Skeptics turn up heat on LEED ratings

When Joe Lstiburek talks about LEED, he does so in wave after wave of pounding criticism.

One of a handful of ardent LEED skeptics, Lstiburek, a licensed engineer and principal of Massachusetts-based Building Science Consulting, said the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design building-rating system is a sham.
LEED-certified buildings, he said, are no more efficient than typical structures built in the 1960s.
Lstiburek said poorly designed LEED-certified structures such as the Seattle City Hall, a building on the Yale University campus and an office building in New York are “energy pigs.”
Builders, architects and governments across the country are enthusiastically using the popular rating system that, in this decade, has become the standard-setting leader in the multibillion-dollar, green-building industry.

Old Farmers Almanac: Global cooling may be underway - USATODAY.com

DUBLIN, N.H. — The Old Farmer's Almanac is going further out on a limb than usual this year, not only forecasting a cooler winter, but looking ahead decades to suggest we are in for global cooling, not warming.

Based on the same time-honored, complex calculations it uses to predict weather, the Almanac hits the newsstands on Tuesday saying a study of solar activity and corresponding records on ocean temperatures and climate point to a cooler, not warmer, climate, for perhaps the next half century.

"We at the Almanac are among those who believe that sunspot cycles and their effects on oceans correlate with climate changes," writes meteorologist and climatologist Joseph D'Aleo. "Studying these and other factor suggests that cold, not warm, climate may be our future."

It remains to be seen, said Editor-in-Chief Jud Hale, whether the human impact on global temperatures will cancel out or override any cooling trend.

"We say that if human beings were not contributing to global warming, it would become real cold in the next 50 years," Hale said.