In Friday’s post, I told you about the American Standard Green Envirohome. In the process of inviting the owners to speak at Green Earth Expo 2008, I had an amazing, 40-minute conversation with Nonnie Chrystal, pictured in Friday’s column. Wow! It’s not every day that I encounter someone with my passion and zeal for environmental issues, especially the holistic approach of not just consuming less but healing the earth whenever possible.

It turns out that the story in USA Today which led me to Nonnie in the first place only tells half the story. As I described in my last column, Nonnie’s and Mark’s family was impacted severely by the rapid-fire hurricanes of 2004. However, I came to learn that the devastation of the next year’s hurricane season hit them hard as well. In fact, Nonnie is an alumna of Tulane University in New Orleans and has strong ties to the Crescent City. That is why the arduous journey of designing and building the American Standard Green Envirohome, in collaboration with multiple companies and governmental bodies, is like a Hurricane Katrina Poem in Concrete and Steel.

As we ponder what happened and what could have been prevented in the national disaster known as Hurricane Katrina (and rightly so), it is important that we not lose sight of the meteorological aspects of that fateful week which closed August, 2005. Indeed, that fatal storm set 3 atmospheric records for cyclones:

1) Katrina was the largest storm ever in terms of area;
2) In the hours before landfall, Katrina had the highest wind gusts ever recorded; and
3) Katrina accelerated from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane faster than any storm recorded.

The third and last of the above is among the most important Hurricane Katrina environmental lessons.

I first moved to Florida from Maine in 1987. Sure enough, just a few months after calling the Sunshine State home, a tropical storm blew through. The damages were relatively mild and I counted myself lucky. It wasn’t until 1992 that I had another chance to see what nature’s fury can do to this lovely and low-lying peninsula. The name of the fury was Hurricane Andrew.

There were devastating similarities between Andrew and his gruesome successor Katrina but also differences. Andrew caused the greatest portion of damage with gales which lasted for brutal, extended periods. Katrina, on the other hand, killed mostly with water, both in the storm surge and the rainfall which breeched levies.

The other key similarity in the destruction of Hurricane Andrew and Katrina points to a trend: the $100 billion natural disaster.

In this blog, I tend to discuss the environmental ramifications of current events. I am an environmentalist so my choice of topics should come as no surprise. However, I also am a Floridian and a homeowner, a risky and often expensive combination. Everyone who owns property or plans to buy property must consider the impact of hurricanes, not just in their immediate effects but the toll they take on the property casualty industry.

When I attended the Solar World Congress in Orlando’s tourism district 2 years ago, I learned a great deal about the technology of renewable energy, especially solar, as the event’s name suggests. One of the most intriguing solutions I saw there, applied in a few different ways, was the solar air conditioner. In fact, one of the presentations on the subject was by NASA, explaining how lunar missions in coming decades will use it.

Sadly, while the most intriguing exhibits and speeches I saw at the Solar World Congress focused on the future, the technologies we use today for generating electricity and then cooling and heating our homes is firmly rooted in the last century. I am very bullish about the promise of geothermal energy and believe that I can convince you to feel the same way.

So, how helpful could it be?

In my previous post, I explained that I am enthusiastic about geothermal energy. The good news does not end with the fact that this abundant resource is clean and renewable. No, it also can lead to stability in energy prices.

Because the fuel is expensive and must be extracted from the earth, the price we pay for conventional energy is volatile, subject to multiple market forces. When we add economic expansion and shifts between population centers, the result is inevitable, rising U.S. energy prices.

Nature has given us a clean solution which also can be quite inexpensive over the long term, geothermal energy.

Soil temperatures beneath the surface of the Earth are constant so we can use the unchanging conditions there to control the temperature of our own surroundings by routing our ventilation system through underground chambers. Applied cleverly, we also can generate electricity cleanly by exploiting the difference in temperature at the surface and deep below.

I love renewable energy. It is clean and, in some cases, free to harness. Which is the right answer for your situation, however? Without visiting your home, I cannot state for certain but what I can do is offer my perspective, which cares equally for keeping the earth green and providing you with the energy you need.

Every form of renewable energy has its advantages. I tend to prefer solar because of the relative ease of installation of the equipment to harness it and the vast untapped potential. As you may know, the world uses a mere fraction of 1% of the solar energy which strikes the surface of the Earth every day.

Solar doesn’t work everywhere, however. Likewise, geothermal has the ability to generate most of the electricity we need and keep our homes comfortable year round but it does not work in every situation. So, should we focus on solar energy or geothermal?

When you learn of the awful forest fires which have become chronic summer occurrences in both hemispheres, I’m sure that you fear for everyone impacted. I do as well. However, there’s a component of global warming at work here which must remain in our consciousness.

Record blizzards and strings of bone-chilling weather cause some of us to assume that global warming can’t be to blame. After all, a warming trend would prevent blizzards, right?

I recently shared with you that the year 2007 has set more weather records. We had not one but two killer hurricanes of category 5 strength strike land within weeks of each other. Worse still, they targeted similar areas, the southwest Caribbean basin. That was a first.

Well, last week, another terrifying record came and went. Arctic ice equal in size to the State of Florida, where I live and which I call Hurricane Alley, melted in six days’ time. We shattered the record for total area melted and pace of melting.

Not only have we never seen melting of such apocalyptic proportions but in some scientific camps the astonishment at this occurrence has yielded calls for new estimates of the year when polar ice will melt completely during the summer.

The Orlando home which Catrin and I share with our 4 cats (6 if you count the 4-legged patrol on our block) weathered the 2004 hurricane season (no pun intended) well on the whole. We lost over 100 roofing shingles but never had a major water leak.

60 miles east of us in Indialantic, the story was quite different. The home which Nonnie Chrystal and her husband Mark are rebuilding suffered terrible damage, so much that it became uninhabitable and very quickly overrun with mold. Here is a photograph of the loss of roofing shingles endured at 216 Coral Way South.

Nonnie Chrystal and her husband Mark are determined to design Florida’s Showcase Green Envirohome to bear up under the greatest stresses which nature can hurl at it in this age of global warming.

The process began for them with extreme water damage which led to tremendous mold infestations. They are using SIP panels for the exterior of the home placed from the corner in so as to reduce the ability of strong winds to bow or lift the house.

Those panels, then, are arranged to allow rainfall to form channels and remain outside. However, if a leak should occur, the guts of the house will be highly resistant to mold, fungus and termite infestation thanks, in part, to BluWood.

Even at the peak of the hurricane season (which falls right now, as you read this), Florida is a wonderful place to live. The people are friendly and at no time are we far from the beach. The natural beauty which fills the Sunshine State comes with a price, however, high dew points and humidity during more than half the year. In addition to lots of perspiration and steady work for air conditioning repair technicians, Florida’s climate has another byproduct, mold.

In other parts of the United States which have 4 distinct seasons, mold is less of an issue and it usually affects clothing and luggage more than buildings. The solution can be as simple as storing those articles in the cellar until fall. For people like Nonnie Chrystal and her husband Mark, however, seaside Florida living can be moldy, just as it is for most every Floridian.

The warning signs which the 2007 hurricane season is sending us about the future have been all bad. The lessons of 2004 and 2005 went beyond the obvious such as horrible wind damage and loss of life to huge storm surges and the connection between Hurricane Katrina and mold. Even as the painful Gulf Coast reconstruction process continues at a pace which satisfies no one, those of us trying to warn the world of what is to come focus on the atmospheric side of those tragic years, too.

The record-setting storm known as Katrina, which killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands more, accelerated from Category 1 to Category 5 in three days’ time. Such a pace of intensification had not been seen before. Well, Katrina’s pedal-to-the-metal record now has been broken, just two years later, by Felix, which accelerated from Category 1 to Category 5 in just over two days’ time. In short, North America must be ready for big storms.