Carbon Emissions for Light Aircraft?

[englishal]

Hey Englishal, you find the good old black stuff - how long until it runs out and we all have to go gliding instead??

See, another myth that everyone believes.

The reserves in certain places could possibly be twice the North Sea
Deep water drilling means they can get more out....Better imaging means they find more fields



I am not biased, I read the facts...in scientific papers. Here's one for you...Some reckon that the classic "hockey stick graph" that all this doom and gloom is based upon can be changed dramatically by changing the input variables slightly. A lot of the input is based upon sketchy evidence - ice core samples for example.

Ice core samples show the climate WAS warmer in the past, and there was more CO2, but the important thing is that if you take the age of the ice core samples go back, it is miniscule compared to the age of the earth. It is like me putting my hand out of the window for 11 seconds and predicticting that tomorrow it will rain. Also one BIG BIG factor - which came first, the heat or the CO2? This is crucial, some scientists reckon that the CO2 is a result of the heat, NOT the other way around.

Sure the world is getting warmer. But the climate has been in a relatively stable period for thousands of years, so we get worried when the temp rises slightly and blame us.

It is aviation that bears the brunt. These doom and gloom reports fail to take into account new technology in jet engines (for example). It'd be like living in the age of the steam train, and saying that in 100 years we're all going to choke on smoke from them...IN reality steam trains were replaced, and there is a lot of research going on into clean jet engines. In 50 years time, you can bet the average jet is a damn site cleaner than they are now......But of course people choose to ignore this fact.

We are "environmentally friendly" but not because we believe this clap trap, but because we don't like living in pollution (another story). We drive a smart car (well the mrs does, when she is not cycling the 15 mile round trip to work each day) and I ride about 3000 miles a year on my bikes....But I do fly to work

I think politicians should get their own house in order before using GW as an excuse to win votes, get Nobel Prizes and make money...

[Justiciar]

Please list some that are not sponsored by the oil, coal or automobile industries, whose work has been peer reviewed. Without that step, research cannot be described as scientific, by definition.

So if you are funded by those industries your work cannot be worth reading, is that it? But it is OK to be in receipt of much greater sources of funding dedicated to showing that climate change is man made. So the scientists on one side are hopelessly compromised in their professional integrity but those on the other side are not. What a very balanced attitude.

So from what you say all these mathematical models are unnecessary: CO2 traps heat; CO2 has increased, therefore CO2 causes global warming.

The pattern of the current warming is also highly unnatural

The trouble is no one knows very clearly what unnatural warming actually means, since we don't know what the climate has done in the past. We do however know that in relatively recent geological times the earth has warmed and cooled dramatically. Since this has not been explained (though the IPCC tried to wipe out these periods in the infamous "hocky stick" graph, which it turned out would still produce a hockey stick with random data!) how are they now able to confidently say that present observations are due to man and not something completly natural?

In fact, many observations of recent warmig may well be localised due to the location of the data points. Satellite measurements provide no support for a general warming; the temparatures at the poles and on the Greenland ice caps seems to be dropping and the ice levels increasing. Snow in the high alps also seems to be increasing. Whilst sea ice appears to be reducing, we once again do not know if there is such a thing as normal nor what the natural pattern of sea ice growth and retreat is. Alpine glaciers, though retreating, are still bigger than they were in the early medaeval period, when areas now unihabitable were settled and farmed.

If it is all down to man, those that say so haven't proved it to be the case.

[Contacttower]

But, the other 4200 years of warming "could ... have been caused by CO2. The operative word here is could (not might or did, but could). The article is full of this: take a fact, speculate about the cause and then advance the speculative cause as an established fact . Why could the other 4200 years not have been caused by the same factors which caused the first 800 years?

Well the Metoffice seem quite convinced that despite that in the past temperatures drove CO2 this has now reversed:

Over the several hundred thousand years covered by the ice core record, the temperature changes were primarily driven by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Over this period, changes in temperature did drive changes in carbon dioxide (CO2). Concentrations of CO2 are now much higher and increasing much faster than at any time in at least the last 600,000 years. This should be a warning that what is happening now is very different to what happened in the past.

In fact, over the last 100 years CO2 concentrations have increased by 30% due mainly to human-induced emissions from fossil fuels. Because CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the increased concentrations have contributed to the recent warming and probably most of the warming over the last 50 years.

The bottom line is that temperature and CO2 concentrations are linked. In recent ice ages, natural changes in the climate (due to orbit changes for example) led to cooling of the climate system. This caused a fall in CO2 concentrations which weakened the greenhouse effect and amplified the cooling. Now the link between temperature and CO2 is working in the opposite direction. Human-induced increases in CO2 is enhancing the greenhouse effect and amplifying the recent warming.

And we all trust them don't we...

[soay]

Originally Posted by justicair

Originally Posted by "soay

Please list some that are not sponsored by the oil, coal or automobile industries, whose work has been peer reviewed. Without that step, research cannot be described as scientific, by definition.

So if you are funded by those industries your work cannot be worth reading, is that it?

I take it from this that the "increasing body of evidence that suggests that CO2 follows on from climatic warming and is not the cause of it" all comes from sources sponsored by those industries. Their reports may well be worth reading, but they are not scientific evidence unless they have been peer reviewed, and they have to be read in the context of the vested interests they represent.

[Contacttower]

but they are not scientific evidence unless they have been peer reviewed, and they have to be read in the context of the vested interests they represent.

But the hype surrounding climate change has made the concept of 'peer review' a bit of a nonsense recently. I agree that there is a lot of evidence to suggest that global warming exists and I support all (sensible) efforts to reduce CO2, but at the same time the big increase in 'weight' which the climate change theory has had in the last 5 years or so is very much down to the media and government action, not to an increase in scientific evidence.

[deice]

Indeed smart to drive a Smart. I reckon you'll get the Think when they get their act together!
The concept of GW is very controversial obviously and compounded by the fact that we won't really know who's right until it's too late (perhaps). You'll go on debating who's right and end up nowhere, that's conviction for you. But, if indeed we are the cause, and we elect to ignore doing anything about it, then we'll be kicking ourselves later, or, our kids will (in my case 5 of them ). The other option is to take these signals as a warning that all is not well with our only home, and when combined with the development of our community, increasing population, ever increasing demand for energy, food, material goods etc. look at ways to reduce the overall waste contribution per person, including emissions.

There are so many small things happening in our world that make no sense whatsoever, from a waste point of view. An example is importing meat from Brazil to Sweden. It's not Yak, it's the same frikkin cow we got trodding our own turf. What the heck is going on? Or, in the company I presently work at, we produce brochures in China, ship them to Sweden and redistribute to the US and EU. My brain is on fire over here - what the heck is going on!? There are printers in the US, no?
If we continue to ship meaningless junk back and forth and at the same time need to reduce "GW", which is accomplished by imposing taxes, the little people, us, won't be able to afford visiting India 10 years from now, because we're shipping paper and meat all over the place. We ought to save our "travel points" for humans rather than glossy brochures nobody ever reads in the first place, and meat that equals the stuff from the farm next door.
And, in my little world, I don't mind consuming less to accomplish the same task - it's a bit of a sport. In fact, I'm trading my 7-person car for one that consumes HALF while delivering more. The yankee gas guzzler crap (although comfy) is going out the door in favor of european high tech machinery!
And, each time I take a student up in the club's Piper I can't help but wish it was the flight school's DA40, or any Rotax powered 2-seater.

I don't need a report to do that, it only takes a mindset.

[Contacttower]

If we continue to ship meaningless junk back and forth and at the same time need to reduce "GW", which is accomplished by imposing taxes, the little people, us, won't be able to afford visiting India 10 years from now, because we're shipping paper and meat all over the place. We ought to save our "travel points" for humans rather than glossy brochures nobody ever reads in the first place, and meat that equals the stuff from the farm next door.

I agree that the way the world economy has grown up does seem rather strange and wasteful...but I somehow think any human effort to control it on a worldwide scale would end in disaster. If we are ever going to kill CO2 emissions it is going to have to be technology, not human intervention in the economy.

[englishal]

Global warming is not in doubt....

What is in doubt is whether it is man made or not and whether we can actually do anything about it.

650 million years ago 95% of all life on earther was killed off by GW. It was caused by massive, continent wide volcanic erruptions lasting a million years. I somehow don't think EasyJet can compete with that.

The geologic time scale is huge. So huge that ice core samples going back a few 10's of thousands of years are meaningless. So meaningless in fact that if you were to show the earths age on a clock, and the earth came into being at 00:00 the time now is about 12:00. The samples they use to predict all this doom and gloom date back less than a second on this clock face. The GW event I was talking about above happened about 10 minutes ago on our clock face - oh and it is doubtful mankind will last another second because we'll nuke ourselves long before that. Until we harnes the power of fusion and EVERYONE is allowed cheap, clean power then we are doomed anyway, not because of GW but because of power struggles and wars over energy (oil etc...).

If people really believe in man made GW then they should do something about it. Carbon Offsetting is a scam to make the rich feel good. If people seriously believe that we are causing then then there is only one course of action for them: Stop driving the car, stop flying straight away, and use home made renewable energy - wind turbines, solar power etc....

The trouble is people don't believe in it that strongly. But it is a great excuse for governments to raise revenue to prop up other areas which need a bit more cash.

If governments really believe in GW then there is only one course of action they can take. Get rid of all fossil fuel burning power stations and replace them with nuclear power plants. They must also give all third world countries access to nuclear technology to make it happen....Is this going to happen...? No chance.

But it is easy to raise taxes and make us all "feel good".....

[soay]

Originally Posted by englishal

Global warming is not in doubt....
What is in doubt is whether it is man made or not and whether we can actually do anything about it.

Thousands of scientists from around the world whose work has been brought together by the IPCC, and reduced to its lowest common denominator by political pressure from the US and Saudi Arabia (do you spot a common factor there?), have concluded that there is 90% certainty that we are the cause of global warming. On what basis do you question that conclusion?

[Justiciar]

have concluded that there is 90% certainty that we are the cause of global warming. On what basis do you question that conclusion?

Well .... do we trust the science. If in 2001 I had questioned the conclusions of the IPCC third report you would have criticised my scepticism. Now, in the fourth report, we have quite significant reductions in the predictions for temperature rise and sea level rises. In the third report, the rate of natural change was flagged as an uncertainty in the calculations (quite a large one, I would have thought). Now, this is down played. What will the 5th report tell us in seven or 8 years time? Further reductions in the predicted rise perhaps?

The world has heated and cooled many times without human intervention; the last time it was warmer than it is today was about 900 years ago. Then the temperature dropped quite quickly, forcing out communities in Greenland and the high Alps. Now the climate may be warming again. Yet for some reason this time it is all man's fault.

If you want to see how the rest of the world really views global warming then go to the US or Asia. They all burn cheap hydrocarbons like they were going out of fashion! All our self imposed and crippling restraint will be the equivalent of bailing the Titanic with a thimble: the impact will be so infinitesimal that we would be better engaged in dealing with the inevitable consequences (if that is what they are) than in trying to achieve the impossible.

[englishal]

On the basis that several thousand "scientists" (I use the term loosely - what is a scientist?), is a drop in the ocean of the Scientist pool. I bet, there are an equal number who dispute MMGW....(The mrs has had papers published and reviewed - mainly astronomy)

However:
-They are called "doubters"
-They are not receiving government funding

You stated earlier that the oil company scientists are biased. I put it to you that they are no more biased than the ones working for the IPCC...I saw Gore and some Indian "scientist" being interviewed the other day on Norwegial telly. Gore was being all dramatic, and the "scientist" was being a bit more cagey when asked direct questions.

But it is all words anyway. I can't see the average American giving up his 5.7L HEMI V8 anytime soon? And I can't see the majority of people on Pprune giving up flying on environmental ground. And if this MMGW is to be believed, then to save or children we need to act now, and drastically. Ban all flights, ban people from living more than 10 miles from work, ban farming etc......

I had this argument with one of my mates who has also turned "green" after having kids. He was bitching and moaning about cheap flights (he never takes any because he is not allowed). Then I pointed out that he races go-karts and other stuff. Ah but it is such small stuff that it makes no difference was his response - he races every weekend, and often drives his big long wheelbase transit to get ther. I say that IF you believe in MMGW then YOU should change your life dramatically - get rid of the car, get off the train, walk, cycle, don't eat farmed meat etc.....But of course no one does it because they soon realise that they can't.

This crusade to heavily tax flights (which is my MAIN gripe), will do NOTHING to stop MMGW (if it exists) and people need to realise this. Even Biofuels don't work - to grow biofuels, they cut down the rain forests!

I'd happily accept a 50% tax on my North Sea heating gas, if, in return the government installed a free solar hot water heating system and a wind generator. But they won't........that is because they spend the "environmental" taxes proping up a failing NHS etc.....

Anyway, it is my view and you won't change it any more than I can change your view . I must go now, as I'm about to board my plane and fly to the UK

[deice]

Why is it that we always must take such drastic measures?
"We'll all be dead anyway so we might as well keep on doing what we're doing" is such a mature stand point. It falls in line with the "If you don't stop everything you might as well shut up about it" attitude.

No, we want to fly, we want to race go-karts and ride bikes and all the rest, but do we have to sacrifice the environment to do it? Stick a catalytic converter on the kart, get a truck that uses less and purchase direct from the farm while you're at it. What's so difficult about it?

[soay]

Originally Posted by englishal

You stated earlier that the oil company scientists are biased. I put it to you that they are no more biased than the ones working for the IPCC.

In what way does undertaking research which concludes that there is a 90% probability that humans are causing global warming further the ends of these organisations?

• NASA
• The Met Office
• Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Now, in what way does funding research that comes to the opposite conclusion benefit these organisations?

• Exxon
• Shell
• General Motors

Those in the latter list are doing exactly what the tobacco companies did: use the 10% uncertainty as implying that the cause and effect connection was still in doubt.

This problem can only be solved at a political level, and that will only happen when the politicians don't think they will scare away votes by telling it like it is. The longer those with vested interests can spread FUD, the later that is likely to be, by which time even more drastic action will have to be taken. That's why I keep banging on about peer reviewed scientific research.

I don't want to have to give up my hobby because we didn't start to make serious reductions in fossil fuel use early enough. Given the political will, there's a lot that can be done without seriously affecting our lifestyle. The politicians know that, because they commissioned the Stern Report, which spelled it out.