Tag Archives: flooding

Planetary Emergency

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Global energy budget from Trenberth et al 2009

This week’s lecture in my thermodynamics course for first-year undergraduate students was about thermodynamic systems and the energy flows in and out of them. I concluded the lecture by talking about our planet as a thermodynamic system using the classic schematic in the thumbnail [see ‘Ample sufficiency of solar energy‘ on October 25th, 2017 for more discussion on this schematic].  This is usually a popular lecture but this year it had particular resonance because of the widely publicised strikes by students for action on climate change.  I have called before for individuals to take responsibility given the intransigence of governments [see ‘Are we all free riders‘ on June 6th, 2016 or ‘New Year Resolution‘ on December 31st, 2014]; so, it is good to see young people making their views and feelings known.

Weather-related events, such as widespread flooding and fires, are reported so frequently in the media that perhaps we have started to ignore them as portents of climate change.  For me, three headlines events have reinforced the gravity of the situation:

  1. The publication earlier this month of a joint report by UNICEF and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health that air pollution in the UK so high that it is infringing the fundamental rights of children to grow up in a clean and safe environment; and, under the Government’s current plans, air pollution in the UK is expected to remain at dangerous levels for at least another 10 years.
  2. The warning earlier this month from the Meteorological Office in London that global warming could exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels within five years.  In my lecture, I highlighted that a 2C rise would be equal to the temperature 3 million years ago when sea levels were 25 to 35m high; and, a 1m rise in sea level would displace 145 million people globally [according to Blockstein & Weigmann, 2010].
  3. The suspension of construction of the new nuclear power station on Anglesey by Hitachi, which leaves the UK Government’s energy strategy in disarray with only one of the six planned new power stations under construction.  This leaves the UK unable to switch from fossil-fuelled to electric vehicles and dependent on fossil fuel to meet current electricity demand.

I apologise for my UK focus this week but whereever you are reading this blog you could probably find similar headlines in your region.  For instance, the 2016 UNICEF report states that one in seven children worldwide live in toxic air and air pollution is a major contributing factor in the deaths of around 600,000 children under five every year.  These three headlines illustrate that there is a planetary emergency because climate change is rapidly and radically altering the ecosystem with likely dire consequences for all living things; that despite a near-existential threat to the next generation as a consequence of air pollution most governments are effectively doing nothing; and that in the UK we are locked into a fossil-fuel dependency for the foreseeable future due to a lack of competent planning and commitment from the government which will compound the air pollution and climate change problems.

Our politicians need to stop arguing about borders and starting worrying about the whole planet.  We are all in this together and no man-made border will protect us from the impact of making the planet a hostile environment for life.

New Year Resolution

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I started 2014 with a post on January 1st about the ‘Knowledge Economy‘ in which I extolled the virtues of knowledge-based rather than energy-based agriculture and engineering.  At the end of the year, oil prices have dropped from $110 to about  $60 per barrel, making it likely that in most countries the energy-based economy will continue to dominate.  In the USA, sales are rising of huge gas-guzzling cars, such as the Escalade, which is 5.15m (17ft) long, weighs 2.59 tonnes and only manages an average of 17 miles per gallon!  Fossil fuels account for approximately 80% of world energy consumption and are responsible for most greenhouse gas production.  During 2014 it was reported that greenhouse gases were rising at the fastest rate for 30 years but still the countries of the UN meeting in Lima before Christmas only agreed that those countries who were ‘ready to do so’ should submit national pledges on cutting emissions in the first of quarter of 2015.

The global average temperature is within one degree of the maximum temperature in the last million years, and a 2 degree rise would be equal to the temperature three million years ago when the sea level was 15 to 23m (80 to 130 feet) higher.  A 1 metre rise in sea level would displace 145 million people, and there is evidence that it has been  rising at 3.5mm per year during the last 20 years which is twice as fast as during the previous 80 years.

How bad does the condition of the planet need to get before effective action is taken?  How many more islands, like the Carteret Islands, will have to disappear?  How many more people than the 7 million in 2012 will have to die prematurely as a consequence of air pollution? Cities such as Beijing are beginning to be described as ‘almost uninhabitable’.  Kofi Annan has suggested that grass roots action is needed because our leaders will not take action in time. So tonight make it your New Year Resolution to reduce your carbon footprint in 2015 by 15%.

Estimate your current carbon footprint using an on-line calculator and starting working out how to reduce it.  If you want to find out the carbon footprint of your organization then the Carbon Trust has useful information and services.

Sources:

‘Inside Beijing’s airpocalypse – a city made “almost uninhabitable” by pollution‘ by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian on Tuesday 16th December, 2014.

Blockstein DE, Wiegman L, The Climate Solutions Consensus. Island Press, Washington, 2010.

Links to previous posts:

‘Year of Air:2013‘ on November 20th, 2013 or ‘Mass-produced nuclear power plants?‘ on November 12th, 2014.

Floods: an everyday example

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floodingI wrote this post before going to the concert at the Philharmonic Hall which inspired the post on February 5th [Rhapsody in Blue].  So, this post is not quite as timely as planned originally but it is still raining frequently here and the Somerset levels remain flooded.

Since before Christmas news bulletins in the US and UK have been dominated by reports of extreme weather events.  Earlier this month the sea on the south coast of the England swept away a substantial length of the main railway line between London and the South-West of the country.  Large areas of the south of the UK have been flooded by storms that rolled across the Atlantic having first caused disruption in North America.  There seems to be plenty of everyday evidence from these events that our climate is changing and this appears to have been confirmed by the Chief Scientist at the UK Metrological Office.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.  The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.’  They go on to say ‘It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century’.  Despite these assertions, our governments have been unable to make significant progress towards limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.  The delegations from most of the developed countries walked out of talks at the Warsaw climate conference last November, followed by representatives from the Green groups and NGOs the next day.  As a consequence, Kofi Annan [Climate crisis: Who will act? in International NYT  November 25, 2013] has called for a global grass-roots movement to tackle climate change and its consequences.  We need to act as individuals whenever we can to reduce global warming and mitigate its impact both directly in our personal and professional lives and indirectly by lobbying our political and industrial/commercial leaders.

In the UK, politicians and the media are beginning to talk about the need for engineers to protect us against flooding and some engineers are responding by highlighting that the cost will be very high and that if climate change continues then we will have consider abandoning some areas.

At a simpler level, those us working in the classroom can use the flooded roads and overwhelmed drainage systems to create topical, and perhaps increasingly everyday, examples focused on flow in drainage ditches, gutters etc., as in the lesson plan below.

5EplanNoF10_open_channel_flow

See also the Everyday Examples page on this blog for more lesson plans and more background on Everyday Examples.