climate change

Future climate change might have a tremendous impact on energy use, ventilative cooling strategies and thermal comfort in buildings, since these parameters are strongly correlated with the external weather conditions.
This paper will present results of a study of the impact future climate change scenarios as developed by the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) and implemented in weather files for specific future time slices (2020, 2050 and 2080) on the design of the external envelope of a hotel building in Greece. Three climatic regions of Greece are considered.

Public residential buildings in Singapore are designed as naturally ventilated. As climate changes, the indoor thermal comfort becomes critical as it depends greatly on the outdoor weather condition. The Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) model developed for Singapore (Givoni, et al., 2006) which depends on indoor air temperature and air speed is used to predict the indoor thermal comfort.

The climate of Greece is typical Mediterranean with wet, cool winters and hot, dry summers. The temperature range is on average between 5°C to 35°C without many extreme temperatures and weather events. The cool sea breeze on the islands makes summer conditions milder. According to researchers and assessment reports of the United Nations climate change is inevitable in the 21st century. Regional climate models related to Greece show low uncertainties.

This paper reviews the scenarios developed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) analysis. It pays particular attention to the applicability of these scenarios to the analysis ofenergy demand, energy savings, and reductions of CO2 emissions for the buildings sector.