From Vanderbilt University , damn the torpedoes uncertainty and full speed ahead, there’s a trillion dollars at stake:
Time to begin anticipating and adapting to climate change
Despite the uncertainties surrounding climate change, it is time to start developing effective strategies that will keep the nation’s transportation systems and other critical infrastructure running in the face of the adverse impacts that seem increasingly likely to occur.
This consensus emerged from a two-day leadership summit that brought together major stakeholders from the $1 trillion-plus freight transportation sector with climate change researchers to discuss the issue for the first time. The meeting was held in June at Vanderbilt University and was sponsored by the Vanderbilt Center for Transportation Research (VECTOR), Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment (VIEE) and the University of Memphis’ Intermodal Freight Transportation Institute.
“It is increasingly clear that climate change will have potentially large impacts on the nation’s highways, railroads, waterways, airports and pipelines. In all likelihood, these impacts will increase in the future, so we have to learn how to plan ahead,” said George Hornberger, director of VIEE and distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Weather-related damage to nation’s infrastructure on the rise
According to the University Center for Atmospheric Research, more than 75 percent of natural disasters are triggered directly or indirectly by weather and climate. In the U.S., more than a quarter of our gross national product (+$2 trillion) is sensitive to weather and climate events, which affect our health, safety, economy, environment, transportation systems and national security. Each year, the U.S. sustains billions of dollars in weather-related damages caused by hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, flooding, heavy snows and drought. The threats associated with extreme weather and climate change are substantial and adapting to climate change will be crucial to economic and social stability, for example by making future water, food and energy supplies reliable and sustainable. Contributing to these costs is the problem of the nation’s aging infrastructure, which needs $2.2 trillion in improvements to meet today’s demands, according to the 2009 National Infrastructure Report Card by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Unless the nation begins taking appropriate measures, these costs are likely to increase: “It appears to us that more extreme weather events – like floods and hurricanes – are becoming more frequent and pronounced and we need to be prepared to adapt to the prospect that what have been episodic events in the past become chronic features of our operational landscape in the future,” observed Craig Philip, Chief Executive Officer of the Ingram Barge Company and a member of the conference steering committee.
The Mississippi River floods in April and May, which were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the waterway in the past century, the flooding on the Missouri that began in June and the above-average wildfire season that burned 1.3 million acres in the month of June in the Southern Plains and Southwest, are dramatic examples of the kinds of natural disasters that experts predict will become increasingly severe and frequent.
“Right now people are waking up to the fact that they will have to adapt, but very few are walking the walk,” commented Mark Abkowitz, co-organizer of the meeting and professor of engineering management at Vanderbilt. “If we’re not careful and begin taking actions soon, we will fall so far behind that playing catch-up will be difficult.”
Reasons for current lack of action
The summit discussions identified several reasons for the current lack of action: 1) uncertainty in the timing and magnitude of climate change; 2) insufficient knowledge of how these changes will impact the performance of critical infrastructure systems; 3) the succession of short-term crises that deflect attention and resources; and, 4) lack of political leadership.
So far, the federal government has focused almost exclusively on mitigation: developing methods that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released in various industrial processes or sequestering carbon deep underground.
“Regardless of the success of mitigation efforts, we will need to adapt. Even if we could completely stop injecting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the concentration of carbon dioxide is already significantly higher than historic levels so we would still have to handle the consequences,” said Hornberger. Key initiatives for next five years Summit delegates identified several key initiatives that should be undertaken in the next five years:
- Identify the critical infrastructure that is most vulnerable to damage and disruption. Of particular importance are bridges, highways, rail lines, airports and other key transportation facilities for which there are no alternatives;
- Assess the cost of impacts to key infrastructure components. Putting a dollar sign on the potential damage for non-action helps determine the benefits of the proposed protective measures;
- Develop better tools and models for performing risk assessments. Right now the climate models are more accurate at the global and regional scale, but they are not capable of predicting the local effects that planners need;
- Define and communicate climate change problems in terms that decision makers can understand;
- Improve dialogue and collaboration among stakeholders.
“There is no reason why we should wait to get started down this path,” said Abkowitz. “As long as our approach remains flexible, we can adapt as better information becomes available.”
Videos of the plenary sessions of the meeting can be viewed on the Vanderbilt School of Engineering’s website at http://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/CivilAndEnvironmentalEngineering/News/PodcastsVideos.aspx
Oh good, they have a five-year “plan”. Hmmm…. who else used to have those? No relation, of course. In their “plan” they list “Define and communicate climate change problems in terms that decision makers can understand”. Yes indeed, with Warmists it always comes down to the “communication”, by which they mean propaganda, and the “terms decision makers can understand” would be along the lines of “we’ll play ball with you if you play ball with us”. The whole “climate change” bit is nothing more than a ruse and a means for a money grab.
“There is no reason why we should wait to get started down this path,” said Abkowitz. “As long as our approach remains flexible, we can adapt as better information becomes available.”
Yes, when it comes to scamming people out of money, now is always better than later.
Especially since, as they probably know, the CAGW scam is coming to an end, so they need to get their snouts in the trough soon, before it’s all gone.
“There is no reason why we should
wait toget started down this path,” said Abkowitz. “As long as our approach remains flexible, we can adapt as better information becomes available.”There you go. Fixed!
“Despite the uncertainties surrounding climate change [policy(!)], it is time to start developing effective strategies that will keep the nation’s transportation systems and other critical infrastructure running in the face of the adverse impacts that seem increasingly likely to occur”
The most effective strategy imaginable is let businesses run transport systems and other critical infrastructure with neither subsidies nor obstacles from govt. That strategy does not even need “development”, it works as it is.
However, it is not only seems increasingly likely, that adverse impacts occur if a free ride is granted to political clowns, but it is absolutely sure.
Money! Money Money Money!
Some things never change.
{snip snip snip snip!}
IMHO, a 15 trillion$ debt is a far greater threat to our future than a 1 degree rise in temperature. The debt is real. 1 degree? Maybe. Down the road. Unless it cools off a bit. Spending still more $$$ we don’t have? That’s a real disaster.
“There is no reason why we should wait to get started down this path,” said Abkowitz. “As long as our approach remains flexible, we can adapt as better information becomes available.”
The weakness in this argument for action now, thought later, is that once a program is moving, like a tsunami wave at sea, it is impossible to stop. Government regulation and spending is a self-managing, self-serving organism that has strong self-preservation instincts. A program that is halted is seen as a failure by those who designed, implemented and operated it; it is a political nuclear bomb at the level of climate change rhetoric.
The Precautionary Principle, when applied to loosing a Juggernaut the size of climate change legislation, says one thing: “Don’t.”
“The bad forest fires were due to forest mismanagement and the suppression of natural burns for 40 years—a big mistake. Smoky Bear aside, the forest rangers were too thorough and now represent a largely misguided program.”
The Law of Unintended Consequnces teaches us over and over again that nature does not reward simplistic solutions. Billions of years of evolution have conditioned life to respond in unpredictable fashion, to out compete other life. Our ignorance leads us to assume that we can predict and thus control the unpredictable. When we are accidentally right we believe in our infallibility. When we are wrong, we blame it on something or someone else.
Ed Mertin says:
August 23, 2011 at 7:29 am
“Can we round up all the Moveon.org & [snip] the costly green tech? Place them all in Alaska and sell it to Russia and/or China for enough trillions to cover infrastructure needs & debt? Then don’t ever let those crazy people back in…”
Mr. Mertin,
The hate speech term [snip] that you used in your screed is a gutter low perverse sexual reference, beneath the minimum standards of any sane, educated, and moral person.
Moderators,
I appeal to your discretion. Simple cussing is one thing. Using extremely foul, perverted sexual slurs to demagogue should be unacceptable.
[Agree; snipped. ~dbs, mod.]
Need an economist at the meeting. If we are still talking about the future affects of AGW after 30 years of hype, then we should be looking at risk in this way: You guys gave us dire warnings in the late 80s and predicted calamity by 2000, or before. You called it CAGW. As the predictions failed miserably and things became less certain, and even cooling set in, you changed the name of the game to climate change, which is an admission that you are not now convinced of catastrophic warming and tipping points. If you are not convinced of warming then for the first 30 years you were just wrong. You can’t project from a wrong theory that “okay warming is less a concern but something else is going to happen”. Let us leave aside the gross dishonesty and imorality (shame, shame) of this climate change substitute. Had we jumped in 1988 and forked over $2T and nothing out of the normal happened as we saw, then the opportunity cost of this cash, say 7% would mean that we could have doubled, redoubled and re-re doubled that cash to $16T!! Even at 3.5% it would be worth a present day roughly $6T for no benefit. If I were now evaluating risk of severe climate change, it is now clear it is at least slow enough that we have lots of time to sit and wait to see if a troubling trend develops of the order of even IPCC’s most moderate trend.
Now the infrastructure itself is another matter – yes we should fix up roads, bridges, airports, etc as soon as we can, but don’t undertake major seawall construction to ward off sea level rises, don’t contruct flood control that anticipates ever increasing flood numbers and levels…. Maybe cutting back on tile drainage of farmland would solve most of the problems and ensure that flood control systems in place are managed properly (recall incompetence in flood control in northern Australia and US midwest).
They want to do the right thing for the wrong reason. I am all for improving infrastructure, starting with the levees in New Orleans. But to do it because a dangerous global warming is on the way is just stupid. I have proved from satellite measurements of global temperature that the greenhouse warming has not been observed for 31 years. I have also proved that Arctic warming which is real is not greenhouse warming but is caused by warm currents from the Atlantic reaching the Arctic Ocean. Read “What Warming?” available on Amazon. com.
There isn’t anything objectionable in the main post. Transportation infrastructure in the US needs more money for repair and upgrading. Climate change (whether AGW or natural) may cause more costly damage, especially with increasing population densities. Better solutions are more likely to arise out of careful study than from neglect. A good balance of government programs (fuel research, financing roads and bridges, regulating pollutants of all forms) and market innovations (improved engines, improved fuel refining, improved aircraft design) will be a part of all solutions, as it always has been in the U.S.. At least some attention to the possibility of AGW is warranted.
Of course they want $$$$. Does anyone propose that maintaining and upgrading the transportation infrastructure will be free and happen without intention?
Again, the Precautionary Principle being applied to only one side of a situation. As usual, the side with other people’s money to spend.
These people keep partying like its 2005. They sound like nothing more than advocates for the President’s upcoming speech about Infrastructure and Job Banks. I would like to know this: if our “infrastructure is so bad, what happened to that $500 billion Congress and Bush appropriated in the historic 2006 Transportation Bill? Better yet, what happened to the hundreds of billions of dollars the current President and Congress appropriated in early 2009 towards “shovel ready” jobs? All in all, some $850 billion was appropriated towards infrastructure since 2006. Even in 2011, $850 billion is a lot of infrastructure.
These advocates for more government spending are a little too late to the game. We’re tapped out. We no longer have the money to play these AGW games.
Ray wrote: When you adapt you survive. If the dinosaurs had adapted, they would still be here.
They did adapt: the adapted forms are turkeys, sea gulls, roadrunners and other birds.
Septic Matthew says:
Of course they want $$$$. Does anyone propose that maintaining and upgrading the transportation infrastructure will be free and happen without intention?
If this is only about “maintaining and upgrading”, then why all the need for the “climate change” hype and propaganda? There’$ a rea$on people lie.
I guess it’s way easier to heat up the climate than to cool it down, right? With stuff like NO2 which is 3,000 times as effective as CO2 as a GHG. So here’s the plan: Adapt all infrastructure to very hot temperatures; and as soon as the temperature drops too much, quickly release a whole lot of NO2, water vapor and CO2, which would bring temperatures back up in no time. We could even do it in winter, probably even each single night. No more need for heating, for greenhouses – the atmospheric greenhouse effect will provide the greenhouse for all. The Stefan-Boltzmann Law automatically makes sure that the low temperatures will rise much more than the high temperatures, and we’ll be living in a nice warm world forever.
Do your part! Drive an ignition engine!
The Mississippi River floods in April and May, which were among the largest and most damaging recorded along the waterway in the past century, the flooding on the Missouri that began in June and the above-average wildfire season that burned 1.3 million acres in the month of June in the Southern Plains and Southwest, are dramatic examples of the kinds of natural disasters that experts predict will become increasingly severe and frequent.
Isn’t this the standard result of a ‘La Niña’ event? What are they going to build to affect the mid Pacific Ocean temp changes?
Vandy, isn’t that where Al G. tried to get his Divinity degree?
Not for moving people. At least, not without significant subsidies. Even during the golden age of rail, say 1890-1920, passenger service never paid its way. Freight hauling subsidized people moving. You can’t put 110,000 pounds of “people” in a train car, but you can put that much coal or iron ore in one.
NJ Transit has new multi-level cars that seat up to 142 passengers. If they are all on monthly passes and traveling between Red Bank and New York Penn station, the per trip cost (based on 23 round trips per month and $414 monthly pass) is $9. Total revenue per car is $1,278. At a penny a pound, freight would bring in $1,100. If you where the railroad and didn’t have to deal with conductors, heating, and airconditioning, which would you rather haul?
“Each year, the U.S. sustains billions of dollars in weather-related damages caused by hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, flooding, heavy snows and drought.”
Back in the Dark Ages, Global Warming was called GOD.
I hope everyone was careful where they stepped. It’s hard to scrape “leadership” like this of your shoes.
“It appears to us that more extreme weather events – like floods and hurricanes – are becoming more frequent and pronounced.”
Intentionally dishonest, or just ignorant? See “Recent historically low global tropical cyclone activity,” Ryan Maue, 2011:
http://coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/2011GL047711-pip.pdf
Excerpt:
“Since 2006, global and Northern Hemisphere (NH) TC accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) has decreased dramatically, nearly cut in half from the previous peak in 2005 to the lowest levels since the 1970s. While the annual global frequency of tropical storm TCs has not exhibited a long-term trend (~87 per year), the calendar year total of 69 observed in 2010 represented a decades’ low.”
Just my two cents, but if people wanted to upgrade our infrastructure like it was needed, we had time to do this back when we were shoveling out money like crazy for “stimulus.”
Instead this money was mostly wasted on “pointless stimulus” instead of for projects that were even talked about at this time that were deemed necessary. For instance, even Washington DC’s water pipe-lines and sewers need work. But instead we shoveled money into such wasteful projects that we see nothing from the money even 2 years later. Bridges are a “little safer” but the general issues with bridge neglect were not solved. They are still below passing grades in many cases, and how do they solve this problem? They just close the bridges down! Brilliant!
And now climate change adapatation with a price tag in the trillions? Where do people think this money is going to come from? Money does not grow on trees last time I checked, and borrowing and increasing taxes to get more for the Fed. Gov. has consequences to the economy eventually.
And although I think the only viable strategy IS adaptation for any kind of climate change, this does not change the fact that I think its a waste of money to throw money into “projects from increased global warming” when all indications point to us losing .3C in the next 20 years as part of a natural ocean cycle. Indeed, if the past proves correct, we will make this up with a positive .6C increase, but never once is the actually observed temperature changes the cause of why we need to act.
Its always based on theoritical models. Come on…if you want us to spend this much money, at least PROVE why another less then a degree C of warming that we have seen since 1900 is dangerous. Models do not count. I can model anything to say anything I want, and that does not make it true.
They had best “alien-proof” all infrastructure too, while they are at it Better safe than sorry.
polistra says:
August 23, 2011 at 4:32 am
This falls into the same category as re-insurance companies heavily supporting carbon cult “research”. They’re using the “science” as an officially justifiable way to throw off liability onto other industries.
Too bad the Italian Mafia never figured out how to use “science”; they’d be the masters of the world now instead of the Wall Street Mafia.
There have been numerous reports that indicate that the Mob is a dominant player in the EU alternative energy field. I first came across them in a post Anthony did some time ago about solar plants that were “producing” electricity at night.
“It appears to us that more extreme weather events – like floods and hurricanes – are becoming more frequent and pronounced and we need to be prepared to adapt to the prospect that what have been episodic events in the past become chronic features of our operational landscape in the future,” observed Craig Philip, Chief Executive Officer of the Ingram Barge Company and a member of the conference steering committee.
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It appears to us you’ve been reading the wrong material and listening to the wrong people.
The US government (including NOAA ) knows there are not more extreme weather events.
People at this level should be smart enough and engaged enough to be aware of the failure of that premise.
“Contributing to these costs is the problem of the nation’s aging infrastructure, which needs $2.2 trillion in improvements to meet today’s demands, according to the 2009 National Infrastructure Report Card by the American Society of Civil Engineers.”
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Obama took $4T, that should be more than enough.
What? Don’t tell me he pissed it away already and didn’t fix anything.