Are we contributing to global warming?

[PingDit]

Statement:
a) Wind farms contribute between 0.5-0.9% toward the national grid in the UK. After taking into account the production, location and transportation costs, is it worth it?
b) Wave power really needs to be taken on-board by the government because the costs are astronomical but apparently, effective.
c) Tree planting absorbs CO2 and you get fancy tables out of them later.

Questions:
1. Do we as aircrew feel any responsibility toward 'Global warming' (if there is such a thing)?
2. Do you feel a need to personally 'offset' your perceived personal carbon emissions?
3. Assuming you do (2 above), by which method would you 'offset'?
Feel free to add to the 'statement' points above.

[Rainboe]

1- None whatsoever- like less than zero. I fly to provide a service that people want. I'm there doing it for them. It's up to them to decide what they want to do. I'm paid to help provide the service.
2- Absolute joke-NO! When I booked my holiday to the Maldives, I had some weirdo website telling me my carbon emissions and suggesting I pay about 10 pounds to someone! Oh yes? Get stuffed! Like the power companies charge a green tax of some sort and keep it for themselves?

Wind farms are a menace- noisy to live anywhere near, technical nightmares, very inefficient. Useless. Wave power will work for a few years, then silt up the estuaries and become a total ecological disaster, and change shallow water environments. big mistake- avoid! Stick to nuclear. The added advantage is it gives us the materials to nuke Russian flags planted where they shouldn't be.

[speedrestriction]

No, I don't feel responsible.
Don't feel any need to offset my emissions, however when I drive I try to maximise my MPG, not to save the planet, but to save my wallet.
What does annoy me is the way aviation is made out to be the big battle ground of carbon emissions - if people seriously want to reduce their carbon footprint all they have to do is look as far as their driveway and figure out ways to use the car less, switch off electrical equipment not in use, buy locally produced goods (within reason) eg. why buy apples flown all the way from New Zealand when you can buy British or (dare I say it) French apples.

Carbon neutralising is a scam. There are only two ways to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere - leave it in the ground in Arabia and plant more trees. Economically neither are particularly likely to take place because a) industry and the economy are based on a whole infrastructure reliant on oil and b) it is more profitable to deforest swathes of the "developing world" than it is to reforest Europe. Any other form of "neutralising" amounts to nothing more than closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

All of this is predicated on the supposition that levels of CO2 are driving climate change in the first place.
sr

[skiesfull]

If all the current (sometimes ridiculous) ideas about reversing 'man-made' global warming actually work, what will be done to stop this reversal turning into another Ice-age?? The Earth's atmosphere is finely balanced and any attempts to change it should be very carefully considered. Yes - we may breathe cleaner air in the future and drink purer water, but can we actually change the temperature as easily as Solar activity and volcanic activity? I have my doubts - so I will not be rushed into complying with "carbon terrorism" until I am convinced.

[PingDit]

It's been proved already that the earth actually goes through cycles with unusual effects; flooding, exceptional heat-waves etc. but I believe that we can alter the levels of these peaks by offsetting. The only types of offset that seem viable though would be by planting more trees to absorb CO2. If the price of every flight ticket sold also included 1 tree being planted, I think we for one could be seen to be 'doing our bit'. Could be mandatory or voluntary?

[wondering]

When will this media hysteria about global warming stop. There has always been and always will be climate change. The whole process is just not understood very well.

During the warm period between 900-1300 people from Iceand and Scandinavia migrated to Greenland. I wonder why? In Europe, life became miserable after 1300 when the climate became cooler.

I would worry more about the destruction and pollution of the environment in some parts of the world e.g. India, China, the rainforest etc.

[Re-Heat]

I think the two stands of the argument should be separated, being:

1) A contribution to global warming is made by aviation, and participants should feel responsible, and (what is implied by the question),

2) Should the participants feel guilty about it

Certainly some contribution is made by aviation, and as a participant, one would not be human, or intelligent, to consider his or her part in such, and to minimise impact where appropriate. Besides, waste of natural resources has a financial cost as well, so clearly intelligently planning approaches and reducing waste is clearly a key responsibility of all participants

Feeling guilty about it is quite another matter - as clearly noted above, there are far greater contributors, and furthermore, the measurable effect of aviation is widely distributed in many studies.

While, as noted in some of the posts above, the mechanism is hugely misunderstood and the earth does move through cycles that also alter the climate, nevertheless, it would be foolish to unnecessarily exacerbate such warming where now a clear body of rational, mainstream scientific opinion also believes that man has some contribution, however immesurable that actual effect may be in the overall scheme.

I too believe carbon offsetting schemes are somewhat of a scam and that nuclear is essential for reducing the carbon emmissions that are clearly hugely more damaging from coal power generation.

The statement about wind power from Rainboe is misleading though - it used to be somewhat wasteful and supported by subsidy, but the technology today is significantly more efficient and profitable withouth subsidy, and in a windswept isle, I fully support hugely greater use of windpower - and unfortunate as it may be, the highlands are the best site for this free resource.

[On-MarkBob]

My pet suject at the moment. The fact is that those scientists that won't be heard under any circumstances believe like me that what we need is more polution if global warming is to be tackled effectively. In fact another Krakatoa would be useful. After it went off last time the whole of the world cooled by 5 degrees. Then there was the industrial revolution and during all that smog and stuff, the river Thames would regularly freeze over in winter. Maybe another world war, when Germany was going up in flames throwing any amount of crap into the atmosphere, all blowing East, it caused one of the coldest ever winters on the Russian front which was enough to hault the German advance in its tracks.
Yes, there might be a greenhouse effect by all of this polution stuff but why overlook the effect of blocking out the suns rays in the first place, which is a greater effect.
CFCs is another load of crap. CFCs are heavy gasses, that's why we have them in fire extinguishers, so they go down to the seat of the fire. Yes the do damage Ozone, if they could get there. How the hell does a CFC gas get all the way up to the edge of space in the first place is a total mystry unless the 'greenies' are taking it up themselves. Never the twain will meet!
The ice caps are goint to melt and the sea level is going to rise! Bollocks! 90% of the earths ice is floating on water, when the ice melts the level goes down! how many times has your drink in a bar gone up when the ice melted?
The whole afair was initially thought about by Maggie Thatcher to convince us all we needed Nuclear power. Unfortunately it didn't work so we now buy our nulear power from the French!
Now of course the Poliititions want to make us believe we are bad so they can tax us even more. Over 90% of the world Co2 is produced by the Oceans, perhaps they'll want to drain them next!

[On-MarkBob]

And furthermore:-

If you bought a brand new Audi and drove it in London, the air that gets sucked in at the front is dirtier than what comes out at the back! Cars can be made to scrub the air as they go along.
The Humble Landrover has the lowest carbon footprint of any mass produced vehicle due to the fact that its life expectancy is in excess of 30 years! buy a Cleo and it will last 8 if you're lucky, so four times more have to be produced over the same life span.
Also my 4x4 is only 4x4 when I select it, which is not often, otherwise it is no different to any other 2x4 car. If trucks can discount their tax by taking a couple of wheels off the ground why can't I have a discount for not using my 4x4 as a 2x4?

[Re-Heat]

You confuse CO2 with particulate matter, which has reduced dramatically since the 1960s as the stuff is so harmful to health. I'd rather not have that stuff back...would you?

The ice caps are goint to melt and the sea level is going to rise! Bollocks! 90% of the earths ice is floating on water, when the ice melts the level goes down!
I hadn't noticed that Antartica and Greenland were floating...or not...!

[411A]

Oh dear, global warming, then global cooling.

What!
Cooling you say?
Indeed so, in fact it was thus proclaimed on the cover of that esteemed publication...'Popular Mechanics' :rolleyes: in 1957, the International Geophysical Year (in case anyone has forgotten..or even cared) which proudly mentioned...

The coming mini ICE AGE

Imagine, fifty years ago the glaciers were to descend toward southern Canada and (in Europe) possibly Geneva, which would surely have spoiled a lot of expensive real estate.

Man is but a pimple on natures backside, and will not have any long term effect on the worlds climate...period.

Nature, with her normal heating and cooling cycles, rules, make absolutely no mistake.

[Rainboe]

Now I'm scared! I'm actually agreeing with everything you say these days 411A! What does it mean? Should I be worried? And what's the significance of '411'?

[411A]

Sooner or later, Rainboe, most everyone comes around to my common sense way of thinking...at least in aviation (politics are a whole 'nother matter).

No, not just '411'...411A, 'tis the type of aeroplane I personally own.
Just had an FAA inspector show it to another inspector (under training) and he mentioned....nearly the best maintained aeroplane in the area.

He was right.

[hedgehopper]

So if the ice melts, the water level lowers, O level phyiscs Ice takes up more space than water!! :\

[On-MarkBob]

So Hedgehopper, shame you never took physics at A-level. By the fact that the ice is floating it is less dense than water. Try putting a glass bottle full of water in your freezer, the ice expands and the bottle breaks. When the ice melts it becomes the same density as water again and contracts to that density.
One of the problems of today is that Geography and History are no longer part of the mandatory subjects at school. It is not surprising that there is allot of ignorance about. I'm not having a go here, it's not your fault, I blame the politicians again. I think it is all part of the conspiracy for ignorance, after all if they taught this stuff everyone would know they realy are talking 'Bollocks'!
As for Re-Heat, I hate to burst your bubble, but perhaps what I should have said is that approximately 90% of the Earths 'Permanent' ice is floating on the oceans. The ice around Antarctica is floating on the arctic oceans, the best part of the continent is in fact a barron desert. The only ice around is just blowing snow, so cold that it just can't stick to anything (ie. -42C and below - does that ring a bell perhaps?). The snow blows about for a while and eventually finds its way back to the sea where it settles on the floating ice or the glaciers, which march relentlessly to end up floating on the sea as well.
Greenland by comparison to Antartica is positively temporate. Much of its ice is purely seasonal and melts annually, as it has been doing for millennia, this ice is not counted in the equation. The other large ice deposits in Glaciers etc. in Antarctica, Canada, Russia and China and the top of the odd mountain, make up the remaining percentage. Greenland's permantent ice by comparison to the polar ice cap is but a drop in the Ocean.
To the chap who doesn't like the dirty black poisonous stuff, nothing we have done since mankind has been able to pollute has come anywhere close to Krakatoa in the 1800s. As another said above we are but a 'pimple', how right you are!

[extreme P]

Turns out NASA had some bad numbers that have been accepted as gospel truth.

Mon, August 13, 2007

Spaced out view of controversy

By EZRA LEVANT

Besides sending up rickety 1970s-era space shuttles and doing damage control for drunk astronauts, NASA's focus these days is promoting global warming hype.

It's smart politics -- a media-savvy attempt by a bureaucratic dinosaur to stay fashionable.

But NASA made an inconvenient admission last week: It has been publishing inaccurate data about the Earth's temperature. The world is not as hot as NASA has been saying it is.

Until last week, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies claimed that 1998 was the hottest year on record in the U.S.

Goddard's director, James Hansen, had become a media darling for his global warming polemics, especially after he announced his support for 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and accused the Bush White House of censoring his pro-Kyoto views.

The fact Hansen remains in his position at NASA, speaks and publishes freely, and a Google search turns up 350,000 mentions of him didn't seem to dampen media enthusiasm for his claim he was being silenced.

Hansen is a more boring version of Al Gore. And like Gore, Hansen says the world has never been hotter, and that doomsday is just around the corner. A visit to the Institute's website shows a partisan, political vocabulary has replaced true science.

Seven of ten of Goddard's latest news releases are about global warming -- odd for a space institute.

But then a funny thing happened. NASA admitted it got its numbers wrong. Last week, they quietly revised their rankings of the hottest years in American history. The hottest year wasn't 1998, as Hansen had said. It was 1934.

Four of the hottest years on record are now in the 1930s. Only three are from the last ten years. And 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2004 were revised downward so much, they're now cooler than the year 1900.

It's tough to make a case modern industry is the cause of global warming when it was hotter 75 years ago. The old press releases haven't been taken down, and no new press release has been issued.

The only way to find out that the Earth has officially become cooler would be to find an obscure link on NASA's website, where the year-by-year data is found.

Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician, discovered NASA's error, and publicized their admission on his website, www.climateaudit.org.

Pro-Kyoto hackers quickly shut his site down.

The reason NASA's error persisted so long is Hansen doesn't disclose all of his methodologies and data to the public -- odd, for a scientist who has complained about censorship. Science is about discovering the truth; a real scientist would welcome others to review and criticize his work.

Not NASA with its political agenda.

That hasn't stopped McIntyre from double-checking other global warming "facts."

A grassroots army of volunteers has been taking photos of official weather stations that gather info about global temperature. They show hundreds of government thermometers located a few feet away from air conditioning vents, barbecues and even by someone's backyard pool -- all in violation of scientific standards.

Go to http://tinyurl.com/3x7olf to see the comic way official "climate science" is being conducted.

Real scientists would rejoice at being corrected.

Honest activists would rejoice that doomsday has been called off.

But Hansen and his ilk long ago stopped being real scientists, and Gore and company are too emotionally invested in their new eco-religion to call off the apocalypse because of something as trivial as the facts.

[Re-Heat]

Try putting a glass bottle full of water in your freezer, the ice expands and the bottle breaks.
Shame on you - it expands only when it first freezes, then contracts as it is cooled further.

Please don't talk tosh - it only gets the environmentalists something to bite into. Nearly all of Antarctica is covered by an ice sheet that is, on average, at least 1.6 kilometres thick. Antarctica contains 90% of the world's ice and more than 70% of its fresh water. If all the land-ice covering Antarctica were to melt — around 30 million cubic kilometres of ice — the seas would rise by over 60 metres.:hmm:

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

Actually, the water starts expanding from +4 deg C to +0 deg C with a rapid further expansion on phase change to ice. That's partly why lakes, rivers etc freeze from the top down. The effect creates an inversion that kills normal convection.

[taufupok]

At a local level in the vicinity of an airport, planes certainly contribute pollutants and greenhouse gases. In the upper atmosphere the NO2 and CO2 emmisions certainly do some damage; however these are offset by the effects of scattering and deflection of solar radiation by the accumulation of contrails. No one has done a definitive study of the total pros and cons of the effects of airplane emissions in the upper atmosphere. The sun's cyclical behaviour in its varying magnetic convulsions and solar wind effects are probably the major cause of the rise in earth's temperature. The man make carbon emissions are mainly localised and mother earth can easily take care of it herself with her own convulsions like hurricanes and quakes!

[On-MarkBob]

Maybe you should look at this:-

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html

Noting the table regarding the 'Grounded Ice' This is what people think is on the 'dry Land'. it's not. The majority is still over the ocean and 'Grounded' below sea level, it is just this sort of thing that gets totally misinterpereted

Further to all this, if all the ice were to melt, the rise in temerature of the world would be so colossal, the temperature at the equator would be enough to boil the sea! Maybe it's time to buy some land on the coast of Antarctica, keep it for the next 80,000,000 years which is about how long it's going to take to melt all the ice, then build an hotel!!!