Seville, 3 August 2007
The collapse of a piece of the infrastructure of modern society and the deaths that accompanied that terrible accident is, I'm convinced, even more evidence -- if we needed it -- of the horrific and worsening impact of climate change.
I got up early on Thursday and flipped through the news channels, thinking I would watch the world's stock markets implode for a while but I caught sight of the flattened bridge and watched, in shock, a loop of video that showed scrambling rescue workers, a burning truck and an abandoned school bus only half on the shattered roadway.
But, and this is the point of this comment, there was an engineer who tried to explain why the disaster hadn't been prevented. One reason, he suggested, was that the bridge had undergone repeated recent episodes of thermal stress when the temperature had swung 20 or 30 degrees over the course of just a few hours. He noted that concrete just doesn't like this and reacts very badly.
I was convinced I now knew why people had died. They've been killed by climate change. The bridge had collapsed because of thermal stress. Global climate change means extremes of temperature and weather. We've got to learn to cope with the results of our own actions. Meantime, a typhoon is battering Japan and there are at least two others forming off the Eastern coast of Asia as I write this. Another study recently reported that the number of 'reportable' hurricanes in the Atlantic has doubled over the past 40 years.
We are going to see more typhoons and hurricans and, sadly, more events like the collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis.
