGOS, OMP, Toulouse, France
b CLS, Ramonville St Agne, France
Al Gore left his car running while lecturing on climate responsibility in Gothenburg, Sweden.
A local news correspondent reported that while all "guests were politely advised to – if possible – use any form of public transportation to go to the event, in order to minimize CO2 emissions," Al Gore himself "arrived in a rental car from the airport, and subsequently left the engine running for the entire lecture. That is to say, about one hour."
Calling Mr. Gore “an embarrasment,” the reporter pointed out that local Swedish law prohibits leaving cars at idle for more than a minute. When Al Gore's people read the story on Climate Depot they denied it and sought a retraction. However, the reporter had the proof and brushed them off with eyewitness accounts published in the Swedish press. “Our post is accurate. The bottom line is this: Al Gore continues to arrogantly refuse to make himself available to journalistic inquiry. Just one example of how Mr. Gore continues to make travel and lifestyle choices that reveal his belief that making do with less is for you and me, but not for him.”
Al Gore was the one started all this nonsense hype. What will it take for you doomsdayers to see thru it all.