Georg Fürtges’s pride and joy is a green monstrosity standing in the basement of his house in the western German city of Essen, hissing quietly and consuming dark little pellets that look like worms. The pellets, stored in bins reaching up to the ceiling in another room, are made of compressed sawdust. And the monstrosity is a furnace that is at least three times as big as a modern condensing gas boiler. Fürtges, 55, and his wife Karla, 49, have 6.4 tons of the pellets stored in their basement, enough to meet their heating needs for a year and a half. The couple has decided to live in an environmentally friendly way.
They have been doing so for more than 20 years, partly because they have three children and are thinking ahead, beyond their own life spans. They have made mistakes, but they have also learned a lot. They remain convinced that their approach is the right one, but they also know that a life devoted to living green can only be had at a high price. Georg Fürtges spent an entire year researching heating systems before he recently replaced his old gas furnace with a pellet furnace combined with a solar thermal heating system. Some of the pipes in the house had to be replaced. All told, it cost Fürtges €27,000 ($40,200) to retrofit his home. He would have paid about €10,000 for a modern gas furnace.

“We believe that it will pay off in the long term,” says Karla Fürtges. The couple bought their small 1930s house in Stadtwald, an Essen neighborhood, 16 years ago. The heating system was old, the windows weren’t insulated and the house lacked effective heat insulation.

The couple began by insulating the outside walls. Then they purchased the costly new gas furnace and had vinyl thermopane windows installed. The insulation alone brought down their annual natural gas consumption from 22,000 to 12,000 kilowatt hours. An average household currently consumes almost twice as much gas.

Keep reading at Der Spiegel

Digging for a Solution

Dissolving mountains of rock might sound like a mad scientist’s dream. But it’s one of the proposals for speeding up the natural process of rock weathering, as a way of absorbing CO2.

Normal rainfall is slightly acidic, and over hundreds of thousands of years, it dissolves away mountains and other rocks.

The process pulls CO2 out of the air, locking it away in the form of minerals such as limestone.

A big operation for artificial rock weathering would need big mines, and a lot of electricity to chemically split seawater to make an acid that would be sprayed over the rocks.

The approach is “basically feasible,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California and a co-author of the Royal Society report.

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From Freshome:

The most common sources of internal heat gain are; appliances, electronic devices, and lighting. Be aware from where the heat is comming. Now if you have air conditioning, use it wisely. Don’t put lamps, televisions or other heat-generating appliances next to your air-conditioning thermostat, because the heat from these appliances will cause the air conditioner to run longer. The heat they produce will make it think your house is warmer than it really is, and your system will run harder than it needs to.

“In the early half of the 20th century, Serbian physicist Milutin Milankovitch first proposed that cyclical variations in the Earth-Sun geometry can alter the Earth’s climate and these changes can be discovered in the Earth’s geological archives, which is exactly what this research team, consisting of members from the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Canada, has done.”

They are quite amazing and very often overlooked because we just see them day by day. And I looked into clouds and found there is something called the Cloud Appreciation Society and they have a great website full of amazing images of clouds, cloud art, cloud poetry and memorabilia!

Check it out!

So, what is this story doing on a good news website? Well, there is good news in all of this. The Stern report can hopefully influence those who decide policies to act in favour of the environment and sway those who still doubt climate change is going to hurt us. British PM Tony Blair is already arguing for action.

We also have time to react to climate change according to Stern. He said “That’s why I’m optimistic – having done this review – that we have the time and knowledge to act. But only if we act internationally, strongly and urgently.”

“Treasurer Peter Costello said the new solar concentrator with a capacity of 154 megawatts would be built in Victoria state, and would reach full capacity by 2013.

“The project aims to build the biggest photovoltaic project in the world and this is by using mirrors which concentrate the sun’s rays on a power plant,” Costello said.”