Friday, March 1, 2013

Getting Real with Climate Change



English: Cover page cuverture Turning the Tide...
Cover page cuverture Turning the Tide On Climate Change (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There's a new online tool called Reality Drop from The Climate Reality Project, along with Arnold Worldwide, built to spread the truth and destroy denial around climate change. This is the REAL information from scientists' decades of research, not government or corporations. Give it a try.

Man-made climate change is here: A reality we can no longer ignore. We see the impacts in our everyday lives, from extreme superstorms, to heat waves, to massive wildfires and droughts.

But Dirty Energy companies and their allies have spread lies and confusion about climate science. Their "think tanks" produce false theories. Their "experts" spout false claims. They flood online comment streams with false information.

The result? People still aren't sure whether we should do anything about climate change - or if it's even happening. The media doesn’t report the facts straight about climate change - or worse yet, they don’t cover it at all.

Reality Drop's mission is to reveal the denial and deception around climate change, spread the truth, and clear the way toward real solutions.

We're long overdue for a national conversation about the carbon pollution that’s warming our planet. We can make this conversation happen… and we can relentlessly call on our leaders to move us toward a clean energy future.

We have something on our side that no amount of money can buy: Reality.


Learn more about how to participate in this earth-saving effort at www.realitydrop.org.

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Reclaim your Mud Room

From Trish Holder's Greenspiration Home blog, writer Kim Whitley-Gaynor tells of her and her husband's bold green-building mud room project which incorporates a whole bunch of great reclaimed vintage materials:


We live in the land of sugar sand. Sand so fine that it’s almost impossible to keep from tracking it indoors.

English: Reclamation yard, Moss Lane, Macclesf...
Reclamation yard: bricks, stone, chimney pots, fountains, and more... (Image: Wikipedia)
After we bought our house in Alto, Texas, we found that we were having to vacuum the kitchen — (which was the room we entered from the back door) – every few days. That got really old.  Really, really fast.

I never thought I’d need or want a mudroom. I thought mudrooms were needed just for snowy, muddy areas. But it occurred to me that this might just be the solution for our almost daily cleaning predicament.

So, my husband and I started discussing adding on a small mudroom to the back of our house. Last summer when it was time to start our window, insulation and siding replacement project, we knew that the time was then or never to build on a small mudroom.

Reclaimed Materials for Building:

We knew we wanted the room to be large enough to be functional and roomy enough, but small enough to keep costs low. We knew we had plenty of reclaimed lumber from our very first old home salvage project to cover most of the material costs, but we knew we would still had to factor in other expenses like labor, electrical supplies, lighting, insulation, roofing, and yes, more lumber.

After we considered everything, we realized that the pros far outweighed the large con of having to clean the floors every other day, so build it we did.

We finished the addition months ago, but have taken our time furnishing and finishing it. (When you’re salvaging old houses 5-6 days a week, there’s not a lot of time or energy left over. So frustrating when you’re wanting to get some home improvement projects done!) Plus, I wanted to find the perfect antique bench, and while I wanted it to appear instantly - (Yeah, I am impatient sometimes) - it took months to find.  READ MORE


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One Man's Trash...

Image via Wikipedia.
Speaking of salvaged, reclaimed, and upcycled materials. Check out this cool and informative graphic via the Open Architecture Network on the various possibilities of re-purposing building materials for home building - green-building to be precise.

In a statement quoted from them on Wikipedia, the organization describes their purpose as follows:

"The Goal of Discarded Dreams, Need not be Nightmares is to repurpose 1,000,000 discarded mattresses by creating a consumer product. We have outlined a strategy to implement/produce the design. We see this as an amazing opportunity to create a product that not only appeals to consumers, and alleviates landfills of unwanted mattresses, and creates a product that begins to provide solutions to the key societal issues of homeless and unemployment."

Visit this link for a higher resolution view of the diagram. There are loads of ideas to consider. Time for me to get working on that roof right now. Happy up-cycling y'all.

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2 comments:

  1. I try to recycle whenever I can. Never even thought about where our old mattress was going when it was hauled away last month. I'm impressed that someone is thinking about creative ideas for all those old mattresses!

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  2. It's so discouraging to reflect on how the media has managed to distort the facts. It appears as though scientists are divided on the issue of global warming, when in reality agreement that human-caused global warming is responsible for rapid climate change is basically unanimous in the scientific community.

    Websites like this inspire me and give me ideas for ways I can help reduce my negative impact on the environment. Keep up the good work!

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