There's a very cool project wrapping up here in Zurich where they built a relief tunnel from the sihl river underground downhill to lake Zurich to handle 500-years floods.
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.
This is far outside of my wheelhouse, but I have some serious questions about the methodology here.
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 conclusions
São Paulo is in the "green" but they were supposedly around two weeks from running out of water for municipal distribution in 2014/2015. A city of that size without water would not do well.
How is Miami not near the bottom of the list? Every time there is a moderate rainfall, streets flood like crazy. Plus we are in hurricane alley, and some models project that most of the Florida peninsula will be under water in 50-100 years.
I had asked a question "how is Miami not on the list at all" and then realized that the table is actually an image not a table so I couldn't search it.
The problem with South Florida isn't that the sea level will rise enough to directly flood everything with seawater but rather with drainage of rainwater. There is already only a small gradient for rainwater to drain off into the ocean. If the ocean level rises even a little then drainage slows and flooding increases. The whole region sits on a karst substrate so dikes aren't effective; they'll need active pumping.
("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)
It doesn't seem to account for earthquakes, which is appropriate, since it's a climate vulnerability index. But definitely something one would take into account when deciding where to settle.
I like that map and it goes all the way down to the tract level of detail. I was confused about the range of risk then saw the sub-heading "Score combining environmental, social, economic, and infrastructure effects on neighborhood-level stability.". Thinking in terms of neighborhood stability make more sense when viewing the percentiles.
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.
I have a hard time believing this site also. When I looked at their methodology at how this list was created, it said "Please fill out our Methodology Request Form, and a member of our team will get back to you, typically within one business day.". As far am I am concerned, I can safely ignore this site.
Not the leader yet and not anywhere close to "factor of 2" also the effects of el nino this year haven't even started really. It's more of a winter weather phenomenon.
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.
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.
Good thing we've been working on beating photosynthesis efficiency of turning sunlight into carbohydrates (e.g., sugar) by using special electrolysis cells to synthesize plant-accessible carbon-nutrients (one kinda-successful (in beating natural leaves with PV based sunlight electricity and their electrochemistry)) attempt focused on generating a nutrient solution rich in acetate from CO2 feed (and electricity); that's one of the energy carrier molecules that existing plant biology can efficiently utilize.
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.
My concern with this analysis is that the headline "conclusions" depend on a proprietary composite index and assumptions. Where are the underlying data and methodologies for independent evaluation?
I 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.
Mmmm what to say.. I lived in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai and I would say these cities are not really resilient. Yeah no major dams or glaciers that will trigger natural disasters but every typhoon season parts of these cities are flooded. Past three years I have been knee deep in water 3x a year in Shanghai, I have never seen anything like it (coming from Europe).
Honestly this list sounds like total BS. Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such? How are they possibly the best prepared city on the planet for climate change? The whole methodology here seems suspect at best.
> Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such?
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.
Chicago is lowest for adjusted risk because it just scores very low for physical risk on their scale. Compared to other cities the adjustment to its risk score for resilience is about typical - not great and not terrible - which suggests that yes, for what physical risks it does face (summer heat) it could probably do more to reduce those risks.
david pogue in "how to prepare for climate change" mentions chicago and the great lakes area in general as a "climate haven", so the idea is not complete bs.
Friendly reminder that the NOAA's USHCN reference network of well sited thermometers with continuous temperature records and no urban heat island bias shows no warming trend over the past ~20 years.
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.
If you predict an event that is 100 years away and 30 years pass, does the event that is still 70 years into the future vanish simply because the present arrived as predicted by the forecast?
Mind you, the forecast told us that we're still fine in 2026.
Places that used to be 32C in summer are consistently hitting 36C+. It absolutely sucks to be outside in those temps. You are running from aircon to aircon. Doom scenarios of unbearable heat is definitely true.
Germany had two sizable heatwaves this summer, of which one was so intense that for the first time in about "ever" ACs tripled/quadrupled in price (note this includes those on online stores where the shipping times would allow for trucking them in from all across central Europe)... I'm not referring to installation labor/technicians even. But like window units and similar ones that don't rely on HVAC technicians to take out the box and turn on.
That doesn't relieve people of the responsibility of having enough scientific literacy to understand that 30 years is only an instant on geological time scales. And the fact that we see meaningful change at all on this time scale is very concerning.
Ah yes, I believe one of those models was called the Strawman Model, generated by Elliot F. Strawman during his tenure at MIT. He was forced into retirement due to his deep embarrassment over his model’s inaccuracies.
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.
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...
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 conclusions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%932017_Brazilian_dr...
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
EDIT: added timeframe
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)
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".
https://docs.alphageo.ai/climate-resilience-suite/climate-ri...
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)
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.
I 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.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/crn/
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.
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.
“What were the major predictions and timeline in the movie An Inconvenient Truth?”
He got some things wrong but was right on a lot.