Let's Go Viking!

Well, after looking at all the options, making tentative budgets and considering the long-term benefits and issues, we have decided on building a monolithic dome, expensive though it be. Our reasons are long-term, looking forward to the day when we are not able to preform maintenance on the roof, safety of the structure in the face of tornados and fire. While this will reduce some of the pleasure of building it ourselves we think that it will more than pay back in pleasure of not worrying if we build the walls correctly or if the logs are checking too widely letting moisture into the walls. Now we are looking at how to refine the interior structures so that our sense of aesthetics and our budget come away intact. Once of things that we are considering is using cob for the interior walls to continue the earthy feeling inside. Also, we will most likely use cob and strawbale for the exterior buildings such as the shop and barns. We have also reduced the overall size down to around 2500 square feet.
This is one floor plan we are looking at, two domes:
Click on the pic for the Full Size image…it’s really BIG so you have been warned!

State Rep. Randy Terrill is sponsoring H.B. 1387 to allow Oklahomans a tax credit up to 40% of the cost of solar and wind stations for the home. Finally Oklahoma is coming around. According to the press release the round of storms last year was the impetus for this measure, increasing the self reliance of Oklahomans. Normally I’m not for the government, since I feel that over the past 30 or so years they have done little to promote personal freedom and independence and a great deal to curtail it, but this is a good measure. Energy independence is good for both the person and the State! Call your State Rep. today to get them to support this measure!

Well the results are in and guess what? We’re all gonna die! Yep…Global Warming tm will continue unabated into the unforeseeable future and the planet will roast and or drown. For one, I am largely relieved. If this is unstoppable, I can quit worrying about it, right? The UN conference in Paris has just relieved me of the duty to pray at the alter of Global Warming. This makes me happy.
Personally, I think that this whole issue is hogwash for a multitude of reasons. Number one is the reliance on computer modeling to make these dire predictions. Modeling is an infant science at best and relies completely on the accuracy of the information entered into it as a baseline. Lets look at current weather predictions as an example…it is often wrong, sometimes wildly so, especially in time frames of greater than 5 days. And yet the Global Warming folk would have us accept completely models that span hundreds or thousands of years…not without a very large grain of salt. About the baseline information that they rely on…accurate temperature measurements have only existed for the past hundred years or so and the methods of data collection have been less than uniform over that time. This leads us to ambiguous data at best. As far as historical temperature assumptions there is no real consensus on how to compare tree-ring data with ice-core data. This is an apple/orange conditional for which there is no good interpolation.

And lets not go into the data interpretation debate…. it seems the UN data can’t support itself if the Medieval Warming Period is accounted for, so they leave it out. Things that make you go hmmmmm.

The upshot of all this, for me, is that there is climate change (always has been, always will be) and that man may have something to do with it but that by and large, it’s a natural event that we’re not going to solve. We just have to learn to live with it and adapt. Or die.