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I'm Laura and in this episode I'm joined by Antonia, Rwayda and Jasmin for a
milestone episode. This is our 50th episode so since we're in our half century we're revisiting our first ever topic for the podcast with a fresh perspective so we're talking about risks but this time we're looking at climate change and how the risks would affect construction and infrastructure and what Engineers can do about them Antonia what's your interest in all of this so when I was thinking about risk I was thinking how we kind of have to adapt to a new climate as we Face climate change
and also given how we have to make so much changes it can be quite expensive we've got other social aspects so it'll be interesting to see how we adapt to climate change really yeah and I guess as we go through this we'll have some discussion about how we think that climate is likely to change in some of the challenges it might pose through Ada if you've got anything to add to that you're a civil engineer right so I guess you'll be taking the uh the sort of well what could we do about our
infrastructure point of view I'm quite interested to know and learn on what will happen to the climate change first of all because I teach civil engineering to the new generation who would have to face all these challenges so we need to be prepared to know what changing so we amend our material to cope with the climate crisis my other side here is as an engineer I would want to know how are we amending our design and structures to cope with these changes I like your point about teaching
in the next generation of civil engineers the climate change turbulence I want to say the sort of the all the uncertainty we're facing and all the extreme conditions that's going to persist for decades it sounds like so it won't just be us that has to deal with this and who knows how far into the future it could persist who knows how much different it would be I imagine there are people that are doing some modeling to give it an idea but I do wonder how certain they are
about that because there must be so many variables involved Jasmine I know you've got an interest from a sort of a sustainability and climate change point of view so do you want to give me your take on risk and climate change my error research focuses a lot on impacts of climate change and what we can do to mitigate impacts to climate change from certain greenhouse gases so for me I think it's like really interesting to see because Global temperature rises
they they will happen that's unavoidable it's just like how what the magnitude is and how that's going to impact how climates change across different parts of the world than as well as in the UK and from there what we need to do to our builders in the infrastructure in order to adapt to the new change in the climate again it's figuring out what those uncertainties are yeah then can we sort of hedge things how much effort we need to put in if there are sort of three different outcomes and how
probable are they going back to our first ever episode where we talked about what a definition of risk was it was about what is the probability of a particular outcome occurring so risk is sort of is a mathematical formula is consequence times likelihood and that gives you a number so in the climate change modeling do they come up with sort of oh there's a there's a 50 chance that we'll see rain every single day in the UK in 100 years time is that the sort of modeling they do depends on
the kind of kind of modeling so when people think of climate models the one that Springs of mind a lot of people be this stuff kind of stuff that the ipcc do as well as the Met Office the ipcc they do modeling more on a global scale as well as on a national level for different countries they take different integrated assessment models which will try to like do an estimate of what will happen to Global temperature rises with under different emission scenario so for
example like business as usual would be like we don't do anything to stop or to cut down our greenhouse gas emissions and then other scenarios would be like okay different levels of cuts to those emissions and they're usually done in a way to meet certain temperature goals or like 1.5 degrees 2 degrees 4.453 degrees then based on the different emission scenarios you can then try to model how the climate when the weather will change in different parts of the world there is a really big
range in the different emission scenarios and how the climate and weather will change will really vary by region just in the UK for example like if we we go for a business as usual scenario than the temperature changes by 2100 it will could rise between one uh one to five degrees depending on which region where we are in the UK that's our temperature right in it already like last year it got really really hot down south yeah summers are gonna get hotter and longer uh Winters are also going to
be because temperatures are rising they're going to be wetter so we're going to see an increase in like intense rainfall flash flooding and those kind of events but also because and temperatures are going are rising we're going to see less snowfall and by last novel I mean fewer days with snow so we're going to start really intense periods where it puts down like meters of snow in a single day yeah I mean it could happen like because of with climate change we're going to get more
extreme weather events so while we are likely to get fewer days with snow like we could like have something that like what happened in the US a few weeks ago where it's like a massive blizzard unlikely but it could happen so generally it's going to be the sort of like tropical conditions if it's going to be warmer and wetter but then with I wouldn't say it's going to be tropical hair but it's going to be warmer and unbearable people because the UK is not designed for temperatures above 30
degrees so I feel like this is drying into some of the things ruida was talking about so I know last year when it got did it hit was it over 40 degrees in south UK and like roads were melting and things were setting on fire yes that happened last year in one of London airports the runway malted and they stopped their planes going in and out one of the reasons is the Mix Design for the asphalt is not for hot weather and that change make it more difficult to predict so we need to revise the design
standards to make sure we adopt for a hotter climate it's even like if you think of the houses in the UK and the way they build them they're not really resilient to heat waves I watch a lot of grand designs let's give them a cloud so I know from that that building regulations say that there has to be a certain amount of insulation and they have to be not drafty which is very different to sort of house that I live in which is old and is very drafty and poorly insulated does that design
consideration that it has to be insulated and it has to keep um airflow down to a minimum is that going to be a problem for people living in them if they're in a heat wave yes because you would need to consider more ventilation to get the temperature down depending if you use your condition or not but again due to the climate change using air condition might not be the best solution personally I'm a supporter of these systems but if you think about the longer effect that they won't really
solve the problem it would cause more problem in the future so having ventilation in a certain way in the building is needed to accumulate for the heat wave the other thing that I've seen in a hotter climate houses you'll have like the ceiling to be is higher I think also like the building materials you you would think or need to be not rubbing heat so that's something that I kind of Might disagree with what I was reading in preparation for this was you know the
idea of Net Zero Energy buildings so you know you can balance it with generating energy as well as energy efficient design and they were saying in some cases depending on what materials you use trying to make it completely passive might use more energy intensive materials than what you would have saved if you act you know use some active measures like air conditioning and the benefit of air conditioning is it takes advantage of thermodynamic laws so for like say one unit of electricity you put
in you get three times that amount of heating or cooling so in that sense it might be more beneficial to use that the only risk is a lot of that uses refrigerants which happen to also be greenhouse gases so you know there is work to have low what we call Global Warming potential refrigerants in the past or ones that have been phased out were 2 000 gwp which is 2 000 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of refrigerant release and now we're getting to like
you know tens it's an improvement that's being made so if there is any leak it will be better I quite like this idea to be honest I I did not come across this all I came across is using other things like green green roof technology to reduce the heat in the house without having to have a condition that's quite interesting to see what different aspect of different scientists were coming with which means we're heading in the right direction at least it kind of sounds
like Antonio was talking about sort of emerging research that's maybe not yet made it all the way into like building regulations whereas roida given your background in civils in your excitement about Building Bridges I imagine you were looking at Structural Materials yeah that's what I was looking at what using the technology in a smart way without hurting the environment is a quite a really good thing there are also other solutions that don't require technology such as planting more trees
to create natural shade and also building houses so that the Glass isn't facing the South if if you're in the northern hemisphere to reduce the amount what we call solar gain so during the day when their Sun you know it kind of traps the heat in the building instead have it facing the other way Simple Solutions that don't require huge amount of Technology but might be just a bit more restrictive and that degrees with what I was reading about the use of reflective services does window size
have an impact on like how much heat gets retained or escapes a building yes okay is it smaller windows that are better basically better like insulation yes and there's lots of types of glass to control that too so like we already know about double glazing but the type of the glass itself you can use a different type that would reflect a bit of the Heat and let in the light see the minute going back to ground designs again it seems to be about south facing windows so that they'll bring the heat
in in the winter when you want to be minimizing your heating bill but is somehow allows the house to not be so hot in the summer which I never quite understood to be honest but they always seem convinced it was the most efficient placement of a window in the current climate it's gonna say it feels like 100 Year times with the sudden trend for houses and point the other way and have North facing windows or really small windows we can ask a thermodynamics engineer to model it to see if it
actually is true I mean it depends how accurate the model is and I guess that's always the risk with modeling is how true is that to real life and I always feel like because it's just tough to make so many approximations that I always wonder you know they always do stuff that's like in a vacuum without any interfaces depending on what they're modeling obviously I guess if you're modeling thermodynamics you definitely have interfaces so you appoint this model
otherwise that's why I said an engineer not a physicist because I feel like an engineer might might put two might put different kinds of assumptions maybe not like maybe not vacuum but just maybe I don't know I don't know where this is going I think you've just insulted all of our physics it's all our physics listeners um I have a physics background yeah so if Laura says it's okay then that means all physicists are okay with that right that's definitely how this
works sarcasm so heavy you have to make those some not necessarily approximations put some constraints on what you're doing because physicists know that there are limitations to our knowledge one of the other things you mentioned your husband to change topic completely and get away from my physicists what you're all doing speech was about flooding you mentioned it would be more likely to get flash flooding yeah so that's to do with um having just wetter Windows yeah so in
general like the north west of the UK will experience more rain than like other parts like the Southeastern parts of Wales so I feel like the North West already gets a lot of rainfall it's likely to get better we're all like more rainy days so it's going to get worse for me and Antonia and Manchester yeah well some parts of the southeast and like some parts of the world are actually potentially going to get drier so more extreme depending on where you live yeah what can I Tonya and I do
about the fact that we're going to live in a floodplain potentially the main solution is the renewable have to be well done on a high rise and using pillars to raise the level of the houses but I think for the current ones from what I've seen is having more protection measures like flood defenses and catchment areas to collect the water coming from the rain I know like there's even few projects in Scotland that are constructing catchment areas to accumulate anticipated heavy rains in
the future so you talk about flood defenses I've already seen in the last few years where the defenses they built along a river in town in the Lake District they were completely overcome they did their job but there was more water than they could cope with more water than have been addicted I guess so you've got a wonder I mean this flood defense comes up to probably probably overhead height and the river is usually like well below the pavement that you're
standing on so that is quite a volume of water and that's already quite a big structure so I think it's the other thing is just having more cashmet areas and the good thing about the cash materials you can use reuse that water to do other things with it because Bloods are coming and the droughts are coming at the same time so I think what we need to do is to be wise on what to do with the extra water when we get it we need to store it the problem is is all water is wasted I
suppose if garlic are a water engineer over here she'd say oh it kind of gets recycled anyway but then again we've also seen droughts where towns again I think it was down in South England wasn't it completely run out of water their supply just dried up it was pretty bad even in London over the summer because there was like hose pipe bands and people were banned from having like Barbecues in any public spaces just because there was like a there was quite a few like fires yeah and then no
resource to put it out if you don't have that water so it sounds like the solution to that is to build some massive pipeline somehow I think that was a plan at one point was to pump water from Northwest to the South yeah so what we're going to do is going to repurpose hs2 or it could be concurrent you know why why is it it's not competing it could just be at the same time so we're going to have water going through this train tunnel as this maglev train is coming up but that was what I
used to think as a superpower would be really good was if you could control water and ice and you know the whole like ultimate World Peace move would be to like bring all the water from like the flooded places and put it in the places with deserts and droughts that was like one of my like if you had a superpower what would it be and I thought yeah I want to be stormed from Mexico but it's an interesting Paradox that I saw as well which was um humidity so as you know when when you have hotter
air you can contain more moisture but what we found is even though there's like something called specific humidity which is the content of water in air the relative humidity I.E how much water is actually in the air compared to how much it could contain the relative humidity is actually going down and not going up at the rate that we expected that the specific humidity should go given that the whole world is warming so that's why actually we do have less water ironically even though we have
higher sea levels so we have less water because it's getting more humid is that what you said no so we got we should be more humid but we're not because the Seas on increasing in temperature at the same rate that land is so over land we we're like drier than it should be ah will that be the case in like 50 years time though if the sea temperature does catch up true maybe on the in like in the future it isn't a problem but it's a problem right now sounds like quite a complex
thing to try and get your head around but I just totally misunderstood what you said the first time around my apologies I might have said it backwards as well that probably didn't help but it's just something like something else to consider when you're thinking about the risk with climate change is not just temperature but water where it is but not just water in general but humidity of the air and then how do you manage that because that can have other impacts
like you know I was thinking just this winter how wet it is and so my house is dead moldy until I found a way which was active removing actively removing air from the water from the air with a dehumidifier but then I'm increasing my energy consumption you just can't win at the minute can you there are too many things that need to be improved from the sound of it yeah I mean this is something that I just think about with climate changes we're kind of we've changed the climate so we're trying to
balance things that were balanced before we've knocked a balance of greenhouse gases and therefore our atmosphere so we're moving the water from the wrong places so we have to actively put measures to counteract what we've done so in chemical engineering speak you and Jasmine both have backgrounds in chemical engineering where we're not in equilibrium we're not in steady state no no it sounds like we were at some point yeah but then we messed it up we decided to industrialize in a uncontrolled
manner we decided we'd burn all these fossil fuels and cut down all those trees but you know it's it's development how could can we compare that to how much it's improved people's lives oh I suppose we should also consider the impact it's had against people's well-being it's another part of um if you're thinking about the risk of doing something as well like there's what happens at a local level and then is what happens at a global level to like whole communities and whole ecosystems
and I can imagine when the industrial revolution first started creating all these problems no one really had that holistic understanding and it's taken an awful lot of Science and engine scientists and engineers and politicians and anthropologists and all sorts to come together to say this is what's happening yeah although having said that there was actually a scientist like back in the day who did some calculations and he did actually like find that with an
increase in CO2 concentration like the Global Temp global temperatures would increase and his what he calculated is actually quite accurate to what's happening right now so people were aware of what was happening with greenhouse gas emissions and temperature rises just that um people didn't really care some people also aware of the effect of increased consumption William Stanley jovens had a book called the coal question back in 1865 which was how we make more efficient engines and
ultimately that makes it better so more people want to use it so it's increased coal consumption even though the engine might be more efficient at using coal and that's called The Rebound effect so we kind of have done the same thing in that making things easier to use we end up using it more I think the people they won't be scared of something they can't see and now we're more aware of the impact because we can see it we can see climate change happening it's not an
anticipation or a cichlid anymore it's not on paper see what I find a little bit odd anyway because I've spent a lot of my career dealing with things that I can't actually see but someone told me it exists and they're a knowledgeable smart person and they're backed up by all this evidence so I tend to believe them that's how you learn right it's how you gain knowledge from something it's not your expertise so how come it took up till now for people to say oh yeah it is
actually getting warmer and wetter I can see this happening the climate isn't the same as it was 10 years ago how come it's taken to that point to start listening to the people that have been saying this for over 100 years in some cases I think we need to talk to some sociologists and psychologists for this really yeah there's a whole thing around like Risk perception so you can put numbers to it all you want but ultimately the numbers don't necessarily convince people it's the more the
emotive side of it or the motivation that they have behind it there's the uh inertia of doing something different and what you've gotten used to it could be also the Fear Factor you know we have quite a lot of negative Communications when it comes to climate change so no one really wants to almost deal with it because it's just a bad time you'd rather bury your head in the sand yeah I also wonder if there's sort of almost an economic impetus because you can you
need to create new technologies to fix a problem that you've not yet found a solution for and that opens the gates to companies that weren't necessarily working on something or startup companies to do something new into it's called disruptive technology it's a it's kind of a weird buzzword because no one likes being disruptive right that does seem to be the trend though as well people are saying disruptive Technologies are the way to go yeah almost as if people are starting to say
oh we can't keep doing what we've always done because terrible things will happen we'll run out of resources and the environment will be a complete mess so disrupting is good it's interesting to see having started with this definition of risk as a numerical thing there are now all these I guess touchy feely considerations I feel like that kind of Strays a little bit away from the technical sciency stuff that we all prefer to talk about so should I bring about the technical science
I'm happy to talk about it but I just don't have anything to back it up because it's touchy-feely yeah well there is um not circumstantial evidence there is there is a way to do science around it I just haven't done it yeah I always think that's um it's kind of harder science to do because it's easy to drop something 10 times and measure how quickly it fell it's less easy to measure how people feel about something yeah because it depends on the people and that's why it's hard and your
methodology as well it's the whole social sciences the whole other thing that I kind of straight into a little bit and I'm always fascinated by it and I'm always impressed by the work that social scientists do but the more technical thing I was going to talk about was I heard about a project in the UK it's one of the few big civil engineering projects to actually finish I think it was I think it finished early and under budget probably it's very unique yeah yeah
I might be wrong about those two but it was definitely impressive for how successful the project was and one of the reasons it was successful was because they used artificial intelligence to predict the weather so that they could schedule work really effectively and that investment in artificial intelligence LED is one of the things big things that led to the success of the project so it suggests at least on a short time scale You can predict the weather very accurately and
have good understanding of the risks but just to recap weather and climate are different yeah that is true and I wonder how good the AI would be at predicting global climate like I think the computer will probably explode because of all the consideration variables it would have to consider because it really just depends on like what the emission scenario is and then it's also like recalibrating because we're finding out new stuff about the different like greenhouse gas
and carbon sources and sinks so then you have to like it would be constantly recalibrating so basically it would either explode or never find a solution kind of like that computer that was built in Hitchhiker's Guide yeah what was that computer called deep thought you think about the radio the AI is moving maybe in a few years it can have more insightful ideas on what will happen to the climate change how how much detail do we need because what do we what do we need it for do we want it
to predict the weather or do we just want to try and get a range of what time type of parameters we should build towards so you know like with the roads what temperature should we be testing or specking especially specifying our roads to I was reading about the the the rail tracks that buckled and that's because they're only pre-stressed to 27 degrees C for the UK I don't know what that means what's pre-stressed so it's basically with with these stressing the Steelers you add temperature to this
teal so this teal would have some residual stresses inside that would remember kind of like the expansion that happened to it at that temperature which make it resilient to the same temperature in the future So when you say it remembers it does that mean that so if you heat up then cool it down it will shrink again but then when it expands when it's exposed the same temperature it will be able to tolerate it once you expand this much right okay so what I'm telling you
is saying they're only pre-stressed was it 27 degrees Yeah so they can only really tolerate that as a maximum temperature and that's not enough anymore yeah so when we had like plus 30 for quite a few weeks no wonder that trades don't work I think if it was 40 then measured it on the steel itself in the sun somewhere out there it would be
more than 40. I was just thinking that because there's quite a lot of heat capacity in the metal right so it would it would heat up quite extremely in air temperature that would be tolerable to a human and in Iraq if you put an egg on the surface of the car the car will fry the egg because even though the temperature is going up to 55 now on the car is hotter than the 55 so because the steel will just absorb all of this heat and store it for a bit so I think it's it's the same scenario
if you have this rail somewhere in the middle of nowhere and you have the sun on it so it would be above 40 if the
temperature got to 40. I feel like we're going back to our thermodynamics episode about what you need to do to um cook an egg what's the temperature can you figure it out from the egg cooking other than getting very distracted Now by food again that'll be a weird way to figure out how hot things get by figuring out if you can cook an egg or not well when you walk on the pavement there you can feel the heat through your shoe because it's so hot it does make you
wonder if we're talking about the UK becoming more extreme and unpleasant what does that mean for other nations that are already an environment that we would think of as important because we're not used to it gonna get more unpleasant I can see it's possible that these places will be heading to an environment that we've never really experienced before how do you plan for that what sort of risks are you thinking of then yeah it's like some places will get like to temperatures where it's just
completely going to be inhospitable for humans but also like like with the increase in temperature you're going to get more rainbow so there's quite a few areas that are low-lying that are basically just gonna get completely fundamentally submerged Yeah so basically we'll have less habitable areas on the globe as the the population is increasing which is what they currently predict yes although I think some countries it's going down so we move there what kind of climate are they
going to have so you need a global picture again this is why the AI would always be recalibrating some countries are sinking yeah technically the parts of the UK are thinking just now the south is thinking Scotland is rising is it sinking or is the sea level rising during the Ice Age like the weight of the eyes like pushed part of Scotland down and like raised up the south of the UK and because of the Isis has gone like the South has been slowly sinking I think guys you need to move to Scotland
then so I'm confused now because actually we're saying that the south is sinking but also going to have droughts but it's just not going to have any rainfall it could be under the sea and not have any rain it's still being a drought it'd just be under some salt water there'll be more like places like parts of Bangladesh and like other regions that are that are just like very low line but with the increased rainfall they will just get more flooding therefore like more errors will just
permanently submerged again we're moving out to this sort of this global view and saying climate change is a global problem and that I still can't get over this idea that the conference of the party's meetings about this they always seem to bicker about who's going to do what and that actually comes together to say we're going to solve this as the world yeah I think they all need to be our nation to solve it otherwise we're doomed I think we have a difficulty because all of this requires
money and money makes the world go round the difficulty with trying to make an agreement whether it's how to build the most efficient building or reduce climate change is just how do we get the resources for it to prevent flooding in Bangladesh a maybe Bangladesh doesn't have the resources as much but B did they contribute much to climate change in the first place so it starts becoming a political will battle but you're also talking about having enough resources
for everyone so I guess that is part of when you're thinking about what are the risks and then so if you're going to do a risk management plan or a risk assessment for anything that you do in the lab you think of well how are you going to mitigate those risks how are you going to make things safer and if one of those things is well where am I going to get the resources to put my safety factors into operation and you don't have them then your risk assessment looks very different like a
again we've strayed away from the technical science and engineering stuff quite a bit Yeah and we're talking about geopolitical forces now so I feel like that is probably a good place to leave it there's been a very different flavor of conversation compared to our very first episode about risk but it's also been interesting to see how the podcast has evolved it's been almost two years since we did that first episode we've sort of grown to get this like really
big picture and like science engineering just this little bit of it and then there are all these other factors to consider I think we've done that quite a lot in a lot of these episodes and we've sort of gone into politics and social aspects quite a lot as well I wonder if that means we should sort of rethink about the title a little bit maybe that's a good thing to feedback on if you're listening to this our anniversary episode comes up in February and I think we'll be doing
something a bit special for that one as well so you can stay tuned and we'll see you next time bye the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and
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