From Outside in Climate Change Effects on Indoor Buildings

7/28/2019 From Outside in Climate Change Effects on Indoor Buildings

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FROM OUTSIDE IN : CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECTS ON THE INDOOR ENVIRONMENT

PART 1

DR. JOHN D. SPENGLER: Well welcome to our course, Human Health and Global

Environmental Change.

And today we're going to be talking about a topic about climate change and

its impact on the built environment, offices, our homes, schools, and the

implications to health.

We titled this Climate Change Hit Home.

And part of this presentation I gave with Vivian Loftnass, who is an

architect and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

And we gave this presentation to the US Green Buildings annual conference

that was held in San Francisco last year, called Green Build.

And this gave us an opportunity to speak to them about the issues of

climate change indoor environments and health.

And it was an important audience, because these are the architects.

These are the planners.

These are the builders.

Some 15,000 strong come to this annual meeting.

And we had a room full of several hundred that were interested in this

topic of climate change and health.

And we also thought that this was an opportunity to bring climate change

into the conversation, or broaden the conversation of climate change,

because up until this time, it really was in the domain of the climate

scientists to talk about the impacts on the outdoor environment.

And as a result of a National Academy of Science committee

that I served on--

Vivian was my co-chair--

we were able to explore this in some depth.

In fact we list on this page where you can actually download the entire


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report that we had prepared for the National Academy of Sciences Institute

of Medicine.

So the learning objectives is first to understand that relationship.

Why would climate change even have an effect on indoor environments?

After all, we go indoors to avoid the variations of weather, and temperature

extremes, and climate.

So we always thought that this was our safe haven.

But if we really understand this, that is we attempt to reduce greenhouse

gases through mitigation efforts, that has an impact on our buildings and how

we operate our buildings.

We also have to look at it from the aspect of adaptation.

The things that we do to adjust our urban scapes, our homes, our offices

in response to climate change issues, also have an implication to

ventilation, to materials that we use.

So to understand that in a deeper context is what we

would like to get across.

And then I think we'll leave it on an upbeat note.

There are strategies, whether to reduce the impacts of climate change

on people, reduce the impacts in out urban areas.

There are some strategies that we would like to bring forward for

consideration.

Well Winston Churchill said, many years ago, that we shape our

buildings, and then our buildings shape us.

And it is so true.

Our buildings consume energy.

They consume materials.

They affect our health, because of the time that we spend indoors.

They shape our social interactions, and they help us build function.

So they're so essential to who we are as human beings.


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But maybe we're not that unique.

As I show you in this picture of this modern office building where we have

built the structure, and the facade is the barrier between the variations of

the outdoor environment and what we try to create as a consistent,

predictable, manageable, indoor climate, indoor environment.

And so the boundary is right at that interface.

Other species also build their environments and shape their

environments.

And here's a picture from Australia of a termite colony who builds these

structures.

And in fact those that study those ecologies of termite colonies have

understood that they're effectively building an air conditioning system

that allows the digestion of bacteria that goes on deep under the ground

producing heat, and then up through channels that they have built in these

mud structures to create a draft and ventilation to cool what is happening

in that colony of termites.

So it's pretty fascinating looking at the analogies of nature in its attempt

to build structures and what we do.

Well first of all, this has been well known for some time, because the

Environmental Protection Agency has had an office for indoor air quality.

And surveys of scientists, general public, and actual examination of the

risk of the exposures that we encounter indoors, radon, lead,

combustion byproducts, out gassing from materials.

Turns out that indoor air pollution ranks among the highest of public

health risks.

And that still today we are building many, many buildings that as we begin

to occupy them, they're not really fit.

They haven't really met good standards for indoor air quality.

Some 30% of new or renovated buildings fail to meet and achieve good air


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quality standards for indoor environments.

And I've seen this true throughout the world in the rapid buildup of

buildings in the Middle East and in China and in India and elsewhere.

Oftentimes the attention that should be paid to the very purpose of

providing good, air quality, good environmental conditions for the

occupants is the thing that is overlooked.

So what are we talking about?

So in this picture is just a set of sources that we've come to recognize

as of concern.

So you see combustion going on.

You see other materials.

And you say, why am I showing you this?

I'm showing you pictures of outdoor air pollution, traffic for example

that can penetrate indoors.

Because all over the world in the densification of cities, more and more

people are living very close to these transportation corridors.

So what are we looking at?

ETS, that's environmental tobacco smoke.

NO2 CO, carbon monoxide CO, combustion.

VOCs, volatile organic compounds, those things that are in our building

materials or in our personal care products or in our paints that

evaporate into space, into our indoor space, volatile.

So that's why they're called volatile organic compounds.

We've known lead, that is in leaded paint, has been an issue for a long

time in this country in particular, as that paint ages and flakes off and

then can be ingested by mostly toddlers and younger children.

Moisture, we'll talk a lot about moisture in this lecture.

Chemicals that are in pesticides for example, or chemicals that are coming

out of the glues and the resins of many materials, like our oriented


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strand board or our pressed board or plywood.

Sometimes they're glued together with materials that then outgas in the for

of formaldyhyde and other compounds.

And of course we share our indoor spaces with other living species.

Sometimes we invite them in, if they're our birds, or cats, or dogs,

or turtles, snake's that we might, hamster's that we might have as

household pets.

But sometimes they are not invited it, and they might be mice and rats and

cockroaches, bed bugs and dust mites.

So there's a whole variety of other organisms that like to cohabitate our

indoor spaces.

And there are implications, health implications for that.

So let's look at this.

So there is a broad range of effects that can occur in humans as a result

of exposures to these compounds or fibers or materials indoors.

And they can affect our health.

They can affect our comfort.

And they can affect our productivity in our indoor spaces.

That's why if we see that climate change can change that risk, then it

is important to understand in more detail.

So even if you didn't believe the climate models, whether you think it's

going to get warmer or wetter or hotter in different parts of the world

and over what time frame, you should at least be cognizant of the data, the

data that comes out of direct observations, ground sensors,

satellite measurements, people reporting in from all over the world,

and good quality data that tells us things about sea level rise, about

surface temperatures, about the intensity of storms, about the

frequency of extreme events of precipitation or heat, shrinking of

ice melts and glaciers in the Arctic regions.


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So this is hard evidence that has been in front of us for some 40 years, as

we've seen these trends emerge.

We know that these can have very severe consequences.

So what has been well recognized and studied and reported on was the heat

wave that swept across Western Europe, with intense temperatures in France, a

little bit into Spain, but certainly through the Netherlands and Belgium

and into Germany and Poland and elsewhere.

With the reported as a consequence of this, some 35,000 excess deaths were

attributed to these heat waves.

I could fast forward to 2010, when that kind of heat pattern really

shifted further to the east, and temperatures in Moscow were oppressive

for weeks on end, where the pollution from fires in Siberia, fires around

Moscow, led to horrible air pollution conditions.

So the combination of the temperature, the heat stress, and the pollution,

official reports out a lot of Moscow saying that daily mortality rates in

the greater metropolitan area of Moscow more than doubled during these

heat wave air pollution episodes.

Normally something around to 165 people might die on average a day.

Numbers were coming in above 700 mortality cases.

Well just last year, in fact, the United States, the heartland of our

country, in fact, most of the south all the way up into the northeast

experienced one of the hottest--

in fact it did turn out to be the hottest year on record ever for the

continental United States.

So here's one day, July 12.

And what you're seeing in color here is heat stress index.

So where it really gets to be mauve and purplish, if you look at that bar,

you're looking at temperatures, the sensible, how that temperature feels

to someone because it's temperature and humidity and lack of wind flow for


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ventilation.

Temperatures were up exceeding 110, 115 degrees.

Dangerous to be outdoors.

And who's affected by this?

Certainly the elderly are affected.

And I'll show you some data on this to verify that.

But also the young could be-- all of us are affected in some ways, unless

we've modified our indoor environments.

These temperatures didn't necessarily drop off at night.

You didn't get that 20 degree fluctuation from the peak of the day

to the cool night, breezes and night temperatures.

So sleeping was horrible under these conditions in the absence of air

conditioning.

So the young and the old are the most vulnerable under these circumstances.

And let me remind you that as the Earth's atmosphere warms up, the

atmosphere being a gas, that gas can absorb more water, can hold more water

in vapor state.

So more heat received on the surface of the Earth, more evaporation, more

moisture, into the atmosphere.

So you see on average one degree increase in the global temperatures,

one degree centigrade, 5% more moisture.

That moisture means energy.

That's more energy into the atmosphere for redistribution in the general

circulation systems and the organized patterns of storms across the world.

Well another reminder of this, so many of us recall Hurricane Sandy.

This was a world news making event.

Here's a collection of pictures.

First one is the track of Sandy as it came up the eastern coast of the

United States offshore.


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There was an approaching trough in the upper air flow that swept down over

Canada and the Great Lakes that actually made this storm, instead of

the normal pattern of curving out to sea, skirting maybe southern New

England as it went into the North Atlantic and finally out of its energy

source, the hot ocean temperatures, this went retrograde.

It got pulled back to the west, which is fairly unusual.

You have to have certain synoptic situations for that to happen.

But we know this took a straight aim into New York Harbor, and into the

shores of New Jersey.

So the damage in the city--

in fact only in, I think it was in April this year, that the Statue of

Liberty was reopened for tourism.

It took that long to recover from the damage.

The other is one of the battery stations on Lower Manhattan or in

Brooklyn, I'm not sure which one.

But it was down near the entrance to the East River.

It flooded with this storm surge, coming over and down the staircases,

down the escalators, spilling down through the station platform onto the

tracks, shutting off that system.

Incredible pictures coming in from all over Manhattan and New Jersey to show

the implication of this.

So here we are just a few miles away in the city of Boston.

So this is a picture of our city looking from the east, from the harbor

side, looking at the city.

The Charles River that then swings out to the west by the Harvard campus.

We missed by a few degrees of Sandy coming into New Bedford, coming into

Boston Harbor, coming up over the sound in the Buzzards Bay.

This could have been a horrendous storm surge for us.

And it was a wake up call that by chance in some sense that we missed


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that event.

Now the pictures that have come out of Boston aren't as dire as the image

that's shown in the lower right here.

This is from a computer model that knows the contours of our land, of

Boston and the Charles River basin.

It knows the level of sea rise that will happen because of thermal

expansion and fresh water melt increasing the depth of the sea.

And the surge on top of that, high tide plus the tremendous force of the

lower pressure of a hurricane that actually lets the water rise, because

the pressure above it is lowering and the accumulation of water in front of

it as the circulation patterns drive cross a fetch of water and drive that

into abatements.

And much of the City of Boston, as you see here, the City of Cambridge, all

the athletic fields of Harvard, some of the dorms along the river, all

would be underwater under those circumstances.

But the models said, all right maybe not the end of this century, but what

if Sandy had hit Boston?

And so this has really been taken very seriously, as the City of Cambridge

and the City of Boston are both in a very accelerated stage of trying to

understand how resilient their infrastructure is.

How will it be able to handle this kind of event should we have the

experience of a Sandy in the Boston area?

And we're vulnerable in many ways.

But I think the public officials, academics, corporations are beginning

to understand how serious this is.

This is another affect, and Dr. Bernstein has talked to you about

this, the lack of precipitation, the early snow melt, the drying of the

upland slopes of many parts of our country.

But we've seen a tremendous increase in the number and


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extent of forest fires.

And here's a graphic example of it.

So you have the combination of dying out of all the kindling that would

give rise to the fuel for these fires under drought conditions, or changing

precipitation patterns.

But this is a graphic example of increased particulate matter.

So this has implications then to air pollution.

And some of that air pollution obviously has an impact on homes and

buildings, because the air that we're breathing inside any building has come

from the outdoors, either directly through linkages or opening the

windows, or through mechanical systems that deliberately pull air to

ventilate our buildings.

So I already made reference to this Institute of Medicine report on

climate change.

And what I'm showing in red here is sort of the public consumption

headlines, let's just say, the issues of deadly heat, the issues of air

pollution outdoors and indoors, the implications of water because of

changing precipitation patterns and how our infrastructure can or cannot

handle that, and scary bugs, those things that might change.

They already are in our environment.

But if we profoundly changed the ecological niches for which they can

actually flourish, then we have issues that we have to anticipate with

climate change.

There's a lot on this slide, but I think it's worth taking the time to go

through it, because this helped guide our committee deliberations.

We sort of laid out the scenarios that the climate scientist on our committee

and others that we can glean from the literature and IPCC reports.

These are the things that we can anticipate, increased extreme heat and

cold events, increased extreme precipitation events, increased seal


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level rise, increase in outdoor ozone levels, increase in outdoor pollen

levels, increase in outdoor particulate levels.

All of these things are predicted as part of future scenarios.

And again, not only predicted but we're already seeing this by looking

at the trends data.

Well now let's draw the line over.

What's the implication to buildings?

Well, it changes the heating and cooling demands.

All across the world, given the climate history of a region, whether

you're in Guadalumpur or Singapore or Shanghai or in Boston or in San

Francisco, you have the climate record.

And that's what guides the designers, the engineers, to say, all right I'm

building a building.

I know the purpose of that building.

I know the number of occupants that will go in that building.

I have to meet certain codes in order to provide ventilation and control the

temperatures for those indoor environments.

And I go to the historic climate record to understand what I have to

use as the design days so I have to meet it on all of these days where

that building's going to be occupied.

Well if that historic record is being so altered in the future, then the

buildings we build today based on historic reasoning are not really

going to be adaptable, suitable, flexible, and meet the

needs in the future.

Buildings might last 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.

Many of our institutions, Harvard campus buildings have been around

hundreds of years.

Renovated and modernized throughout that time, but still the structure has

been around.


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So there's an implication to that.

Well that has implications both to mortality and morbidity and thermal

comfort indoors.

It has implications to infection, respiration, disease transmission.

If we change the ventilation dynamics, you change the exposure to people from

sources that are inside the building.

Look at the issues that go over and affect water.

Flooding, water damage, gives rise to molds, gives rise to other respiratory

conditions, might give rise to the enhancement of vector borne diseases.

Those insects and animals need moisture.

And we're changing that moisture pattern in our buildings.

Increased precipitation, the backup a storage systems, we've seen this

happen already in buildings and in urban areas that have had flooding.

The durability of materials once they have been damaged by water, so it can

lead to a breakdown of those materials, out-gassing.

There could be debris, and of course then just the damage to our electrical

systems and our plumbing systems.

So this has lots of implications that go over and have health consequences.

Changes of ozone pattern, that ozone comes indoors.

That ozone is a very reactive gas.

It can react with other compounds indoors to give rise to alcohols,

aldehydes--

formaldehyde, for example, is a byproduct of some of these reactions.

So there's other profound implications that might impact SPS.

SPS is Sick Building Syndrome.

Respiratory illnesses because it's a respiratory irritant.

They can give rise to allergenic conditions and illness.

So these were the scenarios and the implications of those scenarios that

we explored looking to the literature.


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And what I wanted to do in this talk is share with you some of that

literature, and some of the findings that we felt that were important to

emphasize in our report.

Again the background, so you have the topic areas that I want to cover.

But I want you to be thinking about this through two lenses--

things that we deliberately do to reduce the carbon, to reduce the

greenhouse gases, that might have implications for indoor environments.

I think the most obvious one is we want to save energy.

Right, we want to turn off the fossil fuel electric power sources, or turn

them down by decreasing the demand.

The demand for substantial part of this energy is our office buildings,

our homes, our schools, our hospitals.

So we want to lower that demand.

So we modify our indoor environments.

We put more insulation in.

We might change the ventilation patterns.

So in our efforts to do mitigation, it has consequences.

In our efforts to do adaptation we're also changing things.

We're certainly air conditioning places that quite frankly didn't need

to be air conditioned before.

The amount of people in the New England area up through Vermont and

New Hampshire and Maine that had air conditioning a decade ago are

reconsidering it given the experiences of the last 10 years, in terms of

summer heat conditions.

So there's big changes going on within our housing infrastructure and our

buildings overall.

So that's an adaptation, but there are other forms of adaptation that are

important to know.


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PART 2

SPEAKER: So let's look at this and see what some of the big stressors are.

We found this piece of information quite interesting.

So what you're looking at here is, you're taking several cities.

So I just pointed out San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Because they're the first two on the left hand side of this curve.

And what you're seeing in this is various cities in California, but also

Baltimore and Washington DC are in there.

Tokyo, Japan, is in there.

You're seeing temperature increase per decade.

How hot is that city?

This is the urban heat island issue.

And that means if our urban heat island is going up, as well as the

overall outdoor temperature, then you're getting the demands on air

conditioning and comfort satisfaction on the indoor environments.

But to get back to this figure.

So records go back--

in this case they go back three decades to eight decades, where good

records in these urban areas have been collected.

And what you're seeing is over a 10-year period, looking at that

long-term record, what has been the trend in increasing of that urban

temperature?

So on the high side, you see Los Angeles has gone up almost a full

degree Fahrenheit per decade, per decade.

Not just eight decades, but per decade, is a continuous increase as

that urban infrastructure gets built out.

San Francisco, surrounded by water on the Bay, cooler water offshore--

that impact, even though it's been built up a little more over that long

term record, only 0.2 degrees per decade.


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But just across the Bay, little different in Oakland.

And further down in the San Francisco Bay, San Jose you also see an increase

that's higher.

So that's the point that's being made in this chart.

The implication then is, you have a hotter urban area.

Now you have the effects of extreme heat on top of that.

You also have a less forgiving infrastructure to deal with extreme

heat conditions.

You don't have cooling off at night.

You don't have evaporative loss.

You've cut down wind flow because of the urban infrastructure.

All of these things would have been modifying, mitigating factors to

reduce the effect of a heat stress.

So big profound changes that, if you look around the urbanization around

the world, you're going to find similar patterns.

But this illustrates that.

So then you ask the question, well who's at risk from heat?

Well, the World Health Organization has been paying attention to this.

The Center for Disease Control has been paying attention to

this for some time.

Here's a definition of the kinds of outcomes, the health outcomes, that

one might experience with heat stress, not just heat fatigue, but

cardiovascular problems, stroke, exhaustion, skin eruption.

So there's a whole host of outcomes that might be related to dehydration

effects or just loss of thermal balance, thermal regulation.

So given that, it's not surprising to see this curve, this figure on top.

That those that are older--

'50s '60s '70s '80s --that their risk from extreme temperatures go

substantially higher.


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Now that's because other systems are strained as we get older, for sure.

But also our ability sort of do the vasodilation of our capillaries and

our surface?

How do we moderate to cool, and to hot temperatures?

We sort of lost the ability to have a flexible, internal thermal

regulation going on.

Look on the other end of age spectrum.

That's that little blowout on the right side of that chart.

Where you now see that for kids that are under 14, broken into various

categories--

infants have the highest risk.

So you have both ends of the life spectrum.

The newborns, the infants, and the elderly are going to be probably the

first group that you would see as most susceptible under heat stress.

That doesn't explain everything.

There are lots of cases where the 40-year-old invincible man decides to

go out and cut his lawn when it's 100 degrees in Phoenix or something, and

is overcome by heat stroke.

Or we're off playing tennis and don't understand the symptoms

that are going on.

So these are actuary tables essentially.

But it has the ability to affect all people.

Well let's then-- that's an age distribution at risk.

Let's look at populations, a different sort of cut at this.

And this is work done by our colleagues here at the School of

Public Health, Joel Schwartz, one of our faculty members, Marie O'Neill

when she was working with us on these issues, and now a faculty member at

University of Michigan in the School of Public Health and others did this.

So it takes a little bit of time to explain it, but I think it illustrates


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something that's really important.

Because this has implications to land use patterns, for sure.

So on the vertical, you have the percent of land cover.

Just how much of that urban space is covered with different kinds.

Now it's going to be a simple categorization.

And you have Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Francisco.

So I look L.A. and San Francisco at both ends of this chart on the

horizontal.

So what you're seeing in the light-colored bars is the percent of

land that is hardscaped--

hard, impervious, dark surfaces, non-vegetative.

That's the point.

The other color is the percent of land that is vegetative.

So you see that one, these things change.

They change by some categorization that is along the horizontal.

Now what my colleagues did, was they went into census data.

And they could, for census tract, determine what percent of that

population in that census tract was below the poverty level--

the income level set to meet some minimum code.

And see, that is what is being spread out in five categories on the bottom,

under each city.

That on the left are the richer communities or census tracts.

On the right are the poorest.

Isn't this startling to see, in every single case, the lower income

neighborhoods have more hard cover, more impervious surfaces, less

vegetation.

Now that has a lot of implication as to, even within the small-scale

variations of an urban area, all suffering a big heat wave that's an

air mass, that could be huge--


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several hundred miles across.

But because of these land use issues, you have variations within urban areas

that can be profound.

So that's another way of thinking about who might be at risk.

So here, as we build out our suburbs and you drive down these roads, get

more to the downtown core, it gets denser.

It gets less vegetation.

And so what are the combinations of issues that you have to worry about?

So the loss of shade means more radiant heat coming in, more heat load

being affected on your buildings.

It could increase your time indoors.

We've seen this in studies that we've done around Nashville, Tennessee.

They did measurements of personal exposure to ozone kids in the summer.

Whenever it got hot, they didn't go outside.

It was game time in front of the television or something.

Even on beautiful, what we would consider nice summer days.

But it was hot and humid.

So it really changed their time that they spent indoors and outdoors,

certainly changed physical activity levels as a result of that change and

how we used our space.

So it also has implications on air conditioning loads.

And it turns out that most people, myself included, when we run the air

conditioner, you run it on re-circulation.

You put all the money into conditioning the air.

Why dump it out?

So that by that fact, you've actually also decreased the air exchange

between indoor and out.

Then you with all these situations happening on big, big scales, means

that as our cities get hotter, as we haven't really thought of the


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interactions of our land use decisions, of our materials, on

rooftops, materials on roadways--

all these conspire to put greater demand on power and energy production.

So we now have the secondary effect of straining the grid.

So what is happening here?

So this takes us back to the '80s, through the '90s, into the 2000s for

the United States.

And it's a percent of air conditioning in residential settings, in homes.

So we have this interesting trend.

And as you might well expect, that in the South, this top curve here--

% couple of decades ago --80% of the homes had air conditioning.

Well this is why--

there was a great housing boom, population shifts to the South,

brought on and made possible, in part, because of advances in air

conditioning systems and our energy pricing.

So lots of people, almost up to 100% now.

But look at these other changes.

Here's our area of the world, up in the Northeast part

of the United States.

Decades ago, half the population used air conditioning.

Now it's in excess of 80%.

And given the temperature extremes that we've had over the last few

summers, it's going even higher.

So big geographical shifts as a result of people's desire for more comfort,

and knowing the consequences.

Because disruption of sleep, because of hot temperatures, that if you're

not controlling it, has all sorts of implications on your health and

productivity.

Let's see what this means in terms of demand for power.


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And that has an implication on straining the grid.

So this data comes to us of our study of power demand.

And I'm not going to go into it in detail.

But I submit this to you.

I think it's quite interesting.

If you look in the legend here, you're looking at the demand in commercial

and residential use for power, electricity here, on a given summer

load condition.

And you see that it is broken down by end use, whether it's used for

lighting, whether it's used for refrigeration, for goods in

restaurants or hospital settings, whether used for clothes drying and a

whole bunch of end use, both residential and commercial.

And certainly, during the day, what you're looking at is

across a 24-hour day.

And people are not up at nighttime.

That's the lowest point of total energy use.

But as the day gets going, people start turning--

Some are base loads.

Some you can see here.

Some uses don't really change much over the course of a day.

But other uses start to go up as human activity start to use electricity, use

the equipment, and need the power.

But this red, this stuff that's marked in red, these two-- the white and the

grey here --represent the energy that is being demanded for cooling demand.

So this is the power load that is driven by the need for power for air

conditioning.

And so you see residential and commercial.

And by far that is the greatest variation across the day.

And it ends up being a substantial fraction of that daily demand.


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Now you put this on some really hot days in the summer.

You have the entire electrical grid strained to meet that

requirement for cooling.

And the case that is illustrated here is that power ended up in blackouts

and fairly routine now, brownouts, where we are losing availability of

our electric installed capacity to meet demand during these peak times.

Well because of this, this is a bit of an aside, but folks I know a Lawrence

Berkeley Laboratories, working with the California Conservation Commission

and utilities, and companies, have started to do a voluntary

participation in demand-side management for electricity.

So when days like this go up, they are turning over their building

operational systems--

their control systems on ventilation and lighting and air conditioning

--and they're being able to bring this down.

So I have gone into some of these buildings when I was visiting out

there during days like this, and the lights are dimmer.

And the temperature comes up a little bit.

It's not held at 21 degrees Centigrade, 72 degrees Fahrenheit,

that we all like is comfortable for office settings.

That temperature comes up.

But people know that they're participating in

this voluntary process.

Tremendous potential if this is rolled out across the world to change how

we're setting our thermal comfort policy standards in buildings, and

allow us to not use as much energy under these peak demand times.

Well let's play this out in buildings and in urban settings and parks.

Because there's a lot we can do to pursue sustainability as a basic

development principle.

And some cities and towns and countries are already doing this.


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How do we shade surfaces?

How do we look at new ideas for ventilation?

That's HVAC--

heating, ventilation, air conditioning.

That's what HVAC means.

How do we think of new strategies here?

How do we ensure passive survivability, a new Term

When we have that heat wave, what other things can we compensate?

How do we understand who's the vulnerable population?

Get them out of those places that are at risk.

Are there places we can go that have water elements in it that provide some

cooling and more ventilation, air flow in more open spaces.

So there are things that we can do, if we are thoughtful about it and build

it into our indoor urban planning, that is by way of adaptation.

Because we know what the consequence is.

What you're seeing here--

I like this picture in the lower left.

What a inviting pleasant place.

And this is an image of downtown Portland, a city that always ranks

high in all the sustainability measures.

Let's take you to another part of the world.

Here is Doha, Qatar.

I labeled this a modern city in a hot climate.

I should have said hot, dry climate.

And we had done some work throughout the Middle East, often going to Qatar.

And I tell you about my experiences.

So I've noted on this slide where our hotel was, over here, and where our

meetings were in what is called the Tornado Building.

Actually, that's the name of it.


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It has this sort of funnel shape.

And I'll tell you, you go to Abu Dhabi or Dubai or Qatar or Kuwait City, you

see the most fantastic architecture.

You see the artistry of human creativity and

imagination in these buildings.

Many times you're seeing these are not as--

this is obvious --they're certainly not from the vernacular of what

buildings were there beforehand that were built in adaptation to their

climate extremes of that region.

But you're seeing sort of the high glaze, the totally air conditioned

indoor spaces.

Oh, back to the story.

So we would get picked up at the hotel, 8:30 or so, in a van to take

our group over to the meetings.

And even from that picture you can tell, it's not that far away.

So I said, no.

I want to walk.

I want to experience--

this was June, in fact.

And I bring my infrared thermometer gauge with me, so I could measure

surface temperatures and actually skin temperatures and clothing temperatures

in this thing.

So this is 9 o'clock in the morning.

And I set out to walk down the streets here and across in

front of this big mall.

Part of it under construction here.

Over and then around and entered the Tornado Building here.

And maybe it was a 20 minute walk, something like this.

And I was dressed in business casual.


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Pretty soon I got my jacket off.

And I was even seeking shadow sides of streets.

But here's the point.

With all these high glazed buildings all around me, even with the sun

shining on these buildings, with these wonderful high-E windows that pushed

energy back into the street, so that you reduced the energy that gets

through the windows to the interior--

so I was feeling the sun on all sides.

The east side, the west side, the north side--

wherever it was, bouncing off these buildings.

So by the time I got to that building, I was in high thermal dis-equilibrium.

And I was--

actually capillaries dilated, started to sweat, as a mechanism to dissipate

heat,

You first, of all, get it to the surface so the core

doesn't get too hot.

You perspire so you get evaporation, so you get cooling because you're

evaporating the water from your skin.

And that's how we shed a lot of heat as well as through exhaling some of

the heat that's in our bodies.

So I get to the meetings.

The building is totally air conditioned.

I use my infrared to check the ballast, to see what temperature of

the air is coming through the ventilation system.

It was around 68 degrees coming in.

So I'm walking on streets that were 90, getting a lot of infrared energy

impacting on me, into a building that is operating--

the air temperatures are operating in the 18 degrees

Centigrade, around 72 degrees.


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And I was so over-regulated on the heat side, that I perspired and then

got chilled.

So here is my own experience of trying to deal with thermal comfort in these

complex, outdoor and indoor environments that had been modified.

And you could see this happening all over the world as we've gone to

modernity in many, many of our urban centers.

That we think the paradigm is the modern central building, the centrally

controlled system--

you know set it at these comfort levels and then have the individuals

adjust as they go indoors or outdoors to these conditions.

PART 3

John Spengler: So alternatives to this.

Well, here I take you back to Harvard Yard.

I take you back to a spring day or summer day, and what are people doing

here with where they sit on the lawn, or they can take their chairs,

portable chairs.

They are seeking their thermal comfort.

Some want to sit in the shade.

They have certain clothing factors on.

Some want to sit in the sun to get that radiant heat, but they're

adapting to their own local environment.

And that's the kind of environments that we ought to be thinking about

that are really human centric, and we see examples of this

now at a bigger scale.

Now, this is a computer composite all of green roofs in Chicago.

But Chicago as a city right now has, I think, the most green roofs of any

city in the world.

Well, so they claim, but this has and then a lot of other green features


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that are just inner-woven into our urban scape.

These are places that we can seek during these extreme conditions, or

these green roofs, or other roof materials, that are ways of moderating

the heat load of our buildings.

And again, another scientific finding here, but I wanted to share this with

you, this study that looks at the energy demand here over the course of

a hot day, and this is an experimental design.

The day, I think, got up to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and they were looking at

this structure.

I think it was a house, because they were looking at the temperatures in an

attic space, so you have the first, second floor, then you have the pitch

roof, and the attic.

And what is the implication of what kind of tiles or shingles you would

put on the roof, and you have a variety of choices nowadays.

And if you use the dark colored, grey colored shingles, which are the

conventional shingles you see all over the place, that attic space actually

gets 40 degrees hotter then the outdoor temperature.

Outdoor temperature 90, add another 40, 130, now your indoor space has to

struggle to cool to whatever you have that set point is, because you've got

this heat load above the occupied space just below.

And then the lower curve follows a course of a day where the sun comes up

and shines on that roof, but now you're doing light colored materials

with a lot of reflected energy, less penetrating into the structure of the

house here in the attic.

In this case, the difference, it only increased 10 degrees.

And now we can have things that are even more advanced than that, so

complicated figure, but simple illustration of how important this is.

In fact, in some ways that's how green roofs work.

They effectively are the barrier against that heat being absorbed on


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the surface.

It's into a bigger mass, it's into the plants, you've got a map of

transpiration cooling off that, and you actually lower the demand.

Now, let's look at polluted air, both outdoor air, because of increased

outdoor air pollution, indoor air pollution, inadequate ventilation.

These are all tied together.

And so I already mentioned that we might expect pollen, and particles,

and ozone to increase, increased pollution from combustion, if it is

fossil fuel combustion to meet those energy demands.

Houses are getting tighter, extreme precipitation events, heat and

humidity implications to molds, and so I'm going to illustrate that with more

data, more slides.

So in the course of our National Academy work, we had Ziska join us.

He was with the Department of Agriculture, he's a research

scientist, and he shared some of his research, as well as others.

Did a o wonderfully designed study, where they developed planting beds

with, I think he used ragweed, or some pollen producing plant, and he took

advantage of the gradient in carbon dioxide that occurs in urban areas,

because it is almost 100 parts per million higher in urban areas than it

is in rural areas.

Rural areas, more or less close to background average, which

unfortunately today is around 397 parts per million.

But when he did these studies a few years ago it was lower, but so by

putting the same test bed, the same species, the same nutrients, the same

moisture, water, watering, all those conditions from urban, rural out here,

and suburban, so you've got a gradient in the variation in carbon dioxide.

They demonstrated that carbon dioxide increased plant growth.

So plants need carbon dioxide, they give us oxygen in return, so the plant

mass increases.


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And this has been demonstrated in greenhouse studies and the like, but

what was interesting, they said that the pollen, the amount of pollen

produced, increased, but it increased disproportionately to the mass.

Now, there's not only more mass would give you more pollen, but it turns out

in the higher carbon dioxide growing regions, they produce even more pollen

per mass ratio.

So this has the implication that we might see if this is true for other

species, grasses, trees, we might well see increase of the allergens that are

naturally dispersed in our environments as a result of increasing

carbon dioxide.

The other issues we're seeing is the drying out because the drought

conditions.

This is a dust storm sweeping across Phoenix at 40 miles an hour.

How would you like to be coming out of the shopping mall, going to your car,

looking up and seeing this image coming at you?

And as I looked at these reports, maybe you'd get one of these a year,

maybe less than one a year.

I think 2011 and beyond they were getting four of these kind of events

occurring, sweeping across.

So that's outdoors, big implication to indoors.

Where does this air go?

Well, certainly it can penetrate through cracks and crevices, but you

have mechanical ventilation systems, you have filters that are cleaning the

air, protecting your equipment, providing some reduction of particles

and stuff as that air goes into buildings, and now you get this huge

mass of airborne particulate.

So unless you are really vigilant, and understand that you can't wait till

the annual, the quarterly, the semiannual change of your filters,

after these events you either should have thought to shut it down while the


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event occurred, or you have to start changing your filters more often.

Because one way to really reduce the ventilation in buildings is to clog up

your filters.

Your filters can get easily burdened with particular cake burden mass,

cutting down the air flow across those filters.

So that has a secondary implication to indoor environments, but there's

something else that's happened in our housing stock.

This is now US housing stock, and the knowledge about this we give a lot of

credit to our research colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories that

are in the building technology and indoor air group.

In fact, I'll cite them several times in this talk because of the work

they've done, the contributions they've made in this area.

But what is possible nowadays is to test the air leakages in a house.

Effectively, you close the windows, you close the vents, exhaust vents

over kitchens and bathrooms, chimneys, all right.

And then you have a fan that fits in a door frame or a window frame, and you

try to inflate the house, like you're blowing up a balloon.

So if you blow up a balloon, you put pressure inside, right, and that

expands the balloon.

But if there are holes in the balloon, you're putting a lot of pressure in,

and you get equilibrium.

You get a certain amount of pressure change, and then your leaking it away.

So these are blower door pressurization tests, and they're very

useful, say, before and after weatherization program.

So you hire a company to come and seal your house up, all the cracks, and

leaks in your ducts and other around door frames and window frames, and how

do you know if they've done any good?

Well, if you've done a blower door test before, and a blower door test

afterwards, you can see effectively, my gosh, my house used to have the


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window half open.

Now, I've sealed it up.

It's like the window is only a quarter open, or only a couple

of centimeters open.

You can really effect changes if you have a analytical way of

demonstrating that.

Back to this figure.

By testing lots of homes that were built in different years, you see this

scatter of course.

Homes in different parts of the country, different designs, all sorts

of things make them different, but look at the red line.

The red line comes across as a little dip--

I'm not sure why.

Maybe the literature says why that little dip is, but then the

substantial curve starts a drop.

Right around the energy crisis, the first one we had in 1973, where OPEC

decided to reduce the oil exports to the United States and the rest of the

world, we really got serious about energy.

We see also new materials, home builders using new materials that came

one of our manufacturing.

There are lots of companies that are producing, I think, very useful

materials that are better insulation, better ways of sealing cracks and

crevices, better ducting system.

You start to see this curve come down.

Systematically that's the point-- systematically, we made our houses

tighter than they were in the past.

That has implications.

So Bud Offermann--

with funding, I think, from the Air Resources Board in California--


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set out to say, OK, let's look at new homes, new homes that were built to

the new construction codes that California has, the Energy

Conservation Code, some of the most aggressive in the country.

How are they performing.

This was surprising.

57% of those homes had 24 hour air exchange rates less than 0.3.

That's ACH, air changes per hour.

Now, why is that significant?

Because we have guidelines by our Heating, Refrigeration, Air

Conditioning, and Engineering Society, ASHRAE, guidelines saying homes ought

to be higher than 0.3.

Even 0.3, I'll say parenthetically, is the lowest of all

industrialized countries.

We go look at these standards in Europe, look at them in Japan, and

Korea, and elsewhere, 0.5 to 1.

They're saying higher air exchange rates.

We look to Canada, they're having built-in ventilation systems so you

can't drop that low ever.

So 57% had lower than what one would say was minimum health-based regional

levels for ventilation.

25% were less than 0.18, 0.2.

These are really low.

That means--

think about this-- the house that you're living in, that would mean it

would take five hours for the air to be turned over from outdoor air to

indoor air, if it were totally replaced easily.

It would take five hours for that air to turn over, so everything you did in

your house would be with you at least that long.

Big implications.


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Then they go out and they measured aldehyde levels.

37% had formaldehyde levels above what-- and that's formaldehyde, HCHO

is the chemical shorthand for formaldehyde--

had above what are considered acute irritation levels.

And what they were saying is that maybe it's a complicated system, but

if you have your energy ventilation system meeting your thermal demand,

and you have good insulation--

the box is well sealed--

well, the thing isn't going on and off as much as it should be.

And therefore, if the ventilation isn't going on and off, then you have

less than adequate air exchange rates.

So that's the profound implication for his work, that I think we really--

so we're doing these things for mitigation, right.

We're doing this to reduce the amount of carbon based fuels we use.

And this is, I would say, the dark side of green.

Some of these systems look like this.

Now, this is a big entropy wheel, a air-to-air heat exchanger.

We call them mechanical heat recovery ventilation systems, so this one might

be in a building, for example.

But you have different sizes, and different configurations that might be

in a home, but you have in these red arrows, you have warm air coming out,

and you have cold air from the outside coming in.

And you have a wheel, which is just open Hexcel coring or something-- it's

just tubes, just say they're a bunch of straws of big tubes--

that air passes through.

The heat goes into the material.

That wheel rotates around so as cold air goes by it, that heat

is given back up.

And some of these things can exchange heat, and can exchange moisture too.


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You could do a latent heat recovery.

Very effective.

Use these in buildings on the Harvard campus.

Save lots of energy, because now we put all that money into conditioning

that indoor air, why just dump it out?

So this is why these things, there is many of these things around now.

I think Canada requires that all residential units have some form of

heat recovery systems that are on all the time, to provide basic level

ventilation throughout the house.

So I added to this caption here at the bottom, that they're in wide scale

use, enhanced ventilation, maybe improve occupant health because we can

get good ventilation and productivity we hope.

Because I've been reading the more recent literature that I think we

ought to be more cautious, or at least we ought to understand the behavior

patterns of people, and whether they're really being used, and whether

that the control logic that is embedded in these systems is really

optimizing it for the purpose.

So pay attention to this issue.

I don't think it's totally resolved.

But we do know a lot more about ventilation, so my friend Carl-Gustaf

Bornehag has a huge population under study in Sweden.

And h there were several thousand, 10,000 kids, two to six years old, out

of which they did a case control asthma study.

200 kids with asthma, 200 not diagnosed with asthma, and trying to

understand the conditions, the housing conditions, nutrition conditions,

behavioral factors that would lead to the expression of asthma and

allergenic symptoms.

And as a derivative in his studies, he published this work, and this is so

graphic, I would say.


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If you take the better ventilated houses, and that is the bar that is

0.62 air changes per hour, all right.

So it would take a little less than two hours to turn over the air in that

house, so that's a better ventilated group of houses.

And you say, all right, let's look at the allergenic conditions of the kids

in that house.

We'll set that to 1 as a baseline.

Now, let's look at the kids that live in houses whose ventilation

is less than that.

All the way down to just what Bud Offermann showed in California, 25% of

the homes, here 0.18 air changes per hour.

In other words, more than five hours to turn over the air.

Almost double the rate of allergenic symptoms.

Interesting, and I think this is, again, sort of the dark side of green.

If we are really aggressively promoting energy savings, and it comes

in the form of reduced ventilation, this might be the price that we are

paying as a country.

Let's look at the evidence from office buildings.

In this case, a former colleague of ours, Don Milton, when he was a

faculty member here at Harvard, studied a big company in the Boston

area that allowed him access to over 40 buildings.

Don, by the way, is now chair of environmental health, occupational

health at University of Maryland, still doing great work on infectivity,

spread of infections in buildings.

But for this work he received, I think, it was one of the best papers

of the year award the year that it came out.

But it's looking at 40 buildings where they measured carbon dioxide as an

indication of air exchange rate.

So from carbon dioxide and the occupants in the building, you can


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calculate--

and that's what you see below these bars--

12 L/s, that's 12 liters of outside air per second, per person, or you

have 24 cfm, that's cubic feet per minute.

So these are equivalent, metric system, English system.

Liters per second, per person, cubic feet per minute, per person.

So you group the buildings into two categories, some that had better

ventilation, 24 L/s, 48 cfm per person, and the less ventilated.

And then he looked at absenteeism, and the differential across these

buildings was about 1.6 days per person.

That paper that does went on to calculate what the implication is to

lost productivity, and it is huge.

I think this is why it was such an important paper.

It makes the case how foolish we are to be saving energy on ventilation

when the real cost are people.

The ventilation energy might be $2.00 a square foot.

People are to $200 a square foot for buildings, so you can see that if you

think you're saving in one side of the ledger, you are paying

on the other side.

And that doesn't even count the health care cost, so that's aside, so it

makes a case even without the health care cost.

Let's take this to schools.

So again, we look to Europe, as we often do--

Europe, Japan, elsewhere for some of the good research on indoor

environments--

because they had to deal with colder temperatures, cold climates, sealing

up their buildings.

They paid attention to it, paid attention to molds a lot

sooner than we did.


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But Dan Norback and his colleague did this study on 39 schools in Sweden.

Some of those schools had new ventilation systems they call

displacement air.

In another words, you increase almost sometimes up to 100% fresh air, and

actually don't do the recirculation.

You displace what's in it, so more fresh air.

And they studied these conditions in these kids for two years, and what

you're seeing in the bar graph here is per symptom clustering.

Any asthma symptoms, current asthma, but what is interesting here is

current asthma didn't make any difference, right.

That's what the kids had anyway, but in terms of the expression of

morbidity here, the increase of symptoms as a result of allergies or

asthma, you can see factors of two or more difference between, what we'll

say, conventionally ventilated schools, and the displacement

ventilation.

Another case for fresh air in our indoor environments.

There's been a nice review of this issue of infectious disease and

ventilation.

This was sponsored by ASHRAE, the American Society for Heating,

Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning, and Engineers.

At the time, all the literature available that would provide evidence

between better or worse ventilation and respiratory infection and spread

of influenza.

Very important society.

Each one of us have one or two bouts of common cold a year, and then you

are a lot more concerned about those new emerging pathogens, viruses that

occasionally sweep across countries, and across the world.

So wouldn't you think it would be important to know the influence of the

indoor environmental conditions.


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Temperature, humidity play a role, ventilation and mixing play a role,

and the spread of diseases.

Because it's profoundly important for schools, our homes, our office

buildings if that had a true relationship.

The bottom line here is that there are some very well done studies that

substantiate that.

But I know that the European community, there's a commission that

has been funded to take a new look at this, to really update it with more

evidence since the time that our committee met and

published that paper.

I'd also suggest that you might want to look at the broader literature, a

little bit older, but it's important to understand that these

are numerous studies.

What you're seeing is a list of authors.

You're seeing the years in which the studies were done.

Interestingly enough, the '80s and the '90s, there was a lot of concern for

SBS, Sick Building Syndrome.

The cluster of conditions that office workers mostly, but

wasn't always just offices.

People were complaining.

They couldn't function well.

They had a whole series of malaises from muco secreted regions, to

inability to concentrate, to malodors, all sorts of conditions that were just

clustered together as Sick Building Syndrome.

NIOSH, the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety did

many big studies.

Some of these authors are NIOSH investigators did these studies.

Number of subjects, lots of people.

These weren't just a handful of people in these buildings.


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What you're seeing in this figure is the comparison of the significant odds

ratio between more symptoms given the conditional change, so the baseline is

naturally ventilated buildings.

And if you see red out here, that means the comparison between natural

ventilation and air conditioning with no humidity, air conditioning with

steam, air conditioning with evaporation humidity conditions, spray

conditions, all these kinds of systems that you find in building's HVAC

systems you find in buildings were associated with increased SBS.

Really interesting how consistent it is.

One study wasn't quite reached significance in that, but this really

would make us stop and wonder, is there something about that's just the

thermal contrast here?

Is there something about adding more moisture in it?

Is there something about maintaining the system?

Maybe is has nothing to do with these, but the systems get fouled, and so

there's a lot of questions that are not fully resolved.

But what it has led to is a much more scrutiny in maintenance of the things

that are behind the walls, the things that are in the

mechanical room of buildings.

And good companies, good corporations, good facility managers

understand this now.

At the point back then, it wasn't well understood, but these mistakes are

occurring all over the world, still to this day as we continue to rapidly

build buildings and fail to understand maintenance side of buildings.

Consequences of poor air exchange rates, so I wanted to share with you--

and this wasn't available for our committee that was studying climate

change indoor environments and health.

It came out fairly recently, published in Environmental Health Perspectives.

This figure sort of sets up what I'm about to say.


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So what you're seeing here for different kinds of settings.

Classrooms, office buildings, airplanes--

some of that's our own work--

cars, some of them in trucks, that's our work, and others.

And what are the carbon dioxide levels that have been measured, either

average conditions, or peak exposures during different times.

And I already told you that outdoor levels are around 395 parts per

million C02.

Urban areas because of combustion, cars producing C02, you might bump

another 100.

So typical outside this window, this room right here, I might measure 450

today, or 470 today.

So that's outdoor air, so outdoor air with 450 comes into a building.

Why did these levels get to be 1,000, 1,500, 2,000?

Why is that the case?

Well, if there's no combustion going on inside--

let's say most places there isn't--

these levels are higher because of people, because of you and I. We are

exhaling C02, and if we don't ventilate, that CO2 would go up, and

up, and up, and eventually affect respiration and our cognitive ability.

So there are some standards out there set by occupational

authorities at 5,000.

That would be an occupational setting.

These are below the occupational setting, and for the most part, people

thought, well, no affects.

You're below the occupational, no affects, 2,000.

You go into classrooms all across the world that are not naturally

ventilated.

If the windows open up, they're getting close to background, a little


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bit above that.

But you go to any other places where buildings are sealed, kids are dense

packed into these classrooms, levels of 1,500, 2,000 are not surprising.

And it's also not surprising that kids are nodding off now and then too

because of these higher levels, but let me get to that point.

What Bill Fisk and Usha Satish did, they did a really interesting study.

They took healthy young adults--

I forget how many, 22 of them or so.

They put them in a chamber, a controlled chamber.

They changed the carbon dioxide level.

First, just the people in the chamber, and the ventilation rate made it

around 600, right.

Higher than outdoors, very adequate ventilation, cubic feet per minute,

per person, fine.

No one would complain that that was a decent level to have.

But then they didn't change the ventilation rate, but they introduced

pure carbon dioxide.

They let the levels come up to 1,000, then they let the levels come up to

2,500 of carbon dioxide in that chamber.

So same people, different times, same ventilation, different levels of CO2.

And then they used this test on cognitive functioning, test that has

been around for a long time, used to look at fatigue, applied to interns

and residencies to look at their functions under the stressful work

conditions of hospitals.

They look at it to see how people might be impaired from drugs or

alcohol use.

They've applied it to managers just to see who really had better cognitive

function, higher executive order decision making capabilities when

they're introduced with information.


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So there's lots of sub-outcomes that are in these different categories, and

then they have classification.

If you're in the dark green or light green marginal, very good changes.

And you see the white line is the baseline.

That's the 600 parts per million, normal function ventilation.

And across the categories of how people take in data, what's their

basic activity rate, knowledge of this, decision making, creativity,

decision under stress.

There's a whole series of outcomes that can be measured in a very

standardized way.

So when they bump the level to 1,000, not much difference.

You can see slight, and directionally it lowers the performance, gets some

into the yellow area, doesn't reach significance.

You see the error bars, the standard deviation error bars around that.

Then they go and introduce 2,500, and on some categories, initiative and

decision making, there is deep dysfunction, right down

to the orange line.

That their ability to take in information, organize that

information, make accurate decisions on it has been in impaired.

This need to be replicated in many places, and my friends in Denmark at

the Danish Technological University are now today trying to do a study

very similar to this, and lots of other places have to do this as well.

But this has very important implications.

One, if outdoor levels go up which greenhouse gases, CO2 going up, then

what's the level of fresh air coming in?

It's now much higher than it had been before.

If we reduce ventilation, as we are systematically, what happens to CO2?

It goes up, and in certain situations that we've examined on airplanes and

others, you know, you have levels that are in the 2,000 range.


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So fine, I'm sitting in the back, I'm a passenger, I'm not making big

decisions while I'm flying.

The pilot's up front.

The crew are breathing the same air, and you want to make sure they're

making the right decisions.

And that could be true right across lots of different issues in society,

different jobs in society that are making critical decisions, and we

haven't ever paid attention to this issue.

So get that article out of Environmental Health Perspectives.

We'll probably put it on the website.

I think you'll find that being very important.

PART 4

JACK SPENGLER: Let's switch to devastating water, rain.

So that was the other part of the scenario, what happens

with climate change.

What you're seeing here is the front cover of the global climate change

impacts on the United States.

It's a document that was released in the first month of the Obama

administration, first administration, that really gets out there and says

based on the trends, based on data, what do we see happening, and then

what might we see happening.

I pulled out one figure there.

That's for the United States.

You see Alaska and you see Hawaii offset, but this is based on 40 years

of records from roughly 1960 up through almost 2010.

And the change in downpours, change in what--

there's a definition of intense precipitation, heavy precipitation.

And look at the whole Northeast of the country, almost a 70% increase in that


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severe, intense precipitation.

Other parts it's actually gone the other way, the Southwest under

prolonged drought conditions.

But the implication is, all right, how does our infrastructure handle this?

What happens when some materials get wet, basements get flooded?

What's the implication to material degradation and outgas, and what's the

implication to pest infestation, and what we do in response to pest

infestation?

So this is the celebrated case of that disaster.

Many people know of the general conditions that happened as this

category one hurricane came across Florida, that then got energized with

the warm waters off the Gulf of Mexico to a category five as it came into New

Orleans and the coast of Mississippi and Alabama.

But the aftermath, I mean, we saw scenes like this, both in the Eighth

Ward that got severely flooded in as the dikes were broken, and breached,

and flooded huge sections of the city.

We saw a massive evacuations of people into the Sugar Dome in New Orleans,

and then off to disperse to other parts, many of them going to Houston,

Texas, and Dallas, and elsewhere as a lot of that their

population got dispersed.

People that have studied this-- and I found this being pretty striking--

is that 2/3 of the deaths, and there were 771 known fatalities during this

thing, were the direct result of the flooding.

They lost their lives.

They got caught up in the floods.

They got trapped in their houses, or whatever.

But a third were not flood related, directly related, but power lossage,

sanitation issues, extreme heat, the heat stress, the loss of power in

refrigeration of medicines, so a loss of medical services and distribution.


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So there was a whole host of other contributing causes to mortality that

was a result of this extreme event.

So let's look at some of the other implications as FEMA--

that's our Federal Emergency Response authority, administration, I guess--

set out to do the right thing, get people housed.

There was a massive increase in production of mobile homes,

manufactured homes as you see in this picture.

They found property sites on military bases or other places--

here's a lovely set of homes right down wind from a chemical

manufacturing facility plant--

and got people housed.

Then it turns out that in the rush to build these homes, and to put them out

in areas that were not shaded--

back to that issue--

heated up, that someone got the idea that probably because of responses of

the occupants to irritation affects, they started to measure formaldehyde.

Because we knew formaldehyde was a problem with manufactured housing some

time ago, because it's a lot of press board synthetic materials.

They're not wood frame, stick frame, aluminum frame structures, but a lot

of these cheaper materials inside, particle board, et cetera.

And that has formalic resins that can produce formaldehyde, so you might

expect 10 to 20 parts per billion.

On average, they were finding nearly 80, ranging up to nearly

600 parts per billion.

These were wintertime measurements.

The summertime, you can guarantee with moisture and heat,

they'd be even higher.

But these were so alarming that the people that had been located in

emergency housing, over 7,000 families, were evacuated from the


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emergency housing and put into hotels and motels.

So what we're saying is, here is a somewhat perverse indoor air pollution

issue that is a downstream effect of a climate stress, or a climate related

phenomenon.

What else did people do?

And this happened, though I think we really understand it now in the

aftermath of Sandy.

What you're looking here, you're looking at a emergency power

generator, or just a power generator, and what is a power generator?

Well, you can go to any hardware store around--

Lowe's, Home Depot in the US, and I'm sure lots of other places--

and buy a generator.

These are very popular items now.

So they're effectively a gasoline engine, a two-stroke power cycle.

This is back to the old lawn mowers that we used to have that were

horribly inefficient and polluting, all right. but they gave you some

capacity to produce electricity under emergency conditions.

So after these events, not only Katrina, Sandy, but other floods, and

power outages, and other, sometimes weather related, sometimes not related

events, the poison centers around this country that report to the Center for

Disease Control started seeing increased reporting of acute carbon

monoxide poisoning.

Trace many of these back, and we find out that they were associated with the

use of these portable electric generators.

People were, let's just say, dumb about this in some cases, putting them

in their basements, putting them in there garages, because you don't want

to leave it out in the rain.

And you're producing an exhaust product with no control devices, of

high carbon monoxide, as well as particles, as


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well as nitrogen dioxide.

But the high carbon monoxide led to these, I think in some cases, some

fatalities as a result of it.

So again, our ability to respond has this change in behavior pattern that

has an indoor air pollution impact.

Our National Institute for Testing and Standards, under contract I think from

the Environmental Protection Agency, started to study this in a lot more

detail to understand where these things might be placed so they would

not have impact back in the indoor environment.

So even outside the house with doors open, you can pull the exhaust back

in, so they were doing some dispersion models, let's say, knowing the source

and knowing configurations around airflows around buildings.

The issue is the aftermath of the floods.

The floods eventually subside.

You see in this graphic illustration in this house exactly how high that

moisture got.

And if it wets the wall board, which is sort of a plaster material often

lined with paper on the backside, it's saturated.

So now you have moisture in this system, you have lots of organisms,

spores around, so that if you've got nutrients, you've got moisture, and

you've got the spores, and then you've got the right amount of drying--

because if it's saturated you won't get it, but the

right amount of drying--

you get the growth of fungus on this.

And there's a lot known about this.

There are many, many studies.

There's an Institute of Medicine report that links damp indoor spaces

that are associated with irritation, increased respiratory ailments, so we

know increased medication use, increased infestations, we know these


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relationships.

And so if it's true for the general set of homes, it's also going to be

true for those homes that are damaged under these extreme

precipitation events.

And sometimes we build homes the wrong way.

What you're seeing is the [INAUDIBLE] taken off of this building, this home,

where a company, Tri-State Homes, now out of business, across Wisconsin, and

Minnesota, and Michigan, built thousands of homes.

And in the attempt to put a vapor barrier, didn't do it properly, and

that trapped the moisture between the vapor barrier and the plywood, or the

oriented strand board, in the inside of that wall, led to the mold growth.

Or the wet basements that aren't ventilated, or are not dehumidifier,

growth on surfaces.

So the affects of mold or dampness, not quite sure exactly the real cause,

but dampness seems to be an underlying, let's say, condition that

links a lot of these things together.

The increase of allergies, asthma, infection, irritation, cognitive

dysfunction associated with some of these organisms as

well, and other effects.

I'm making reference to NORDAMP.

That is the study of-- all the Nordic countries gathered some of their top

scientists that were epidemiologist, medical doctors, biostatisticians,

engineers, indoor specialist, not all of them.

Some came from very different fields, but they reviewed the world literature

at the time, and I find this as really compelling.

They said, dampness--

they all signed this as a conclusion--

dampness increases the relative risk of chronic cough, chronic wheeze,

asthma, tiredness, headaches, and airway infection.


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Odds ratios of 1.4 to 2.2.

Roughly speaking, 40% to 120% increase of those conditions when you have

those kinds of situations.

So they included studies that we've done across North America.

Some of the highest indoor risk factors that we've seen, higher than

passive cigarette smoke on kids was the effects of dampness in houses.

Some of my earlier experiences was looking at working with the

Passamaquoddy Indian tribe, Native Americans that live in the state of

Maine in the United States.

And new housing built on their tribal lands, their reservations, thinking

they were doing the right thing, insulation structures, and you found

interior surfaces as shown in this picture with molds

growing on the ceilings.

And you pull off the wall boards, and it's growing where that condensation

gets hit with the vapor barrier, right between.

These kids were sick all winter long.

They just didn't recover.

They didn't have a chance.

Many of the homeowners, the Native Americans that had that house were

living off reservation.

They would meet us on the doorstep, they said, we can't go in, we're so

allergic to our own house.

That's how severe the conditions were, so don't underestimate when we see

climate changes that link to moisture, flooding, these kinds of conditions,

it has a real health effects on occupants in those structures.

Look at this summary out of work by Mudarri and Fisk, Lawrence Berkeley

Labs, about 23% of asthma cases in the United States related to mold and

dampness in homes, so they actually put in attributable risk to it.

Now, so that we aren't sporeophobic, afraid of all spores and things and


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things in our environment, many of us might have our lives as a consequences

of antibiotics, penicillin.

This is a mold.

Here it is growing on bread, and discovered in World War II, saved lots

of soldiers from infection, wounds, infections, and others.

Saved lots of us in childhood, because we had antibiotics derived from molds,

effectively from spores.

And sometimes we enjoy other things in life.

This salami, or maybe it's prosciutto that is encased with mold,

effectively.

The enzymes in the mold are curing that meat inside.

And part of the enjoyment of life is from yeast, and from fermentation

process, from our wines, to our beers, to our cheeses, our breads.

So nature has given us a full bounty of wonderful things, and things to be

cautious about as well.

We know a lot about these issues.

Again, they're summarized Institute of Medicine, clearing the air, what

should we be doing about these things, these things that cause or contribute

to the symptoms of asthma and allergy.

Things like mold, things like nitrogen dioxide, ozone, formaldehyde, so

that's why it's important to be concerned about these conditions as

they might change with climate change.

Well, let's get into the positive side of things.

I like this humorous little picture of capturing the rain, but this gets back

to the issue.

I said we can turn this into a positive thing if we understand how we

can control the moisture penetration into buildings and materials with

vapor barriers, the right kind of dehumidification, ventilation, so that

we don't get condensation.


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I'll give you some examples of that in.

Our urban scape, it'd be so much more pleasant to not try to get to your car

through a puddle, because you have impervious parking lot

that has pour drainage.

The drains are blocked up over this excessive rainfall, and you have to

deal with that, versus having the bioswales that can accommodate a

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