Is climate change causing increased severity of weather events? If yes, then fossil fuel-based transportation segment will be forced to change.
The world is changing! It used to be that if you spoke irreverently about a religion, you would be accused of blasphemy. But today, one could also be blasphemous for not believing that human activities are causing climate change!
Climate change can affect global weather patterns. These changes, in turn, influence the intensity and, in some cases, the frequency of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, heat waves, floods, droughts and storms, including forest fires.
Extreme rainfall and flooding left paths of destruction through communities around the world in 2021. The latest was in Tennessee, USA, where a record-shattering 17 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, turning creeks into rivers that flooded hundreds of homes and killed at least 18 people. One study looked at the rainfall from the European storm that killed more than 220 people when floods swept through Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands in July 2021.
Another study points out that the western North American extreme heat in late June 2021 would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. Recently, more than 100 people were feared dead in communities across the American Midwest and South after a string of powerful storms and tornadoes swept across 6 states overnight. Until now, storms of such severity were rare so late in the season.
A decade ago, scientists weren’t able to confidently connect any individual weather event to climate change. Even now, many scientists are not sure whether there is a link between climate change and the frequency or strength of storms, in part because of limited data. Still, a team of climate scientists have reported that human-induced global warming of 1.2 degrees Celsius has made storms of higher severity 1.2 to 9 times more likely than it would have been in a cooler world. They also point out that in recent years, tornadoes seem to be occurring in greater ‘clusters’.
Transportation segment taking corrective steps
There has always been extreme weather. But it is prudent to accept that activities such as burning fossil fuels are contributing to global warming and proactively take corrective steps before being forced to do so. Battery electric vehicle (BEV) and hydrogen power are the most discussed alternatives to vehicles powered by internal combustion engine (ICE). While rapid progress is being made to shift from ICE to BEVs for personal transportation, powering commercial vehicles (CV) for zero emission may be more challenging. While just 2 percent of the vehicles on the road are commercial vehicles (out of which trucking accounts for 22 percent of all CO2 produced by the transport sector), their impact on emissions, and the environment, is disproportionately large. Indeed, any approach to reduce emissions in the trucking sector is a good thing. Battery electric or even hydrogen power, all possess the potential to achieve this goal. Trucks using battery power don’t require any changes to infrastructure but will be expensive, take a long time to charge and add excess wear to roads. Hydrogen trucks will be lighter and able to refuel in minutes like ICE vehicles, but making hydrogen isn’t easy or cheap.
Now there is a third option currently being evaluated in Frankfurt, Germany, that seems to be turning heads. Here, trucks will be powered by overhead electric power lines, as is the case with trams and trains, with a pantograph mounted on truck cab.
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