Summary: This week, two readers strenuously object to the notion of manmade climate change. Others are on either side of the fence as to whether Mike Crosbie was right about Buckminster Fuller being the first Green architect.

Re: President Purnell Testifies About Climate Change Before House Energy Committee

I really think the AIA needs to get the facts straight regarding “manmade global warming.” If you look at the facts and not conjecture or hypotheses, you will find there is no truth to manmade global warming. This inconvenient warming trend is the Earth—Mother Nature—going through its normal cycle. Look at the weather data. There are many instances of the globe warming and cooling over periods of time. If man caused global warming, then what caused the Ice Age to end? Man was not burning fossil fuels at the time, so what caused the Earth to warm? Please see the attached Myths/Fact sheets and the following articles:

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0805/S00122.htm

www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/05/14/global-warming-tutorial-media-should-be-required-take

I’m all for saving energy and protecting the environment and all, but I am sick and tired of everyone falling for this manmade global warming crap. Most especially is the whole idea behind carbon credits. Let’s see, man inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas???!!!); plants use (inhale) carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and gives off (exhale) oxygen. Therefore, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more our plants will grow. But yet we’re going to buy (and trade) units of carbon. You’ve got to be kidding me. Here, you want to buy a rock … you can treat it like a pet. You know, a pet rock. Really, I’m serious. (Oh, we already fell for that one.)

This is just another societal overreaction to something when we don’t fully understand how it works. Meteorologists can’t predict the weather a few days in advance, how can they predict it three years in advance? Ahhh … they can’t day-to-day, but perhaps they can in more general terms, such as you will find in the Farmer’s Almanac. And how do “they” do that, one might ask. They use empirical data. By knowing what has happened in the past, ‘they” can generally tell what’s going to happen in the future. And that is my point. Manmade global warming is still just a hypothesis, not fact. Until “they” come up with empirical data that factually prove man’s actions can cause global warming, the AIA should not have leapt into the green tar pit, which unfortunately it already has.

Since the cost of oil has risen so much, you would think owners of buildings would want to make their buildings as efficient as they can to reduce their operating costs. Now, that is the reason to use less fossil fuels, use geothermal heat pumps, and increase insulation thickness—not man-made global warming.

—Tim Yoko, AIA
Nashville

I can longer sit and swallow all this rhetoric on the global climatic change. In the article and before some committee, AIA President Marshall E. Purnell stood up for me and 84,000 other AIA members to speak on the topic of climate change. Well thanks, but no thanks—I can speak for myself just fine. All this psycho-babble on global warming is just that, just a bunch of tree-hugging bleeding heart anti-capitalists wanting to control every aspect of my life though government regulations.

Enough … I can say for myself after reviewing information from informed scientists and meteorologists that yes, the climate has changed, but it cannot be tied to manmade global warming or our carbon footprint! Thank you Mr. Gore, whose house in Tennessee uses how much power each month—enough for a $13,000 power bill!

Just as a side bar, in the ‘70s, all the experts said the earth was cooling and we were heading for an “ice age.” It was on magazine covers! Building something that is energy-efficient is fine, and if someone wants to pursue that goal, great. We don’t need Big Brother telling us we have to, thereby doubling the cost of the project to meet some artificial standard.

We have enough government regulations—we don’t need more. I’d love to go on, but I need to turn on some energy-wasting lights and start working for a living! The AIA is not representing my voice on this topic!

—Dave Magariner AIA
Charlotte

Re: The First Green Architect?

To consider Buckminster Fuller as the first green architect is patently ridiculous. Certainly Frank Lloyd Wright was environmentally and energy conscious in many of his designs, and they have had a lasting impact on our built world. But really we should be looking back much further. Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon was an extremely energy-efficient apartment building, built with native materials circa 1100. We like to think that we have discovered Green design, when in truth, it is all that we have forgotten about green design that has gotten us into trouble.

—Kevin Munroe, AIA
Wakefield, R.I.

Of course! Michael Crosbie hit the nail on the head.

Fuller made fun of the idiocy which would take a narrow view of globalism. He set it in cosmic context with clearly local implications. He was the first to ask "what does your building weigh?" implying that much energy could be save by lightening the mass of structures. Some thought his vision pompous and his talks abstruse. Yet he was a humble man, driven toward design as a complex totality which needed to be reduced to understandable terms in order to achieve both efficiency and beauty.

He understood the importance of the writings and works of Barbara Ward, Rachel Carson, Paul Sears, Ian McHarg, and J. B. Jackson. I only wish that I had been able to listen in on the weekly cocktail chats he had with Kahn and LeRicolais during their later days in Philadelphia.

—Patrick J. Quinn, FAIA
Albany N.Y.