Swiss Re Warns Europe of Increasing 'Soil Subsidence' from Climate Change
According to a new study from Swiss Re, “Europe is witnessing a dramatic increase in property damage as a result of soil subsidence.” A new loss model developed by Swiss Re and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), also concludes that “climate change could magnify those risks.”
The publication suggests that “soil subsidence will worsen and spread in Europe, with some areas seeing a more than 50 percent rise in future losses. Prolonged dry spells, as recently seen in parts of Europe, can cause the ground to sink by so much that cracks appear in the earth, tearing apart the foundations of houses, bridges, factories and other structures. In the worst case, whole buildings can collapse.”
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1 comment:
I'm an Engineer and I have plenty of experience with large civil infrastructure (roads, tunnels & bridges). Settlement is an issue and it is related to groundwater and how wet the soil is, but dry soil is better than wet soil but that's not the point.
The point I want to make is that this is typical of the "how do we make money out of climate change alarm" strategy. I'll give you a personal example.
We had a sustainability group at my company and they wanted to make themselves more important so they hatched this idea that they would coordinate a review of all the climate change risks for our infrastructure. Seemed ok, but they were only interested in two things, "drama" and "dangerous warming".
The criteria they set was a 2 degree celcius rise in temperature. I suggested that temperatures may also fall (that's climate change) but they refused to listen. After much backwards and forwards they thought they had hit on the perfect area to scare everybody. Fatigue. Mind you, not one of them had any scientific, engineering or technical qualifications at all.
Just so happened one of my young engineers had worked for the Australian defence department running fatigue models for aircraft. So the question was put to him about temperature rises and fatigue, to which he replied "you've got bigger fish to fry than a tiny temperature change". Of course, rather than listen to him they set about trying to silence and smear him.
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