The best informed guesses I can find about what we Australians might need to deal with in direct climate effects are hotter weather, stronger cyclones, a monsoonal rain pattern that moves south, (making it relevant not just to Darwin and far northern Australia but to Queensland and northern NSW too), a lower frequency of strong El Niño and more La Niña – which is good news for the eastern states…
Isn’t it stunning? This is the current position of all the cargo vessels in the world. Just cargo vessels – I’ve set the filter to remove the passenger ships, the tankers, the fishing vessels, all the other types of sea traffic. How do we prepare for when those ships stop, or, if we are smarter than I think we collectively are, when they start using fuel that is clean and…
The Bureau of Meteorology says that it’s likely that this will be an El Niño year, drier and warmer. That is, it says, on top of the drier and warmer conditions that climate change predicts anyhow for much of Australia, especially the south east. It brings with it an increased risk of extreme heat. And my ‘470’ research came to the same conclusion as this week’s article in The Conversation – Australia’s…
We made bamboo biochar on the weekend. There’s some impressive science behind the idea that biochar, and especially bamboo biochar, might be a cheap, fast, effective way to remove huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and add it to the soil. And biochar does such good things for soil quality.
We’ve done relatively little “renovation” in the conventional sense in retrosuburbia-ing this 1950’s cottage. In most cases, the embedded energy, and money, is more than would be saved by changing an old thing for a new one. This west wall is one of the few bits of real demolishing and rebuilding we’ve done.
Too many tomatoes for eating fresh but not enough for passata making yet, so it’s sun drying time. We have a dehydrator but often low tech is easiest. A dark coloured enamel plate with a dark tinted pyrex pie plate in the sun. Halved cherry tomatoes and some sprigs of basil, oregano, thyme. Easy peasy.
Much of the retrosuburbia writing about energy use and energy conservation that I see is about heating, but heating isn’t the issue here. Here, it is cooling, not heating that is the main challenge, even now let alone in the future.