Combating climate change: can naval architects do more?

摘要

Engineers, in the ultimate analysis, are the culprits of climate change. The industrial revolution of the last 200 years has had the unintended consequences of polluting the world with greenhouse gas. True, engineers deserve credit for inventing the steam/gas turbine and the internal combustion engine but unwittingly they also have let the genie out of the bottle: the dire consequence of global warming. The evidence of a hotter planet is clear: raging fires, melting polar ice caps and permafrost, exceptional floods, droughts, and hurricanes. Life on land and in the ocean has been decimated, biodiversity compromised, and food security endangered. Yet even as the world gets warmer, engineers are at the forefront of hydrocarbons extractino from the earths crust and ocean bed to feed those machines. One way to get out of this conundrum is to build in the sea what man has been building on the land. Floating complexes, be it offices or industrial estates, abodes or institutions, are environmentally more sustainable.