Also in the news this week is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting in Durban South Africa with the latest IPCC report update.

What can we expect from climate change?

The highest certainty will most likely be heatwaves. “This will be the first clear signal” says Jean Palutikof director of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffith University. “It will appear sooner than other [effects] and will be recognised as due to global warming. Droughts would be the next most certain.”

It is impossible to read the draft summary to the IPCC without getting the impression that extreme weather impacts are going to be felt more and more simply because there are more and more people on planet Earch particularly in the swelling megacities of the developing world that overwhelmingly lie on the coast or on big rivers close to the coast.

Self-styled sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg says that what matters most is whether you are vulnerable.

It is worth asking ourselves here in the upper Kedron Brook valley this question: How vulnerable are we? How are we vulnerable to climate change? Maybe also where are our strengths that we are relatively resilient?

Another question Lomborg raises is: What are the most cost-effective ways of combating climate change?

He suggests that ‘the best bang for your buck is to be had in spending public money on research and development on reducing the cost of renewable energies to the point where they can compete in a free market with fossil fuels.’

My understanding is that one of the purposes of the carbon tax is to do this: to progressively reduce the subsidies on fossil fuels and swing them to renewable energies.

Barack Obama saluted Julia Gillard’s stand on introducing carbon measures in Australia but made clear that the US won’t be following suit while there are no binding targets on emissions for China and India.

China has now overtaken the US as the world’s largest carbon-emitting nation. However both the US and China are taking many steps to reduce carbon emissions already.

Here locally we took several steps to reduce our carbon emissions this week and we’re thrilled about it.

Through the Energymark program we were able to calculate that our household carbon emissions is 39 tonnes per annum for the two of us. This takes into account our electricity natural gas LPG petrol diesel air travel wood household waste garden waste household expenses and food.

Do you know how to calculate your total annual household carbon emissions? If you would like to do so you can find the formulas on Transition The Grove’s Energy Forum at www.transitionthegrove.org.au and go to the Forum tab.

So the two steps to reduce our carbon emissions that are happening in this household this week both extremely effective – are:

1. We’ve made an 8-metre shadecloth curtain and hung it right across the back of the house covering the walls and windows. It stops the direct sunlight heating the walls and coming through the windows. Inside it makes a big temperature difference and the light is very pleasant. The cost of this measure is very low for the benefit achieved.

2. We’ve adapted the pool chlorinator to bypass the pool pump and turned the pool pump back to only one hour a day which is all that is needed to suck up the leaves in the pool. Meanwhile we’ve wired the pool chlorinator to run off our solar panel since it only requires 80 watts not the 1.5kilowatts the pump takes. The pool pump is our biggest user of mains power so this should be a considerable financial saving and also a big reduction in electricity use and carbon emissions.

If you want to discuss the pool chlorinator come along to Transition The Grove’s Energy Subgroup monthly meetings.