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Perhaps aviation biggest challenge....

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Perhaps aviation biggest challenge....

Old 24th May 2019, 10:26
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Aviation's biggest challenge is it's an easy target, having embraced a position of guilt and vain attempts to buy lenience by way of opaque carbon off-set plans.

What this industry really needs, is for someone to go on the offensive and direct the public attention towards far larger polluter in the transport industry, and here I'm thinking of the global fleet of cargo carrying vessels burning heavy bunker oil. The container fleet of the largest such carrier, Maersk Line, emits more pollution than the total of all private cars in the world. Try to let that sink in for a minute, and realise that's also more than the combined emissions of the global airline industry.

Without being an engineer, let alone of the naval persuasion, it does not seem beyond the realm of possibility, that large cargo carrying vessels ditch their diesels in favour of electric propulsion driven by a bank of batteries in the bottom of the vessels, charged by natural gas driven lean turbines and a large solar array fitted on the top deck.
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Old 24th May 2019, 10:27
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Originally Posted by paul_v1
The one little burp by Mt. Etna has already put more than 10,000 times the co2 into the atmosphere than mankind has in our ENTIRE time on earth but dont worry a scam is in the works to tax you your minuscule footprint.

Research :
https://bit.ly/30JtaIu

Video with some Facts:
https://bit.ly/2EqCN4X
No it hasn't.

When evaluating such claims, Snopes is your friend. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vo...bon-emissions/

Last edited by msjh; 24th May 2019 at 10:39.
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Old 24th May 2019, 10:42
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Originally Posted by msjh
No it hasn't.

When evaluating such claims, Snopes is your friend. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vo...bon-emissions/
It's frightening how climate change deniers aways post videos from crazy Youtube channels with a few hundred views that look like they were filmed in the host's bedroom, like the video link posted by the denier above. I half expected more videos on that channel to tell us that vaccines are dangerous, chemtrails are real and the moon landing was a hoax.

It's also baffling how deniers blatantly ignore actual scientific bodies which debunk the "Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans" lie like the actual experts on volcanoes, the US Geological Survey
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Old 24th May 2019, 11:15
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Just some science for those that are interested.
The Earth is currently in an ice-age and we are in the Holocene interglacial (warm ) period in that ice age. You will note from the diagram below that over geologic timescales there is no causal relationship between levels of CO2 and the global temperatures. Indeed on all timescales atmospheric CO2 levels lag temperature changes, indicating that when the seas are warmer they out-gas CO2 and when it is colder more CO2 dissolves in the oceans. You should also note that there is a level of 'homeostasis' in geologic time showing that temperatures tend to stop their rise and not 'run away'.. This is almost certainly due to the hydrologic cycle.

You should also note that the Holocene was much warmer 10,000 years ago than it is now at the Holocene Climatic Optimum, it was also warmer at the Minoan Climate optimum, 1400 years or so later at the Roman Optimum and 1400 years or so later at the Medieval Warm Period. Despite the recent warming out of the Litttle Ice Age we are at the cold end of the Holocene Interglacial




CO2 vs Temperatures over geologic timescales

The amount of energy in the tropical cyclones (including hurricanes) can be measured precisely these days here is a graphic from Ryan Maue. As the text says - despite the mainstream media claims the number and strength of tropical cyclones is not increasing.

Accumulated Cyclone Energy last few decades

Finally many of the graphs shown have their Y-axis hugely distorted so changes of hundredths of a degree C seem huge. This is spurious accuracy as the comparator periods a hundred years ago did not have the sensors we have today. There were almost no sensors in the Southern Indian Ocean or in the South Pacific and continents such as Africa had very few yet the figures showing changes from past guessed temperatures are to hundredths of a degree. The graphics are themselves misleading by vastly increasing the scale of the Y axis making hundredth of degree changes look extreme. So the graphic below takes the NASA GISS dataset and displays the temperatures as if they were shown on a row of red alcohol thermometers. Does it seem that there are changes to panic about?


Show temperatures on red alcohol thermometers

For the technical averaging an intensive variable like atmospheric temperature is a nonsense. You can average the figures of course and do it to as many places of decimals as you wish in the same way you can average the phone numbers in the London Phone book to several places of decimals but an average phone number is equally meaningless.

The correct metric for assessing the 'retention of heat energy' in the atmosphere is Kilojoules per Kilogram as the enthalpy of the atmosphere varies dependent on relative humidity. You should ask why Climate 'scientists' are using the incorrect measure for atmospheric energy content. The answer is similar to why they expand the Y-Axis on their graphs.




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Old 24th May 2019, 11:33
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Originally Posted by Ian W
Just some science for those that are interested.

here is a graphic from Ryan Maue.
Unfortunately your "scientist" is a denier who doesn't work for an actual reputable scientific organisation, but actually works for a conservative political lobby group funded by the Koch brothers, well known climate change deniers. He's also been caught faking data in an attempt to disprove climate change. If you're going to pass quackery off as science you're going to have to do better than that...

https://www.iflscience.com/environme...ng-false-data/
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Old 24th May 2019, 11:42
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Originally Posted by dr dre
Unfortunately your "scientist" is a denier who doesn't work for an actual reputable scientific organisation, but actually works for a conservative political lobby group funded by the Koch brothers, well known climate change deniers. He's also been caught faking data in an attempt to disprove climate change. If you're going to pass quackery off as science you're going to have to do better than that...

https://www.iflscience.com/environme...ng-false-data/
But his figures are correct.
Just do a hurricane count even including the fish storms that in the past wouldn't be seen or reported as they were in mid-ocean.

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Old 24th May 2019, 11:52
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Originally Posted by Ian W
But his figures are correct.
Are they? Have they been peer reviewed by multiple reputable scientific organisations?

Here's actual peer reviewed and referenced science on the subject:

Hurricanes and Global Warming – Is There a Connection?
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Old 24th May 2019, 11:59
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Originally Posted by dr dre
Are they? Have they been peer reviewed by multiple reputable scientific organisations?

Here's actual peer reviewed and referenced science on the subject:

Hurricanes and Global Warming – Is There a Connection?
You obviously have no understanding of 'peer'/pal review
and yes they are reducing
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Old 24th May 2019, 12:12
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Originally Posted by Ian W
The graphics are themselves misleading by vastly increasing the scale of the Y axis making hundredth of degree changes look extreme.
Given that a temperature rise of only a handful of degrees is generally considered to be disastrous, that seems an eminently sensible thing to do.

I suppose we should be grateful that climate change deniers don't plot temperatures on a Kelvin scale so that we can barely detect any variances at all.

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Old 24th May 2019, 12:24
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It is misleading to me the way any CO2 graphic displayed in the media only ever goes back far enough to make the current level of around 430 look disastrous compared to the oscillations around the 200 mark for the last 800,000years or so.
It is much more informative if the graph goes back enough to see that CO2 levels have been significantly higher than they are today in the earths history. There is clearly a desire to create alarm rather than present the facts as they are, and that in turn creates mistrust.
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Old 24th May 2019, 12:39
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Originally Posted by 73qanda
It is misleading to me the way any CO2 graphic displayed in the media only ever goes back far enough to make the current level of around 430 look disastrous compared to the oscillations around the 200 mark for the last 800,000years or so.
It is much more informative if the graph goes back enough to see that CO2 levels have been significantly higher than they are today in the earths history. There is clearly a desire to create alarm rather than present the facts as they are, and that in turn creates mistrust.
I concur. But would add that the temperatures and ecological environment in previous times were very different from current ones. Neither we nor our foodstuffs would have flourished in some previous epochs. Maybe the emphasis on the current period is merited.
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Old 24th May 2019, 12:49
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Originally Posted by 73qanda
It is misleading to me the way any CO2 graphic displayed in the media only ever goes back far enough to make the current level of around 430 look disastrous compared to the oscillations around the 200 mark for the last 800,000years or so.
It is much more informative if the graph goes back enough to see that CO2 levels have been significantly higher than they are today in the earths history. There is clearly a desire to create alarm rather than present the facts as they are, and that in turn creates mistrust.
I think you will find that periods with significantly higher or lower CO2 levels have featured vastly different flora and fauna. The changes from one to the other are usually associated with mass extinction of species. Considering a timeframe longer than the history of homo sapiens does not really seem outrageous to me.
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Old 24th May 2019, 12:57
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Originally Posted by 73qanda
It is misleading to me the way any CO2 graphic displayed in the media only ever goes back far enough to make the current level of around 430 look disastrous compared to the oscillations around the 200 mark for the last 800,000years or so.
It is much more informative if the graph goes back enough to see that CO2 levels have been significantly higher than they are today in the earths history. There is clearly a desire to create alarm rather than present the facts as they are, and that in turn creates mistrust.
Perhaps a graphic of climate against time, marking out those 'sweet spots' when we could thrive? Perhaps then it would better show that to deliberately choose (as we now do) to act in a way which will move us out of one of those rare 'sweet spots' is not a good idea.
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Old 24th May 2019, 13:06
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Maybe it is time to hand over the stewardship of the planet to another species? Would they do a better job than us? After all, the dinosaurs probably thought they were top of the food chain until they weren’t. And they had managed to last for 180 odd Million years.
I agree with several of the above posters that talked about the cyclical nature of these events, and can’t help thinking mass extinctions are part of that cycle. I just hope we get our act together and make sure we don’t go the way of the dinosaurs.
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Old 24th May 2019, 13:07
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dr dre, after posting:

It's frightening how climate change deniers aways post videos from crazy Youtube channels with a few hundred views that look like they were filmed in the host's bedroom
,

hopefully you would find the following link less frigtening. And if watching the whole clip is not too unbearable for you, feel free to explain any denigration you may feel like making of this great man and his qualifications and I can come up with many more equally factual clips with extremely well qualified people speaking.

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Old 24th May 2019, 13:11
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I think you will find that periods with significantly higher or lower CO2 levels have featured vastly different flora and fauna.
I imagine you’re right. I know that when they grow my tomatoes they bump the CO2 levels up to around 1000 to get a good crop.
The changes from one to the other are usually associated with mass extinction of species.
That would be big news. Do we have some examples?
Neither we nor our foodstuffs would have flourished in some previous epochs.
Can you explain what would have prevented us flourishing ? The cold or the heat? The CO2 ?
I still think we should present the facts and not try to display data to tie in with a specific line of thinking.
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Old 24th May 2019, 13:48
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Originally Posted by Ian W
But his figures are correct.
Just do a hurricane count even including the fish storms that in the past wouldn't be seen or reported as they were in mid-ocean.
Some reports written in simple English with supporting data here on Pacific storms and Atlantic storms published in Wikipedia (and hence cross-referenced to scientific journals). The conclusion is inescapable: storms are increasing markedly in frequency and destructiveness.
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Old 24th May 2019, 14:07
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The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead.
From When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans? which is annotated for source material

Whilst there were impacts on the earth, it was the change of climate that the impacts produced that caused the extinctions.

Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat.
Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat
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Old 24th May 2019, 14:31
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Originally Posted by SMT Member
Without being an engineer, let alone of the naval persuasion, it does not seem beyond the realm of possibility, that large cargo carrying vessels ditch their diesels in favour of electric propulsion driven by a bank of batteries in the bottom of the vessels, charged by natural gas driven lean turbines and a large solar array fitted on the top deck.
When I see folks hereabouts proudly stating that they are not an engineer, and then confidently explaining how things are "possible" I tend to pull out my calculator.

A typical large container vessel (say the Maersk EEE vessels) is approx 60m wide x 400m long. Even if every bit of the deck were given up to solar ( = 24,000 m2) and even if the sun were directly overhead, and if very high quality 22% efficiency solar cells were used yielding 0.22kW/m2, then such a vessel would only generate 5.4MW. In contrast the Maersk EEE class uses 60MW of main propulsion to achieve its max speed of 25kts, but at about 18kts which is its optimum designed 'slow steaming speed' it is using approx half that, i.e. 30MW.

So at midday in peak sunshine, such a ship carpeted in solar, would only be able to generate about 1/6 of the power it actually needs. Please pull out a calculator yourself before saying that it can use batteries to make up the difference. First figure out the distance between ports, then the required battery size, then the available ship size, then the batery fraction as a % of the ship volume/mass fraction ........... (it is not so different than the Breuget range equation in a different environment).

Bottom line is: Short sea can reasonably go to battery & electrical systems, fed by shoreside renewable generation. Deep sea for large vessels at 18kts cannot. It is not a given in a fully-renewables world that the relatively meagre amounts of liquid fuels would be preferentially burnt in aircraft. It is not beyond consideration that they might be preferentially burnt in deep sea shipping over those routes that cannot be economically substituted by either local manufacture, or by trans-continental (renewables-fed) freight rail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maersk...container_ship
https://www.sunpowercorp.co.uk/produ...n-solar-panels
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Old 24th May 2019, 14:56
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Originally Posted by 73qanda
That would be big news. Do we have some examples?
You will find mass extinctions events on more or less every boundary between geological periods (these are after all pretty much defined by the type of fossils dominantly found). Often the transition is also marked by drastic changes in the Earth's climate and/or atmosphere. Generally speaking, climate, atmosphere, surface geology and living matter are closely coupled, so disturbing one of these will necessarily lead to changes in the others. Depending on magnitude the system might return to the previous status quo, or settle for an entirely different equilibrium.

The famous two degree target is essentially to be understood as a perturbation that is small enough to be safe. That does not mean that birds will fall out of the sky once we are at three degrees, rather it means we might be converted from pilots to passengers at that point.

Obviously this is not really your or my problem, because neither of us will live long enough, it is only a problem for the generations to come..
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