House Plants of Gor

fjm , who will probably be truly punished in her next life, just linked to this...

House Plants of Gor!

If you've read several Gor novels, you'll be groaning.  Even if you haven't, you'll probably still be groaning.  The style is very Gorean...

Climate change refugees

Picture from the BBC web site.



and the text that was with it:

Open borders

Some groups go further. They want industrialised nations to open up borders to allow environmental refugees to move from their lands and find safer locations.

Bangladesh is one of the most crowded nations, with more than 158m crammed into about 144,000 sq km. Scientists predict Bangladesh could lose up to 20% of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels.

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If you have the choice, which would you rather do - reduce your energy consumption by around 60% (or  80% if you're American) (I don't know the figure for Australia, but that's probably bad as it's a very coal dependent country) or allow refugees from countries like Bangladesh to enter your country in large numbers (for the sake of argument, let's assign environmental refugees to industrialised countries in proportion to their CO2 emissions per head of their own population).  Discuss.

In the meantime, here's one more way to reduce your carbon footprint. 
Curtains -- It's amazing how many people overlook a simple and cheap method of insulation.  If you have double-glazing, still use your curtains.  They'll have a big impact on heat loss.  Many people tend to stop using their curtains at night once they have double-glazing (or else have filmy ones with no insulation value).  By doing that, you've lost a lot of the gain from installing the double-glazing.

If it's dark enough to have your lights on, then it's probably time to close your curtains.

If you have a cold hallway (and that's an awful lot of us), get a floor-length curtain from Oxfam, put a cheap rail over the door, and use it whenever the weather is cold, especially at night.  I was surprised how much difference ours made.

Also, consider a curtain at the foot of your stairs.  In the old days, people had a stairCASE.  The stairs were encased - it kept the heat in.  A curtain will help reproduce the effect of a door at the foot of your stairs and stop heat doing what it normally does - rise upstairs.  (You could always open it an hour before you go to bed, if you want the last of the heat to flow up and warm your bedroom.)

We turned off radiators in all our bedrooms the year our baby got croup (which we learned was caused by hot, dry air) and haven't turned them on again in decades.  A hot water bottle or electric blanket is far more cost-effective if you need to warm the bed before you get into it.  And I for one actually sleep better if my head is cool.