Climate Change, Thermal Comfort and Bulding Design
Thermal Comfort for Building Occupants, London, Nov. 2008.
The world’s climate is changing. Here we review the level of historic changes, look at one prediction of future climate and investigate what impact this would have on a typical school built to the current building regulations. We then study how the environment within a building is likely to change for a range of future predictions of climate, including some more extreme than commonly considered. From this work it would appear that the first derivative of the change in maximum (or mean) internal temperature with respect to changes in maximum (or mean) external temperature is a constant across all scenarios. We have termed this constant a climate change resilience coefficient, CTmax, and believe it likely that the concept is a general one that can be used to asses the resilience of any design. In addition, we have found that the value of CTmax displayed by a design is maintained even if the UK were to experience radical climate change that led to very different weather patterns. By extending this approach to comfort we have found that the idea of a resilience coefficient is still valid when discussing predicted mean vote.