Beltane Solstice Moon
Linking the story from Singapore to this article in the New York Review of Books, Collapse and Crash, JUNE 20, 2013, Bill McKibben, gives me a chance to promote your reading of Bill McKibben’s fine review of a book by engineer Henry Petroski, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure.
(our very own engineering failure)
Though the book sounds interesting in its own right, it preaches failure as the great teacher, it’s McKibben’s context for his review that made me really pay attention. In it he observes that many failures, perhaps most engineering failures, result in serious questioning of existing standards and often their revision.
And that’s just the rub now. Mother Earth no longer acts according to the rules of the Holocene, the period since the end of the last Ice Age. Temperature has risen on average 
about 1 degree around the globe. And will rise more. One thing this does, McKibben points out, is add energy to meteorological phenomenon, producing more tornadoes, more severe thunderstorms and, take just these two, increases stress on buildings, dams, sewer systems, stresses that were previously adjudged to be 50 year or 100 year or 500 year events, now occurring much more frequently.
How do engineers design structures safely and, a critical point, economically in such a plastic environment? Then, as McKibben also points out, those who travel with the engineers, bond agencies and insurance companies, face an uncertain and novel setting for their work, too.
My sense is that McKibben, a well known environmentalist, has begun to point out the real time effects of global warming, not just the overall, omg the ice is melting, but it will also cost us money and lives and create a unique, unknown future.