Greenhouse emissions
 

Just another add-on to the Dupre/Notso debate;

If all us humung beans did was belch out CO2 it wouldn't be so bad, unfortunately we seem to have been clever enough to develop molecules which are thousands of times more potent than CO2 in terms of their greenhouse capability (and jolly stable too, so they hang around for ages'n'ages).

Furthermore, just to make everyone feel even worse, the exhaust from planes is injected into the upper atmos where things work better as greenhouse gases and are no so easily mixed up with the stuff that plants breathe down here at ground level. Ho hum, still I'm more part of the problem than part of the solution, so I don't wish to appear to be holier than anyone else....

I seem to remember reading something shortly after Sep 11th about the impact (or lack of) on the climate attributed to the empty skies over USA, anyone else remember that.... something about the insuylating properties of contrails if my booze addled memory serves...

Thanks for the clarification OAG - my post was quite misleading. It was written with the comment that inspired it in mind, reproduced here:

The 140 tonnes of Jet-A1 contained about 80 tonnes of C, so with 340 tonnes of O2 from the air, we have 420 tonnes of CO2.

In context, my working was correct I think. I take your point about the average ratio of CO2 to fuel being 3.155. Perhaps the appropriate correction to the above statement should be that there is ~120t of C in 140t of fuel, and left the CO2 product alone?

This is all getting quite hair-splitting. I'm off...
O8

No problem Oktas8.

After posting, I realized part of the problem was the earlier posting saying there was only 80 tonnes of carbon in 140 tonnes of fuel.

I quite agree that the actual carbon content is 120 tonnes.

I also agree that this topic is getting a bit stale.