CC Sep-Oct 2023

COMMENT
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Comment
Earth, fire and water
by David Chadwick
Forgive me for getting a bit biblical,
but how many omens do you want?
From earthquakes in Morocco, to
record heat levels being recorded on a
global basis followed by terrifying forest
fires, alternating with devastating rains and
catastrophic floods, and culminating in the
terrible tragedy in Libya, when local dams
burst, sweeping thousands of inhabitants
of Derna out to sea, we appear to be in an
upward spiral of climactic climate events.
The consequences of climate change are
not always so dramatic. Lengthy
heatwaves cause prolonged droughts,
crops struggle to survive and when the
rains eventually arrive they are too
powerful and sweep the arid regions
clean. Global warming strips the polar
regions of millennia of accumulated ice,
and water levels rise slowly but inexorably
and once fertile coastal regions are
subsumed by the sea.
The problem is we are both the culprits
and the assuagers. I hesitate to use the
word solution, as there are none, and we
can merely attempt to mitigate the effects
of climate change. Our growing
dependence on IT to drive efficiencies in
the construction industry and our attempts
to introduce sustainable power generation
are countered by the massive and
increasing demand for processing
capability to drive data centres running AI,
bitcoin mining and cloud computing
services. Many of the data centres using
scarce water resources to cool the vast
arrays of processors are based in hot
urban environments, like California and the
Southern regions of China and India, and
alternative air conditioning systems
consume massive amounts of electricity.
The processing power of the data
centres is required to handle the complex
simulations that are quite clever at
showing us where we are inexorably
headed, but can also be used to fine-tune
the construction of the environment we
hope to live in.
Trying to balance the books, then, so that
we can continue to maintain the lifestyles
we have grown accustomed to - and to
support burgeoning population growth
and urbanisation in the under-resourced
Third World - the industry is using its
technology to both educate people and to
fight back against an inevitable fate.
In this issue we are taking a closer look at
water security. It's a vicious circle. The
rising global temperatures are melting
polar regions and altering oceanic
currents, changing water temperatures
and generating more extreme weather
events. We cannot reverse the trend until
we get things like carbon emissions under
control. In the meantime we must ensure
that the world's growing population have
enough water to sustain them and grow
their crops, and that we can handle an
increasingly violent events that nature
throws at us.
To this end we have Bentley's Sandra
DiMatteo explaining how the company's
digital twin technology is being used to
help municipal organisations in Brazil,
China, America and the Netherlands to
improve the efficiency of their water supply
and management, suggesting a number of
ways in which in which this can be
achieved, One of the solutions is
particularly poignant in the aftermath of the
Libyan disaster, as it focuses on dam
management.
This is complemented by an article from
Bluesky on the use of Lidar technology to
measure rising sea levels. The company
commissioned Sairo Studios, a creative
agency specialising in content for AR, VR
and Metaverse to create a 360-degree
video educational film for students, 'Rising
Tides: Climate Change in Morecambe
Bay', which vividly brings the real impact of
global warming to life.
4 September/October 2023