How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?(alphageo.ai) |
How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?(alphageo.ai) |
One weekend they let people walk the length of the tunnel from the river to the lake. It was a pretty steep slope and about 3/4 down the walls of the tunnel changed from smooth to rough. They had calculated how fast the water would be moving when it hits the rough part and then how much that would slow it down.
Then at the bottom instead of emptying directly into the lake it comes flying out of the tunnel and smashes into a giant cement wall then flows under a roadway into the lake.
Cost was $200 million. A 500-year flood would flood downtown Zurich.
https://www.zh.ch/de/planen-bauen/wasserbau/wasserbauprojekt...
It's a really stunning place to visit as well, mid Wales in general is so pretty and the dams themselves are ornamented in a way nobody would bother with today. Of course the Victorians got away with things that would be unthinkable now, when Liverpool did the same approach of flooding Welsh valleys to water English cities in the mid 20th century it was very controversial because the scheme flooded a majority Welsh-speaking village and the language was in a fairly steep decline then; nowadays there's a lot more protections for Welsh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%932017_Brazilian_dr...
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
EDIT: added timeframe
My neighborhood is in the 55th percentile but then right across the main street, where the houses are bigger, it drops to 25th percentile. Both neighborhoods seems pretty stable but I guess when the chips are down crime is going to increase faster in a poorer neighborhood.
Not disputing the methodology, but our state is the nation's leader in tornadoes (by more than a factor of 2) due to Niña/Niño this year, and Chicago spent a few days this summer with the world's worst air quality due to Canadian wildfire smoke.
Obviously, "resilient" ⍯ "unaffected".
Current tornado count for Illinois: 210 ( as of 8/29 ) Current record holder is Texas: 244 in 2015
However, Texas is big i don't have the math handy but I bet Illinois is well ahead in terms of tornados/square mile. ..maybe that's where your "factor of 2" comes from? Or maybe people affected since most Tornados in Texas don't affect much except maybe fences and powerlines.
- number of “tornadoes due to Niña/Niño“ (my reading)
- “number of tornadoes” (total for the year), with Niña/Niño being why it’s that way (sounds like your reading, since those numbers are the overall)
https://docs.alphageo.ai/climate-resilience-suite/climate-ri...
I dug into what they call a "resiliency checklist", which is what looks to be a set of questions that have qualitative answers which are subjective at best. This information looks like it is fed into the CRRI, the data set that substantiates the city-wide scores used to power this report.
I am very skeptical that these 2 things happened:
- They captured a representative set of key assets that go into making a "city"
- The answers they received are calibrated or are meaningful enough to make these large conclusionsI was also surprised by how little attention the analysis gives to China and India. It's like measuring the smoke from a candle while standing next to two forest fires. The real-world impact is to decimate the economies of Europe while industry moves to China and India, who have no meaningful guardrails at all, making the claimed problem worse.
There was a heatwave in the 1990s that killed thousands in Chicago. Since then, the city has done a lot to handle them. While people still die during heatwaves, not as many as would have prior to all of the planning and effort. I guess it depends on how you define “a bunch”.
The growing risk factor for Chicago is flooding and dangerous storms. So far this is causing economic damage but not really killing anyone. Who knows if that holds.
This was the network that had heat island issues because it was volunteer stations highly biased towards urban areas.
It was superseded by USCRN (which you linked to) in 2005. USCRN is 114 stations intentionally situated away away from development. USCRN shows MORE warming than global networks, around .3* C per decade, and it recorded 2024 as the warmest year on record.
The article you are indirectly citing (https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/08/u-s-government-has-an-ac...) is easily disproven if you analyze the numbers: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-most-accurate-record-o...
Mind you, the forecast told us that we're still fine in 2026.
The list is a little weird in that I can't find any population-based reason why Miami would even be on it: it's almost the top-10 U.S. cities by population, but missing San Diego or any SF/BayArea city, while Miami & DC are #41 and #22 respectively. If you go by metro area it explains why Miami & DC are there and why Dallas & Fort Worth are condensed, but not why Atlanta is missing and San Antonio is included.
Even in the most cataclysmic scenarios, scientists project Sea level to rise 2m by 2100, and most of Florida is above that level.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-best-and-worst-case...
Here is a useful scenario for understanding what different SLR scenarios mean for the states [2]
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/chapter-4-sea-level-rise-a...
[2] https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/
("most of the Florida peninsula will be under water in 50-100 years" is certainly not true, however, Miami would be in a very difficult spot at 2m SLR)
I'ma guessing that's the reason.
The problem is not that we couldn't improve cities to sustain -30 Celsius winters. This is doable. The problem is that places suitable for agriculture would vanish in the upper half of the continent. Canadians need to import many of their food and they are like 40 million people, Europe would need to find a way to feed 500 million people.
Cities resilience to war will be a concern much before climate resilience.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.09.011
And note that by exploiting winter time solar yield and the grow houses with such technology not using sunlight directly and thus allowing easy and efficient thermal insulation, production could run year-round just with the amount of grow houses "online" varying with the average solar yield. Also gives convenient off-times (if they rotate which building runs through the winter) for maintenance.
And eating less meat or at least feeding the meat animals efficiently produced (but not as "tasty/varied/textured") plant/algae(/possibly-microbiological with bacteria or yeast) feed instead of things like Alfalfa that are very resource intensive to farm, would also help a lot with these issues.
Probably we should get back to doing grain bunkers as strategic reserves, though, lasting long enough to realize the problem, slaughter 80% of livestock, and plant low-failure-risk human suitable food crops on farmland that previously had feed crops for those no longer living 80% and land that had things like corn dedicated for ethanol that's then added to gasoline. Ideally ofc. we'd not need to cull as much life stock and could instead just slightly reduce new breeding and switch those corn fields to human food.
Between fruits and vegetables that literally dried up to the Sun (with a unusually hot and dry Spring season), critical drinking water availability and drying up rivers, the coming year is going to be interesting to track.
After the British Columbia University web, Canada still seems to import like a 75% of the fruits and a 50% of the vegetables eaten by Canadians (excluding potatoes). Apparently, this is one of the problems with the tariffs.
I said 'even in the most cataclysmic scenarios'
I'm having a headache trying to parse the first paragraph, but definitely we didn't beat the photosynthesis. Not yet.
We have beaten it but only for an output that's approximately "green smoothie".
We're already better than just LED grow lights for e.g. lettuce, though, from how I recall the linked paper.
Unsure how you conclude that cold outdoors necessitate more meat though; aside from some micronutrients vegan diet works just fine so reverting back to "meat only on Sundays" 1910 style household dinner menu structures would work fine...
Most people could, for example, do with replacing the caloric intake from half the portion of any non-vegan food they consume, with potato.
If outdoor farming breaks from climate meat will get more expensive...
Vertical solar panels mounted like fence panels between fence posts high enough to not get covered by snowdrifts will produce electricity year-round; and we only need around 3x as much solar farm currently to power sealed grow "basements" than the same plant output would need if just farmed on an open field (assuming climate is matched and weather is average). The benefit of it is just that the panels can be other places (like noise barrier walls next to an urban highway) than the plants and the climate can be freely picked. Also no unlucky correlated dry spell weather events that can cut 100 million people's worth of harvest yield down to half or worse.
Grow houses won't fail collectively as much as farming weather is correlated across a region. Pretty much just need to keep measures around to prevent the plants from freezing just because the electric grid falls over for 3 days in winter.
What is your point?
“What were the major predictions and timeline in the movie An Inconvenient Truth?”
He got some things wrong but was right on a lot.
or it's noise. I'm also on your side but be realistic.
Anyway, Illinois is about to break the all time record for tornadoes by a single state, previously held by Texas, during the strongest El Niño ever measured. I’ll be proud tucking my kids in and telling them as long as they pray hard enough to the Gods of technological progress, we’ll be guaranteed to stumble upon a carbon sequestration technology akin to the Haber process and they won’t have to be forced into a Sophie’s choice when there’s only enough clean water for 2 of their 3 children.