The climate and Bio fuels
I think this may be an appropriate moment for my first post. I’m not a pilot or aviation engineer but I am an engineer with long experience in diesel engines until recently when I switched to computing. I have had a lifelong interest in aviation so feel “qualified to contribute”
Firstly, the whole Climate Change, Global Warming, Carbon footprint scenario we are being sold is nonsense, and I speak from one who has read a vast amount of the scientific evidence. The whole thing is a political movement to get us to focus on the environment but they have chosen the wrong gas, the wrong bogie man if you like. However it is one that even those with a cursory education recognise and partially understand (ie most politicians and many environmentalists but not all)
CO2 is not a pollutant and nor is it a very important greenhouse gas. And given that, man made contributions to the total CO2 output each year is minuscule compared to natural outputs. In fact CO2 is essential to our well being and to food production on our planet and without which we would all perish. The higher the concentrations the faster plants grow. And by the way despite the fancy graphs from the IPCC and our good friend Al, CO2 concentrations were higher in the early 1800’s and around 1930. New evidence shows that the concentration fluctuates quite a lot with the reasons for this not fully understood, but one thing is certain, it has not been cause by us burning fossil fuels.
All this brings into question the grandstanding of organisations such as Virgin, who could be a little more honest and say they are looking for ways of saving fuel to help their costs, improve their profits and at the same time reduce the real pollutants such as Nitrous Oxides, un-burnt Hydrocarbons and Particulate matter, all of which have been forgotten in our quest to reduce the life giving gas CO2.
We have server risks out there over the future of our fuel supplies (Middle East and Russia not to mention growing demand from China and India) and by implication our current standards of living. We should be pushing harder to save fuel and pushing for our engines to build cleaner burning and even more fuel efficient engines. In my experience if the engineer today says that’s impossible, tomorrow he will be crowing, look what I have achieved. 
Trying to save CO2 sets everyone on a hiding to nothing.
The worst thing we can do is use bio fuels. I know from my Diesel experience that an engine designed for diesel will produce higher levels of the real pollutants on bio fuel. Also maintenance costs rise. Then there is the disastrous effect it is already having in the poorer parts of the word where even more forest is being cut down to grown Palm oil trees and much high quality agricultural land in the west is being used for Bio fuel production as the farmers look to improve returns, so that we in the West source even more from the third world who in turn cut down more forest to supply us. This is in addition to the completely bizarre fact that, producing this fuel, costs us as much in energy as it subsequently returns. No joined up thinking going on here is there?
Lastly for those who enjoy a good scientific sleep inducing read and regularly suffer from insomnia here are some links to some kind sole that have been collating the real science for us.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php
http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/