Technically, things are warming up. The earth’s temperature climbed somewhere around one degree Fahrenheit over the 20th century and all of those glacier makeover pictures provide the senses with the multi-media evidence that statistics fall short of. But what actually is happening? One scientist, Andrew Watson, who I interviewed for an article a few months ago, suggested that possibly a “natural oscillation” in climate is occurring alongside human influence. He certainly hasn’t put on the Al Gore freak-out face but instead posits:

What happens if we take no action? We will see a warming as great as that which has occurred since the middle of the last ice age (when there was a 2 kilometer thick ice sheet where Birmingham is today for instance) but happening much more quickly. I don’t think that all life on the planet is in danger (the world has been that warm before, albeit a very long time ago). But the natural world as we know it is going to pass away, and billions of people will be displaced.

Billions of displaced people? It’s been a little hard to imagine the five million people who are reported to have been made homeless in China in the last week. Billions is out of my concept range and likely out of range as well for most government emergency plans. I’ve been editing quite a few environmental science essays over the past few months, and, coincidentally, there’s been a marked shift in verbiage over even that short period: prevention turns damage reduction. Call it what you will, things are heating up.

And, when it comes down to it, the global warming-related and reinforced “ethics” encouraging human change seem to be fostering financially responsible attitudes. While reading a book last year called Disenchanted Night: the Industrialization of Light, originally written in German in the early 80s by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, I was introduced to the German term ganzes Haus. It translates directly as “total household” and basically referred to houses that were energy-autonomous. They needed no external sources for things like heat and light. Although in reality it has made more dollar sense following the industrial revolution to supply multiple homes with heat and light from a central, exterior supply, I remember thinking that the ganzes Haus concept was a great metaphor for personal finance. Instead of constantly drawing from a source and expending energy(money), making one’s energy(money) work for them – returns on the “total household” (light produces heat) — affords a much different form of life. Phillipe Lebon, the French inventor of the early 1800s Thermolamp (which would heat a house while lighting it) actually believed that his design was more of a humanitarian than an industrial development.

Ironically, “progress” in conjunction with climate control intervention seems to be shifting things back toward the idea of the ganzes Haus. What, in the early days of the gas era was called the “total household,” is in the renewable, sustainable age called a passiv haus in German because it can be “passively” heated, “using only the existing internal heat sources,” The U.S. has their own version of the “Passive Houses” modeled after the Germans’, both of which are similar to the U.K.’s plans for “zero-carbon” houses, or “Green Houses.”

Even if the human group as a whole doesn’t embrace the changes or believe climate change is happening at all, it’s exciting to think that the concepts of energy production and the use of resources in general are making yet another shift. And, if there’s any chance that it could save the planet as well, then even better.