Impact of concrete

My students learn impact analysis so they can understand the kind of impact their future innovations might have on the world someday as engineers -- including those impacts that were not intended. I have looked at this in a number of posts over the years. An article I used recently is about the impact of concrete: specifically, how concrete contributes to global warming.

The article is Feeling the Heat? Blame Concrete and the subtitle is particularly eye-catching: Concrete has transformed civilization -- but it's making our cities, and our world, hotter. So it is clear that the article looks at both the pros and cons of concrete.

Link to the article: https://time.com/5655074/concrete-urban-heat/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief-pm&utm_content=20190820&xid=newsletter-brief

A non-narrated video (56 seconds) on the same site as this article starts: "July 2019 was the hottest July and the hottest month on record globally since temperature records began."

As an argumentative, or opinion, essay -- looking at the pros and cons, it is very well structured in the English style: 

• Introduction: topic and specific focus of topic
• Advantages of concrete, with examples (2 paragraphs)
• Disadvantages of concrete, with examples (9 paragraphs)
• Conclusion: indication of future concerns

This, then, serves as a good model text for English essay organization. Since the main focus of the disadvantages is on how concrete contributes to global warming, there is also information about how this occurs. This includes useful phrases and collocations relating to heat:

• potency of heat waves
• soaks up and retains the sun's heat
• temperatures rise
• magnify that effect
• urban heat islands
• the heat released by vehicle engines
• boost the temperature
• soaring (city) temperatures
• a rapidly warming world

A useful feature for argumentative essays is the use of comparisons that the audience will understand (many of these focus on an American audience):

• If you've ever walked barefoot across a sunbaked parking lot, you know firsthand how concrete soaks up and retains the sun's heat.
• Heat already kills more Americans than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined.
• That's the equivalent of adding nine New York Cities to the planet every year.
• ... making it the third-largest source of global-warming, behind only coal-fueled power plants and combustion-engine vehicles.
• ... enough to blanket the entire state of California.
• There is so much money to be made off of sand that in some countries, organized criminal gangs have moved into the business.
• We tend to think of concrete as permanent as the stone it mimics. It's not.
• America's dams are in similarly dismal shape.

Since the argumentation consists of information about the impact of concrete, there are many examples of cause and effect (with useful phrases in bold):

• When temperatures rise, the countless miles of concrete streets, sidewalks, walls and roofs in cities magnify that effect, creating a phenomenon known as urban heat islands. When combined with the heat released by vehicle engines, paved areas can boost the temperature in cities by as much as 22°F, ...
• The urban heat island effect is ever more worrisome because more and more people are moving into cities.
• Concrete is essentially just sand and gravel glued together with cement. To feed the construction industry's needs, tens of billions of tons of sand are dug out of the earth each year, enough to blanket the entire state of California. Much of it is dredged from river beds, lake bottoms, and beaches. The process often slaughters river-dwelling fish and birds, damages coral reefs, undermines bridges and causes riverbanks to collapse.
• There is so much money to be made off of sand that in some countries, organized criminal gangs have moved into the business.
• Heat, cold, chemicals, salt, and moisture all attack that seemingly solid artificial stone, working to weaken and shatter it from within. If it's not monitored and maintained, most concrete slowly disintegrates.

The final sentence is: "We can't stop using concrete completely; it's far too useful as a building material. But in a rapidly warming world, we need to start thinking about its true costs."

It would be interesting to see what engineering students would propose as a solution to this -- and it might depend on which field of engineering they are studying.

The author of the article is Vince Beiser, who is mentioned as the author of the book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. I haven't read this book, but it certainly sounds as if it is all about impact. Perhaps there are students or teachers who would be interested in reading it!