William A. “Bill” Wallace
Long ago, as a teenage science nerd, I read a lot of science fiction paperbacks and followed our nation’s space programs closely. I remember like a book, brain wave by Poul Anderson, described a future in which Earth drifts away from a wrecking field into space, allowing humans, as well as animals, to become truly intelligent. People’s IQ is off the charts. Difficult math problems are solved. These super-intelligent beings invent warp propulsion, build spaceships, and fly around the universe — lots of cool stuff for science teens.
Today I think that maybe this is not science fiction. It looks like Earth has moved back into a field of stupid.
A clear evidence of this can be found in a proposed Republican political agenda, Project 2025, a publication in which ignorance of climate change is a key feature. Never mind that nearly every nation on the planet views climate change as a threat to civilization as we know it. The drafters of the Project 2025 agenda and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump say climate change is a hoax perpetrated by so-called “climate alarmists.”
But the weather is changing, and we have documented and paid for the disastrous effects: extreme temperatures, rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, massive wildfires, record floods and prolonged droughts.
Since reporting began in 1980, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information has counted 376 climate and weather disasters that have cost US taxpayers more than $2.6 trillion , adjusted for inflation. Not surprisingly, Project 2025 calls for eliminating the agency’s climate research and cost assessment work that it considers “…the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarm.”
Paralysis of climate action?
According to the political agenda of Project 2025, any work on the cause of climate change (carbon emissions from fossil energy sources) or its impact (rising seas, heat waves, floods, wildfires, storms) would stop Energy policy basically becomes “drill, baby, drill!” —get energy from what the authors call reliable and affordable sources: coal, oil and natural gas. By this logic, families fleeing future major climate and weather disasters would be somewhat comforted knowing that they would have access to cheap gas during their flight.
Fortunately, Congress ignored the climate nonsense of Project 2025 and passed two major pieces of legislation in 2021 and 2022: the Jobs and Infrastructure Investment Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Together, they represent a $1.25 trillion investment in both reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building resilient and adaptive infrastructure.
Doing both is essential. The climate has become unstable due to excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, more than Earth’s natural systems can process. As a result, the planet continues to warm, now about 1.3℃ above pre-industrial era levels. Above 1.5℃, climate and weather conditions worsen significantly. At 1.5℃, 14% of the world’s population is exposed to extreme heat; at 2.0℃, the ratio jumps to 37%, 2.6 times worse. Species loss is 2 to 3 times greater, and harvest and fishery yields decrease by a factor of two.
In addition, there is what Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina, calls a “new normal” for climate and weather disasters. In the past, these were one-off events, giving communities enough time to recover. Today, they have to deal with recurring acute disasters (RAD) that happen in rapid sequence, increasing the cumulative impact and reducing the time interval for recovery.
hard road
Doing both will not be easy. To stay below 1.5℃, climate scientists tell us we need to reduce emissions to zero by 2050. This requires a change in our energy systems, replacing fossil energy with renewable energy sources . Any remaining carbon release must be captured and stored. In addition, our infrastructure must be redesigned or upgraded to cope with extreme and erratic weather and climate conditions for which it was not designed.
“In the age of climate change, civil infrastructure design problems have been brought into a domain of deep uncertainty,” says the author of this book, just published by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Image courtesy of ASCE Press
Doing both requires a revolution, essentially an overhaul of how civil engineering is currently practiced. Arizona State University researchers Mikhail Chester and Braden Allenby note that engineers have approached climate impacts in civil infrastructure design as normal, if complicated, engineering problems using traditional standards and methods that they produce optimization and efficiency.
But in the current era of climate change, civil infrastructure design problems have now moved into a domain of deep uncertainty, in which conditions are changing and unpredictable.
Many engineers realize that climate change needs to be factored into their designs, but they don’t know what to do.
A 2022 survey of architecture and engineering professionals by the University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership and global design firm HGA found that few use climate projections to make design decisions. The main barriers were that clients did not ask for them and professionals did not have the internal expertise to apply them.
“Time to do the right thing”
If you’re an engineer working in the built environment, it’s time to do what’s right.
Follow an example from the Institution of Civil Engineers of the United Kingdom. his State of the Nation 2021 The report told members to reject business as usual related to climate change ignorance. (“Damn, I don’t know much about climate change, but luckily my client didn’t ask me.”). Like safety, the report stated that carbon should be part of every customer conversation (‘How can we reduce the carbon footprint of the project?’). Members of the institution were told to be responsible for resilience (“We tested the design for a wide range of climate extremes.”).
As a tool to achieve this transformation, I wrote a book, The great reform of civil engineering (ASCE, 2024), which provides students, engineers, industry professionals, officials, and others with concepts, methods, and tools to manage what could be the largest set of opportunities they will ever face in their careers.
Acknowledging the abundance of climate nonsense, the book begins with the basics: the importance of civil infrastructure and the relationship between climate, sustainability and infrastructure resilience. It then addresses the profound uncertainties of future climate conditions and presents methodologies and case examples that show how engineers manage changing conditions.
The opportunities are right in front of you. Funds are now being spent to reduce carbon emissions and improve infrastructure resilience. Many federal and other credible authorities provide detailed information on how the climate is changing and the effects on the built environment.
what are you going to do If you don’t already know, you need to start finding out now.
William A. “Bill” Wallace is a consultant and university professor with more than 40 years of professional experience, including 30 years in environmental engineering and management, and is a recognized expert on sustainable development who was cited as the inventor of the Sustainable Infrastructure Institute. Envision classification system. He is the author of a 277-page book recently published by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a resource for sustainable infrastructure design. Wallace can be reached at billw5909@gmail.com
