Climate Change could destroy America's roads
How bad is the National Research Council's report about climate change's potential impact on America's transportation system? NPR says it has warnings of "Biblical proportions." 60,000 miles of highways, major airports, railroads, low-lying tunnels and ports are at risk of damage from changes in the climate. Climate change will cause roads to buckle, bridge joints to be stressed, railroad tracks to be deformed and will keep planes grounded because of the heat. In the Arctic, permafrost, the solid ground that builders depend on, may even melt away.
Gerry Schwartz, head of the panel that issued the report, says "there's certainly the potential for severe damage to highways, pipelines [and] airports in the Arctic." Virginia Burkett, who co-authored the report, says "if sea level rises 4 feet, 24 percent of the interstate highways would be inundated." To avoid all of this, changes to the transportation system will need to be made and it "could cost hundreds of billions of dollars." Not doing anything the report warns, could cost us a lot more.
[Source: NPR]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
rar 5:21PM (3/13/2008)
That photo is from the flood of 1993 in Missouri. It is highway 54 going south just before you cross the Missouri river and come to Jefferson City. That flood also put highway 40/64 in the St. Louis area under 6 feet of water buy the Missouri river.
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Edsel 5:25PM (3/13/2008)
Buy a boat. Pretend you're a Venetian.
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ug 5:32PM (3/13/2008)
Have Bob Lutz drive through those flooded roads in a Hummer.
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Tim 5:39PM (3/13/2008)
I'm still waiting for that GIANT meteor to hit, the end of the Aztec calendar (2012), 2000 computer shut down with launching of all nuclear missiles (missed that), global cooling (oops), alien invaders, Christ's return & apocalypse, stock market crash, mad cow, west nile virus, avian flue, aids, ozone hole, peak oil, the “red menace”, Cloverfield, attack of the Borg, WWIII, attack of the giant marshmallow man, terrorist’s dirty bomb/viral attack, US prison camps, Alzheimer’s, collapsing US $dollar & economy, new world order, hackers, identity theft, burglars, the IRS, mike meyres, zebra mussels, human cloning, alien experiments, no Santa?, deforestation, gulf dead zone, CA sliding into the sea, species extinction, giant shark attack, mass shootings, Chinese toys, illegal aliens, too much salt, too much fat, salmonella on my salad, steroids in my chicken sandwich, corrupt politicians, do my friends really like me?, are my kids on drugs?, what if I die in my sleep… what if I don’t? etc. etc. etc.......
The media’s policy is “A threat a day keeps the creditors at bay”.
Why must you post this CRAP here?
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Wildgoosechase73 5:55PM (3/13/2008)
At the current rate of the ocean rising we will out of oil and no longer drive cars. We will have bigger fish to fry then.
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Enoch 9:55PM (3/14/2008)
Global warming will also make women horny and men impotent.
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Sos10 8:27PM (3/13/2008)
If 2 days of rain is enough to create huge potholes in basically every street in Los Angeles...
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fnc 8:38PM (3/13/2008)
To avoid all of this, changes to the transportation system will need to be made and it "could cost hundreds of billions of dollars."
Roughly translated, the study reads "Give us money!"
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Tim 8:47PM (3/13/2008)
fnc, so THAT's why the call the movement "green".
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Wave54 10:40PM (3/13/2008)
The Earth's climate would continue to change EVEN if mankind never appeared and fossil fuels were never burned. There is nothing new to warming and cooling cycles, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.
Humans have inhabited and constructed an expansive complex of cities and roadways on inherently unstable coastal areas and expect the planet to remain exactly as it was in 1970? Why? When has the planet ever remained the same for any extended period of time?
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meme 11:00PM (3/13/2008)
Hey, Tim, Wave54: I'm still waiting for you to read the IPCC report. I'm sure you'll do it any day now ;). Once again, I'll give you the link:
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
Tim: of all of the things that you mentioned, I must be forgetting -- which of those had regular conferences involving thousands of scientists from around the world reviewing tens of thousands of published papers on the subject each time?
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MikeW 9:11AM (3/14/2008)
But you forget, the IPCC is a political body, not scientific.
The last time they buried the real numbers. The human contribution to CO2 is 3%, and that still presumes that CO2 drives the climate, instead of being driven by the climate.
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Rick 10:24AM (3/14/2008)
Roads? If the oceans rose 4 feet, there would be cities destroyed, forget roads, they are less important compared to cities; buildings and homes.
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Mikael Johansson 11:52AM (3/14/2008)
It looks like Mother Nature does not like the american way of living.
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Mike 1:28PM (3/14/2008)
Big f***ing deal. Now everyone can experience Michigan roads!
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PapaWhiskey 12:24PM (3/14/2008)
March 13th, "NOAA: Coolest Winter Since 2001 for U.S., Globe"
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080313_coolest.html
Gee, I thought the planet was supposed to be getting warmer?
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KarenRei 1:31PM (3/14/2008)
"But you forget, the IPCC is a political body, not scientific. The last time they buried the real numbers."
They are not in the least, there's not a single recognized scientific organization on the planet who doesn't accept them as a scientific body, and they did no such thing (you may be referring to a minor controversy over a decade ago in one of the first IPCC meetings in which some right-wing groups accused the editorial team (made of scientists that took part in the IPCC) of adjusting the meaning of some other scientists' statements when making the summary for policymakers (*not* the technical reports or the technical summary, which you need to read) -- yet the same scientists whose meanings were supposedly tweaked came back in the next IPCC meeting and made *even stronger* statements about global warming for the next assessment report).
What the IPCC does is very, very simple. They don't do research -- they just summarize. The IPCC technical reports are little more than summaries of practically all of the published papers available on the subject. The technical summaries are summaries of the technical reports, and the summaries for policymakers are summaries of the technical summaries. Read them. Learn. If you don't want to read the IPCC report, at least use it as a way to know what papers are available on a particular topic before you spout off about it.
"The human contribution to CO2 is 3%"
No, it isn't. Read the report. Past emissions of CO2 have, with a greater than 80% probability, contributed to 3/4 of the increase in CO2, with the rest largely due to human land use changes.
"and that still presumes that CO2 drives the climate"
Which is more than demonstrated in the report. Read Ramaswamy et al (2001), Collins et al (2006), Forester and Taylor (2006), and a couple other dozen papers cited by the report.
PapaWhiskey: Apparently you've never heard of fluctuations. Imagine that -- climate not following a smooth curve! Whoda guessed? I mean, where you live, if it's 45F today, it'll be 45.2F tomorrow, 45.4F the day after, 45.6F the day after that, and so on, right? Because weather always follows a constant line, right?
(And before anyone asks how chaos can be modelled, at least do yourself a favor and google "convergence")
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