Adaptation

[numerobis]

This forum is mostly about mitigation but we also need to adapt to the warming we’ve already created.

So here is a description of what policies India has put in place to help deal with the increasing heat waves:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/02/india-heat-wave-deaths-public-health-measures

Namely, white paint on roofs; open the public parks; organize civil society to better provide water.

[Bob Wallace]

Real Climate recently published a piece on how rising temperatures are expected to increase the strength of tropical storms.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/05/does-global-warming-make-tropical-cyclones-stronger/

NPR did extended coverage today on how much Puerto Rico was damaged by Hurricane Maria, how many more likely died than the 'official' number we've been given, and how much is left to do in order to return things to how they were.

It's left me thinking about what we might do to protect poorer people who live in the paths of the storms which may become more violent.

In Thailand a lot of construction is basically 'post and beam' where the structural members are created by building forms around rebar and pouring the posts and beams in place.



This is some pretty low tech stuff.  I've seen folks building this way with nothing much more than a wheelbarrow and hoe to mix the cement and some buckets to carry it up to the top of the form and pour it in.  Tree limbs and bamboo holding up the beams.

I've got some experience with ferrocement construction.  Very strong and pretty low tech.  Ferrocement boat hulls are typically between 3/8 to 1-1/8 inch thick and extremely durable.  They are about the only boats that can get stuck on a reef for a few days and come off without major damage.

So.  What if people were given assistance to build a single small post and beam room with ferrocement fillin.  Just large enough for themselves and their hardest to replace possessions.  Perhaps the size of a small bedroom.

When a storm approached people could pack in their possessions and themselves and ride out the storm.  After the storm they would be alive and not have to start from scratch.

Over time some might be able to expand their storm-hardy building while others may only be able to expand their living space with the sort of bamboo and scrap wood they now use. 

Any other ideas of how to build inexpensive storm hardy spaces?  Something light on material expense and could be constructed with minimal skills and tools.

[johnm33]

Depends on what materials are locally available but geopolymer concrete has to be considered. https://www.geopolymer.org/applications/ It's the only structural concrete that doesn't need rebar. Dome of the Pantheon, roman docks/harbours, for instance.

[Bob Wallace]

Depends on what materials are locally available but geopolymer concrete has to be considered. https://www.geopolymer.org/applications/ It's the only structural concrete that doesn't need rebar. Dome of the Pantheon, roman docks/harbours, for instance.

But the main benefits of geopolymeric cements are the reductions in carbon dioxide: the chemical process emits zero carbon dioxide, and the fuel much less, so the end result is a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions for cement manufacture of between 80% and 90%.

Geopolymeric cement has been used for ferrocement panels.  Any cement product used in the island areas I'm thinking about is going to need to be imported from the mainland.

I suppose what would need some study would be resistance to penetration by a large object being thrown by hurricane winds.  Or perhaps that is such a low probability event (object penetrating and then striking someone) that it could be ignored if the cost of metal reinforcement was a problem.  Perhaps teach people to pile 'stuff' against the side most exposed to the wind and to sit on the other side.

A ferrocement roof with a slight slope should be storm resistant and serve for water collection throughout the year.

[Bob Wallace]

Forgot the link for geopolymeric and here's some more info from the same source.

https://www.geopolymer.org/applications/global-warming/

The same grinders and the same ovens can be retained for the new process, but the ovens are merely run at half-temperature. For geopolymeric cement production, no temperature higher than 750°C is ever needed. This means that only one third of the fuel requirement is needed for cement production, and of course the fuel emissions are thus reduced by two thirds. This means local benefits for coal-burning regions, with drastic reductions in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen emissions, as well as suppression of particulate emissions.

Couldn't we use electric ovens?  We already process aluminum, steel, and silicon (glass) with electricity rather than fossil fuels.  If so then we might run these plants as dispatchable loads, shutting them down during extended stretches of low wind/solar input.  Aluminum plants already stop processing in brownout conditions.

[SteveMDFP]

It's left me thinking about what we might do to protect poorer people who live in the paths of the storms which may become more violent.

In Thailand a lot of construction is basically 'post and beam' where the structural members are created by building forms around rebar and pouring the posts and beams in place.

Interesting subject.  Unfortunately, cement production does release a lot of CO2.  Still, I could envision homes made with four posts of ferrocement, with walls filled in with a technique being used some in parts of Africa:

How to Construct Houses with Plastic Bottles
http://www.goodshomedesign.com/how-to-construct-houses-with-plastic-bottles/

The cement posts should enhance stability in the face of storms, earthquakes, and floods.
The overall approach would be fairly labor-intensive, but in the developing world, abundant labor is often available inexpensively. 

[gerontocrat]

How to build a horribly hot house in the tropics for poor people 1.01

Thin concrete walls and a tin roof and an AC unit they can't afford to run or maintain.

[numerobis]

Apart from tornados, the vast majority of deaths in weather events aren't from buildings falling down. It's from access to clean water, access to medical care, from air pollution, or from heat.

[Bob Wallace]

How to build a horribly hot house in the tropics for poor people 1.01

Thin concrete walls and a tin roof and an AC unit they can't afford to run or maintain.

I'm talking about saving lives and people's very limited possessions.  Adapting to the storms that now kill people and promise to become even more dangerous.

No tin roof, a ferrocement roof.  Something that would survive a storm.

Not their entire house but a small safe room which could serve as shelter during the storm and basic shelter while they rebuild. 

Direct solar heating of the cement can be mitigated with vegetation.  A metal roof could be built over their entire house, including the safe room.

I've spent a lot of time in Thailand and other hot parts of the world.  People commonly live in concrete (mostly concrete block infill) houses with no AC.  They stucco the outsides with a light color which reflects away a lot of the solar gain.  They construct roofs that hold the heat away from the building.  And they plant trees and shrubs that shade their houses.

[TerryM]

Variations on Auntie Em's root cellar, the one that saved the rest of the family from sharing Dorothy & Toto's yellow brick road trip, have been used as either "safe rooms" or as comfortable accommodations away from desert heat or arctic cold.
Terry

[Bob Wallace]

Apart from tornados, the vast majority of deaths in weather events aren't from buildings falling down. It's from access to clean water, access to medical care, from air pollution, or from heat.

Adapting to climate change will mean working to minimize multiple problems.  Surviving and recovering from violent storms is one of those problems.

Deadly heat is another problem which we will have to deal with.  Someone has already posted information about how India is working toward the heat problem. 

Some parts of the world might benefit from "safe rooms" that could be used during heat waves.  Think about a small, well insulated area that could be air conditioned, at least down to survival temperatures.

[Bob Wallace]

Variations on Auntie Em's root cellar, the one that saved the rest of the family from sharing Dorothy & Toto's yellow brick road trip, have been used as either "safe rooms" or as comfortable accommodations away from desert heat or arctic cold.
Terry

It's not hard to dig a root cellar in the Midwest soil.  I'm not so sure about volcanic islands and the sand of the Middle East.

Perhaps Middle Eastern countries could get the Boring Company to build underground tunnels where people could shelter as needed.  Maybe if they installed Hyperloop systems underground the tunnels could be used during heat spells like the London Underground was used as bomb shelters during WWII.

[johnm33]

I was thinking specifically about the bricks for housing, https://www.geopolymer.org/fichiers_pdf/ltgs.pdf You could even cast a ring beam and do a bit of fancy brickwork and coat the roof with a waterproof geopolymer.
 This particular geopolymer institute doesn't regard any alkili activated concretes as geopolymers.

[SteveMDFP]

Variations on Auntie Em's root cellar, the one that saved the rest of the family from sharing Dorothy & Toto's yellow brick road trip, have been used as either "safe rooms" or as comfortable accommodations away from desert heat or arctic cold.
Terry

Definitely not a Straw Man argument here.  This one has a brain.

[TerryM]

I've been in Basketmaker pit homes from the Mojave desert and Dorset Culture dugouts in Northern Newfoundland. Both were reasonably comfortable in the worst weather extremes that those regions offered.


As a child in Southern Ontario some families who were building their own homes would begin by digging the basement, then living there for a few years while saving for the material to complete the construction. Flat tar papered structures perhaps 2 feet above ground level, sporting a door opening on a stairwell were not terribly uncommon.


Terry

[Bob Wallace]

Interesting small $10k house built is 24  hours using 3d printing.  The organization hopes to get the cost down to $4k.

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/03/13/3d-printed-homes-10000-dollars/

[SteveMDFP]

Interesting small $10k house built is 24  hours using 3d printing.  The organization hopes to get the cost down to $4k.

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/03/13/3d-printed-homes-10000-dollars/

This does sound like an advance for providing low-cost housing for low-income folks.  I'm not sure we should be cheering from an environmental perspective, however.  The article includes a sentence " At the annual film and innovation festival known as SXSW, the company showed off how it could construct a 650-square-foot house out of cement in one day."

Cement production generates lots of CO2, even if the process is powered by renewable energy.  It's intrinsic to the chemistry of conventional cement.

I don't know if one of those "geopolymers" might be suitable for 3-D printing technology.

[Bob Wallace]

I don't see why one of the low carbon cement formulations wouldn't work.  Geopolymeric cement has been used for ferrocement panels.

Perhaps one of us could do a little digging into low CO2 cement and pull some info together.  I'm a bit on overload.

[ghoti]

Interesting info told to me by one of the guys installing a ground source heat pump in my house today. We were talking about how the biggest expense in city installations is the vertical wells for the ground loops. He said that Enbridge ( the giant natural gas supply/pipeline company is now designing and talking about installing ground source supply as a utility. I guess it would sort of be like district heating without the heating - you let the individuals extract the heat.

Maybe they see that natural gas supply is no longer a growth industry.

I call that adaptation!

[Tom_Mazanec]

Talk by Prof. Jem Bendell at European Commission on technologies for deep adaptation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke1PCgiM3V4&feature=youtu.be

EDIT: Not all US military bases carrying out adaptations:
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/not-all-bases-factoring-extreme-weather-climate-change-into-planning-gao-says-1.585850

[Tom_Mazanec]

How West Africa is trying to adapt:
https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-how-west-africa-is-using-data-to-prevent-climate-change-5871397/

[DrTskoul]

How West Africa is trying to adapt:
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/climate-change-emergency-carbon-warming-16677081

In Wales??

[DrTskoul]

Probably OT,  but some are trying to tackle adaptation with interesting methods ( welcome to dystopia )

First human-monkey chimera raises concern among scientists

[petm]

Been re-reading Atwood's Oryx & Crake trilogy. Too close for comfort. That guy should be fired and worse.

[Tom_Mazanec]

Rubio on climate change: 'We should choose adaptive solutions'
To be clear, attempting to reverse engineer the U.S. economy to absolve our past climate sins — either through a carbon tax or some "Green New Deal" scheme — will fail. The cost would set our state back, depriving us of the resources we desperately need to continue to adapt. Despite the high costs, none of those advocates can point to how even the most aggressive (and draconian) plan would improve the lives of Floridians.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/19/rubio-on-climate-change-we-should-choose-adaptive-solutions-column/2019310001/

MPR News’ Paul Huttner, filling in for host Kerri Miller, spoke with Forbes Tompkins, officer of flood-prepared communities at The Pew Charitable Trusts, and Mayor Errick Simmons of Greenville, Miss., about how cities across the country are bracing for more climate-driven flooding.
Later, as part of the Climate Reality Panel, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter joined Paul for a discussion on combating climate change in the Twin Cities.
https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2019/08/19/miller-how-are-cities-preparing-to-combat-climate-change

[Tom_Mazanec]

Eastie Farm’s community-building approach is common among urban farms, but its emphasis on climate resilience and environmental education is unique. “Most have gone the social route, worrying about people not having enough food, or people of color or lower-income people not getting healthy food,” Thiruvengadam told Civil Eats. “Unfortunately, it’s almost seen [by other urban farms] as a luxury worrying about the environment, a concern for tomorrow.”

https://civileats.com/2019/08/21/bostons-eastie-farm-builds-community-and-resilience-on-the-front-lines-of-climate-change/

AUG 22
The case for strategic and managed climate retreat
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6455/761

Faced with global warming, rising sea levels, and the climate-related extremes they intensify, the question is no longer whether some communities will retreat—moving people and assets out of harm's way—but why, where, when, and how they will retreat. To the extent that retreat is already happening, it is typically ad hoc and focused on risk reduction in isolation from broader societal goals. It is also frequently inequitable and often ignores the communities left behind or those receiving people who retreat. Retreat has been seen largely as a last resort, a failure to adapt, or a one-time emergency action; thus, little research has focused on retreat, leaving practitioners with little guidance. Such a narrow conception of retreat has limited decision-makers' perception of the tools available and stilted innovation. We propose a reconceptualization of retreat as a suite of adaptation options that are both strategic and managed. Strategy integrates retreat into long-term development goals and identifies why retreat should occur and, in doing so, influences where and when. Management addresses how retreat is executed. By reconceptualizing retreat as a set of tools used to achieve societal goals, communities and nations gain additional adaptation options and a better chance of choosing the actions most likely to help their communities thrive.

Climate change evacuation planning needs to start now, urges scientists
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-08-23/climate-retreat-planning-science/11435382
This is a popular account of the above scientific paper

[Tom_Mazanec]

Canada Tries a Forceful Message for Flood Victims: Live Someplace Else
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/climate/canada-flood-homes-buyout.html

Unlike the United States, which will repeatedly help pay for people to rebuild in place, Canada has responded to the escalating costs of climate change by limiting aid after disasters, and even telling people to leave their homes. It is an experiment that has exposed a complex mix of relief, anger and loss as entire neighborhoods are removed, house by house.

“Canadians are stubbornly beginning to reconsider the wisdom of building near flood-prone areas,” said Jason Thistlethwaite, a professor of environment and business at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “It’s taking government action to obligate people to make better decisions.”

[Tom_Mazanec]

Investing in climate adaptation can stimulate trillions in benefits
https://www.cnbctv18.com/economy/investing-in-climate-adaptation-can-stimulate-trillions-in-benefits-report-4334761.htm

The cost of not doing this is too high. The report emphatically states that without this kind of adaption, global food production will decrease by 30 percent; over 5 billion people would be without adequate drinking water; coastal areas of many countries would be reclaimed by the sea, pushing people inwards to the mainland. And, of course, for countries like India that have worked so hard at moving people from poverty, we may see these people slip back into poverty.

[Sigmetnow]

The Bahamas has been struck by many of the storms that have plowed through the Caribbean in the last few decades: Hurricane Andrew, Hurricane Floyd, Ike, Matthew, Irma, and so on. We’re familiar with their destruction, and so we have our protocols, our shelters, our rigorous building codes, and our years and years of experience. We also have the stories that have been passed down through generations, the ones that taught us about the worst dangers of the hurricanes that have hit our archipelago, and the legends of how people survived them.

But that’s no longer enough. “I have never seen nothing like that,” a woman screams at the top of her lungs in a video that was widely shared on Instagram. “There’s not one house in Marsh Harbor that’s standing,” she says. “Dead bodies everywhere.” Her eyes are wide and darting quickly, as if she has just seen a ghost, or many. “That couldn’t have just been a hurricane.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hurricane-dorian-was-a-climate-injustice

[Tom_Mazanec]

How Maine Tribes Are Adapting To Climate Change, Threatening Thousands Of Years Of Culture
https://www.mainepublic.org/post/how-maine-tribes-are-adapting-climate-change-threatening-thousands-years-culture

In northern Maine, the Aroostook Band of Micmacs has for decades been trying to protect important tribal cultural resources, including traditional foods, from pollution. And warming temperatures are expected to further that threat. But the Micmacs and other Maine tribes are taking steps to adapt.

[Tom_Mazanec]

NDP pledges $2.5 billion more to prevent disastrous effects of climate change
https://www.thestar.com/news/federal-election/2019/09/22/ndp-pledges-25-billion-more-to-prevent-disastrous-effects-of-climate-change.html

GATINEAU, QUE.—The New Democrats promised Sunday to more than double the amount of federal money earmarked to prevent damage from natural disasters such as floods.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh pledged to add $2.5 billion to the federal government’s disaster mitigation fund, saying he wants to help people and businesses prevent problems.