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More About Climate Change
Feb 17, 2017 23:08:40   #
Richard94611
 
This is an interesting article. Of course, we all know that climate change isn't real -- except that the people who actually live with its results seem to disagree.

Climate change is threatening to push a crowded capital toward a breaking point.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, Photographs by JOSH HANER
FEB. 17, 2017

MEXICO CITY — On bad days, you can smell the stench from a mile away, drifting over a nowhere sprawl of highways and office parks.

When the Grand Canal was completed, at the end of the 1800s, it was Mexico City’s Brooklyn Bridge, a major feat of engineering and a symbol of civic pride: 29 miles long, with the ability to move tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater per second. It promised to solve the flooding and sewage problems that had plagued the city for centuries.

Only it didn’t, pretty much from the start. The canal was based on gravity. And Mexico City, a mile and a half above sea level, was sinking, collapsing in on itself.

It still is, faster and faster, and the canal is just one victim of what has become a vicious cycle. Always short of water, Mexico City keeps drilling deeper for more, weakening the ancient clay lake beds on which the Aztecs first built much of the city, causing it to crumble even further.

Source: Subsidence rate data from Dr. Andy Sowter at Geomatic Ventures Limited.
It is a cycle made worse by climate change. More heat and drought mean more evaporation and yet more demand for water, adding pressure to tap distant reservoirs at staggering costs or further drain underground aquifers and hasten the city’s collapse.

In the immense neighborhood of Iztapalapa — where nearly two million people live, many of them unable to count on water from their taps — a teenager was swallowed up where a crack in the brittle ground split open a street. Sidewalks resemble broken china, and 15 elementary schools have crumbled or caved in.

Much is being written about climate change and the impact of rising seas on waterfront populations. But coasts are not the only places affected. Mexico City — high in the mountains, in the center of the country — is a glaring example. The world has a lot invested in crowded capitals like this one, with vast numbers of people, huge economies and the stability of a hemisphere at risk.

Changing Climate, Changing Cities
The first in a series of articles about how climate change is challenging the world’s urban centers.

One study predicts that 10 percent of Mexicans ages 15 to 65 could eventually try to emigrate north as a result of rising temperatures, drought and floods, potentially scattering millions of people and heightening already extreme political tensions over immigration.

The effects of climate change are varied and opportunistic, but one thing is consistent: They are like sparks in the tinder. They expose cities’ biggest vulnerabilities, inflaming troubles that politicians and city planners often ignore or try to paper over. And they spread outward, defying borders.

That’s what this series is about — how global cities tackle climate threats, or fail to. Around the world, extreme weather and water scarcity are accelerating repression, regional conflicts and violence. A Columbia University report found that where rainfall declines, “the risk of a low-level conflict escalating to a full-scale civil war approximately doubles the following year.” The Pentagon’s term for climate change is “threat multiplier.”

And nowhere does this apply more obviously than in cities. This is the first urban century in human history, the first time more people live in cities than don’t, with predictions that three-quarters of the global population will be urban by 2050. By that time, according to another study, there may be more than 700 million climate refugees on the move.

For many cities around the world, adapting to climate change is a route to long-term prosperity. That’s the good news, where societies are willing to listen. But adaptation can also be costly and slow. It can run counter to the rhythms of political campaigns and headlong into powerful, entrenched interests, confounding business as usual. This is, in effect, what happened in New Orleans, which ignored countless warning signs, destroyed natural protections, gave developers a free pass and failed to reinforce levees before Hurricane Katrina left much of the city in ruins.

Unlike traffic jams or crime, climate change isn’t something most people easily feel or see. It is certainly not what residents in Mexico City talk about every day. But it is like an approaching storm, straining an already precarious social fabric and threatening to push a great city toward a breaking point.

As Arnoldo Kramer, Mexico City’s chief resilience officer, put it: “Climate change has become the biggest long-term threat to this city’s future. And that’s because it is linked to water, health, air pollution, traffic disruption from floods, housing vulnerability to landslides — which means we can’t begin to address any of the city’s real problems without facing the climate issue.”

There’s much more at stake than this city’s well being. At the extreme, if climate change wreaks havoc on the social and economic fabric of global linchpins like Mexico City, warns the writer Christian Parenti, “no amount of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.”

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 00:23:07   #
PeterS
 
Richard94611 wrote:
This is an interesting article. Of course, we all know that climate change isn't real -- except that the people who actually live with its results seem to disagree.

Climate change is threatening to push a crowded capital toward a breaking point.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, Photographs by JOSH HANER
FEB. 17, 2017

MEXICO CITY — On bad days, you can smell the stench from a mile away, drifting over a nowhere sprawl of highways and office parks.

When the Grand Canal was completed, at the end of the 1800s, it was Mexico City’s Brooklyn Bridge, a major feat of engineering and a symbol of civic pride: 29 miles long, with the ability to move tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater per second. It promised to solve the flooding and sewage problems that had plagued the city for centuries.

Only it didn’t, pretty much from the start. The canal was based on gravity. And Mexico City, a mile and a half above sea level, was sinking, collapsing in on itself.

It still is, faster and faster, and the canal is just one victim of what has become a vicious cycle. Always short of water, Mexico City keeps drilling deeper for more, weakening the ancient clay lake beds on which the Aztecs first built much of the city, causing it to crumble even further.

Source: Subsidence rate data from Dr. Andy Sowter at Geomatic Ventures Limited.
It is a cycle made worse by climate change. More heat and drought mean more evaporation and yet more demand for water, adding pressure to tap distant reservoirs at staggering costs or further drain underground aquifers and hasten the city’s collapse.

In the immense neighborhood of Iztapalapa — where nearly two million people live, many of them unable to count on water from their taps — a teenager was swallowed up where a crack in the brittle ground split open a street. Sidewalks resemble broken china, and 15 elementary schools have crumbled or caved in.

Much is being written about climate change and the impact of rising seas on waterfront populations. But coasts are not the only places affected. Mexico City — high in the mountains, in the center of the country — is a glaring example. The world has a lot invested in crowded capitals like this one, with vast numbers of people, huge economies and the stability of a hemisphere at risk.

Changing Climate, Changing Cities
The first in a series of articles about how climate change is challenging the world’s urban centers.

One study predicts that 10 percent of Mexicans ages 15 to 65 could eventually try to emigrate north as a result of rising temperatures, drought and floods, potentially scattering millions of people and heightening already extreme political tensions over immigration.

The effects of climate change are varied and opportunistic, but one thing is consistent: They are like sparks in the tinder. They expose cities’ biggest vulnerabilities, inflaming troubles that politicians and city planners often ignore or try to paper over. And they spread outward, defying borders.

That’s what this series is about — how global cities tackle climate threats, or fail to. Around the world, extreme weather and water scarcity are accelerating repression, regional conflicts and violence. A Columbia University report found that where rainfall declines, “the risk of a low-level conflict escalating to a full-scale civil war approximately doubles the following year.” The Pentagon’s term for climate change is “threat multiplier.”

And nowhere does this apply more obviously than in cities. This is the first urban century in human history, the first time more people live in cities than don’t, with predictions that three-quarters of the global population will be urban by 2050. By that time, according to another study, there may be more than 700 million climate refugees on the move.

For many cities around the world, adapting to climate change is a route to long-term prosperity. That’s the good news, where societies are willing to listen. But adaptation can also be costly and slow. It can run counter to the rhythms of political campaigns and headlong into powerful, entrenched interests, confounding business as usual. This is, in effect, what happened in New Orleans, which ignored countless warning signs, destroyed natural protections, gave developers a free pass and failed to reinforce levees before Hurricane Katrina left much of the city in ruins.

Unlike traffic jams or crime, climate change isn’t something most people easily feel or see. It is certainly not what residents in Mexico City talk about every day. But it is like an approaching storm, straining an already precarious social fabric and threatening to push a great city toward a breaking point.

As Arnoldo Kramer, Mexico City’s chief resilience officer, put it: “Climate change has become the biggest long-term threat to this city’s future. And that’s because it is linked to water, health, air pollution, traffic disruption from floods, housing vulnerability to landslides — which means we can’t begin to address any of the city’s real problems without facing the climate issue.”

There’s much more at stake than this city’s well being. At the extreme, if climate change wreaks havoc on the social and economic fabric of global linchpins like Mexico City, warns the writer Christian Parenti, “no amount of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.”
b This is an interesting article. Of course, we ... (show quote)


If climate change is real there is no way to stop it so why worry about something no one can do anything about anyway. Better to make as much money as you can--that way you can leave it to your children and they can use it to build an self sustained environment and then they won't need to worry about what the climate does...

Think about yourselves--Fuk everyone else!!!

Oh, and don't forget to buy lots of guns.

PTL and pass the beans....

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 00:53:13   #
QuestGirl Loc: Jayhawk Country
 
PeterS wrote:
If climate change is real there is no way to stop it so why worry about something no one can do anything about anyway. Better to make as much money as you can--that way you can leave it to your children and they can use it to build an self sustained environment and then they won't need to worry about what the climate does...

Think about yourselves--Fuk everyone else!!!

Oh, and don't forget to buy lots of guns.

PTL and pass the beans....


...and the latest from Al Gore.


Climate-Alarmist Gore: 'Middle East Could Become Uninhabitable' | MRCTV

http://www.mrctv.org/blog/climate-alarmist-gore-middle-east-could-become-uninhabitable?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWTJJMlpqZGtOMlZtTVRZeiIsInQiOiJKdms5U1VZNHBpRHpLemhlRU5oUDVVTHhsTklCMTFWb01NZlYrY2pxZmRBZEk2Y0hjXC9WYjIzbWZNM0VXQTF1VWhkV0k4a1NYcWpJZFgwQm9PRUFSK2o5QXZCZklpXC95WlNJem1tQU50SnNoTlZwRFJETXVsdEF2R2htMkMySHoyIn0%3D

Reply
 
 
Feb 18, 2017 02:32:39   #
Nutter Loc: Fly Over Zone
 
Exactly what happened in the four corners area where the cliff dwellers eventually had to move out for lack of rain!

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 03:09:02   #
PeterS
 


That's too bad, all them Muslims will be looking for a place to stay...

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 03:10:45   #
PeterS
 
Nutter wrote:
Exactly what happened in the four corners area where the cliff dwellers eventually had to move out for lack of rain!


The question becomes--what happens when there is no place to move...

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 08:59:22   #
reconreb Loc: America / Inglis Fla.
 
Richard94611 wrote:
This is an interesting article. Of course, we all know that climate change isn't real -- except that the people who actually live with its results seem to disagree.

Climate change is threatening to push a crowded capital toward a breaking point.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, Photographs by JOSH HANER
FEB. 17, 2017

MEXICO CITY — On bad days, you can smell the stench from a mile away, drifting over a nowhere sprawl of highways and office parks.

When the Grand Canal was completed, at the end of the 1800s, it was Mexico City’s Brooklyn Bridge, a major feat of engineering and a symbol of civic pride: 29 miles long, with the ability to move tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater per second. It promised to solve the flooding and sewage problems that had plagued the city for centuries.

Only it didn’t, pretty much from the start. The canal was based on gravity. And Mexico City, a mile and a half above sea level, was sinking, collapsing in on itself.

It still is, faster and faster, and the canal is just one victim of what has become a vicious cycle. Always short of water, Mexico City keeps drilling deeper for more, weakening the ancient clay lake beds on which the Aztecs first built much of the city, causing it to crumble even further.

Source: Subsidence rate data from Dr. Andy Sowter at Geomatic Ventures Limited.
It is a cycle made worse by climate change. More heat and drought mean more evaporation and yet more demand for water, adding pressure to tap distant reservoirs at staggering costs or further drain underground aquifers and hasten the city’s collapse.

In the immense neighborhood of Iztapalapa — where nearly two million people live, many of them unable to count on water from their taps — a teenager was swallowed up where a crack in the brittle ground split open a street. Sidewalks resemble broken china, and 15 elementary schools have crumbled or caved in.

Much is being written about climate change and the impact of rising seas on waterfront populations. But coasts are not the only places affected. Mexico City — high in the mountains, in the center of the country — is a glaring example. The world has a lot invested in crowded capitals like this one, with vast numbers of people, huge economies and the stability of a hemisphere at risk.

Changing Climate, Changing Cities
The first in a series of articles about how climate change is challenging the world’s urban centers.

One study predicts that 10 percent of Mexicans ages 15 to 65 could eventually try to emigrate north as a result of rising temperatures, drought and floods, potentially scattering millions of people and heightening already extreme political tensions over immigration.

The effects of climate change are varied and opportunistic, but one thing is consistent: They are like sparks in the tinder. They expose cities’ biggest vulnerabilities, inflaming troubles that politicians and city planners often ignore or try to paper over. And they spread outward, defying borders.

That’s what this series is about — how global cities tackle climate threats, or fail to. Around the world, extreme weather and water scarcity are accelerating repression, regional conflicts and violence. A Columbia University report found that where rainfall declines, “the risk of a low-level conflict escalating to a full-scale civil war approximately doubles the following year.” The Pentagon’s term for climate change is “threat multiplier.”

And nowhere does this apply more obviously than in cities. This is the first urban century in human history, the first time more people live in cities than don’t, with predictions that three-quarters of the global population will be urban by 2050. By that time, according to another study, there may be more than 700 million climate refugees on the move.

For many cities around the world, adapting to climate change is a route to long-term prosperity. That’s the good news, where societies are willing to listen. But adaptation can also be costly and slow. It can run counter to the rhythms of political campaigns and headlong into powerful, entrenched interests, confounding business as usual. This is, in effect, what happened in New Orleans, which ignored countless warning signs, destroyed natural protections, gave developers a free pass and failed to reinforce levees before Hurricane Katrina left much of the city in ruins.

Unlike traffic jams or crime, climate change isn’t something most people easily feel or see. It is certainly not what residents in Mexico City talk about every day. But it is like an approaching storm, straining an already precarious social fabric and threatening to push a great city toward a breaking point.

As Arnoldo Kramer, Mexico City’s chief resilience officer, put it: “Climate change has become the biggest long-term threat to this city’s future. And that’s because it is linked to water, health, air pollution, traffic disruption from floods, housing vulnerability to landslides — which means we can’t begin to address any of the city’s real problems without facing the climate issue.”

There’s much more at stake than this city’s well being. At the extreme, if climate change wreaks havoc on the social and economic fabric of global linchpins like Mexico City, warns the writer Christian Parenti, “no amount of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.”
b This is an interesting article. Of course, we ... (show quote)


Well if this is true there is only one answer , nuke Mexico City now to stop the pollution ..

Reply
 
 
Feb 18, 2017 09:07:20   #
reconreb Loc: America / Inglis Fla.
 
PeterS wrote:
If climate change is real there is no way to stop it so why worry about something no one can do anything about anyway. Better to make as much money as you can--that way you can leave it to your children and they can use it to build an self sustained environment and then they won't need to worry about what the climate does...

Think about yourselves--Fuk everyone else!!!

Oh, and don't forget to buy lots of guns.

PTL and pass the beans....


You start your comment out with that fantastic word " IF ".. Look petey , the gig is up . We know climate change is part of the UN agenda of the globalist to dominate the free world and promote a Caliphate . You are part of this , with your constant anti Christian attitude .. sorry Jamal .. not going to happen .. see you in hell first .

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 09:11:50   #
Morgan
 
reconreb wrote:
Well if this is true there is only one answer , nuke Mexico City now to stop the pollution ..


Have you ever seen a fire ant hill when it is disturbed?

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 09:19:53   #
Morgan
 
reconreb wrote:
Well if this is true there is only one answer , nuke Mexico City now to stop the pollution ..



We are up to 7.4 Billion people, you do understand sustainability.

defined as: the avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance.

How much more difficult will that be with a completely toxic environment? Simple yet poignant question?

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 16:24:44   #
Mikeyavelli
 
Climate change is almost as big a hoax as obama. Both weapons of the left to topple America.
We wish we could control the climate. We are of the earth, we take nothing and we contribute nothing. Humans are as random to the earth as a gust of wind or a crashing wave or a bolt of lightning.
Any attempt to alter our fuel source or change to a vegan diet or impose guilt over success is a cheap rube to weaken America.

Reply
 
 
Feb 18, 2017 16:36:57   #
Vegas Rob
 
4% of Americans have the thought that there is global warming. 96% seem to be correct. If the 4 % were right, how could anything be done?

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 20:03:35   #
cephusbob
 
The problem with Mexico City is not climate change . It is it's physical location which traps the air pollution and a lack of water to support the large population much like California.

Reply
Feb 18, 2017 23:42:14   #
Kickaha Loc: Nebraska
 
We have had higher temperatures in the past, just as they have been much colder (have you heard about the previous Ice Ages?). Temperatures have fluctuated throughout history, those people who think global warming is man-made are as egotistical as the people in the middle ages that thought earth was the center of the universe.

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