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Air Travel and Global Warming

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DWill

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Air Travel and Global Warming

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I'd heard a long time ago that air travel was one of the most significant factors in large ecological footprints. Sometimes people who see themselves as pretty "green" are surprised when they calculate their footprints and find them to be several times larger than the world average. Air travel is carbon-intensive and often makes a big difference. Ecological footprint is not quite the same as individual carbon use; it's a more comprehensive and, I think, more valuable, measure than simple carbon consumption. The link below gives information about the carbon-intensifying effect of contrails from jets that I found interesting.
http://phys.org/news/2011-03-airplane-c ... sions.html

There are a number of lifestyle changes that we'd need to make if we wanted to be credible advocates for carbon reduction. They're all very hard to achieve because we want to have the lives we see as good, which isn't bad....except that it can be. Protesters recently gathered in DC to demonstrate against the proposed XL Pipeline, which would carry Canadian tar sands oil to the Gulf refineries. I admire these people if they have made changes in their own lifestyles that reduce their carbon load. If they haven't, I'm afraid I have to see them as a bit hypocritical. We all expect to have energy available for anything we want to do. This demands an increasing supply, which will often have side effects we don't find pretty. But we can't with any consistency bemoan the ugliness or possible environmental hazards while doing nothing on our own to decrease demand.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Air Travel and Global Warming

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The mantra of "decrease demand" is the biggest error regarding fixing the climate. Individual action to use less energy is utterly irrelevant to climate change. Focus on personal footprint is a harmful distraction from the real global policy issues. There is nothing virtuous about refusing to catch planes, or going to live in a cave. Your individual decisions about personal energy use will make no difference to whether the planet cooks or not.

The only thing that matters for climate stability is the amount of CO2 equivalent in the atmosphere. Emissions are adding carbon, but many natural processes are removing carbon. Augmenting this removal side of the equation is where we can actually change things on a relevant scale. If we can find ways to remove carbon from the air, even while using more energy, then we can stabilise the climate. The key question is putting resources into research and development of new technology to profitably mine carbon from the air. This is why large scale ocean based algae production for food, fuel, fertilizer and fabric is such a central problem. Everything else is a pointless sideshow.
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Re: Air Travel and Global Warming

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I think trying to reduce our eco footprints is ultimately a worthwhile and even noble goal. We seem far too mobile for our own good. My wife just told me where everyone in her practice is going for spring break, almost all flying to a warm climate. We think nothing of hopping in the car and driving an hour to get a bit of lunch somewhere. We all have appliances that are on all the time, and our TVs and computers are in sleep mode when we don't use them.

The switch to low flush toilets and CFL lightbulbs was ultimately a top-down effort to decrease our energy usage, possibly because the infrastructure wasn't able to keep up with our increasing demand. It will take a new mentality for individuals to want to reduce our eco footprint to do any good. Unfortunately, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. We seem to be becoming an increasingly consumer-oriented and wasteful society.

I remember when we were hit by 9/11, President Bush said something along the lines that we should continue to shop. When he made the decision to invade Iraq, he was also working hard to decrease taxes which flew in the face of fiscal reality. We should carry on, business as usual, and let the government handle everything (which includes borrowing more money to pay for our war efforts)?

During World War II, people at home were asked to make sacrifices for the good of our country, and it drew us together. This was top-down as well, but I get a sense that people were willing to make these sacrifices. People were asked to invest in war bonds. By 1943, U.S. residents "needed government issued ration coupons to purchase typewriters, coffee, sugar, gasoline, bicycles, clothing, fuel oil, silk, nylon, stoves, shoes, meat, cheese, butter, lard, margarine, canned foods, dried fruits, jam, and many other items. Some items—like new automobiles and appliances were no longer made."

(Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta ... #Rationing)

Maybe we'll continue to be rescued by technological fixes, or maybe we'll hit a wall at some point. Malthus may still be proved to be correct in everything except his time frame. But to make no changes in our exorbitant lifestyles seems driven by hubris and arrogance.

Also, if the government pursues solutions without participation or sacrifice from the people, won't it ultimately lead to complacency and apathy and entitlement?
-Geo
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Re: Air Travel and Global Warming

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This made the rounds on Facebook recently. It shows changing attitudes about "going green" show a certain ignorance about how wasteful we have become.

GOING GREEN

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.
The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.” The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”

She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn’t do the green thing back then.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint. But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smartass young person.
-Geo
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DWill

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Re: Air Travel and Global Warming

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I become flabbergasted by viewpoints like Robert's. Well, actually that's not quite true, because I've never heard a viewpoint like Robert's. We can all live in la-la land of superabundant, probably free, harmless, and environment-loving energy. We can do this right now, if only our policies would change. I need a description better than pie in the sky for that.
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Re: Air Travel and Global Warming

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DWill wrote:I become flabbergasted by viewpoints like Robert's. Well, actually that's not quite true, because I've never heard a viewpoint like Robert's. We can all live in la-la land of superabundant, probably free, harmless, and environment-loving energy. We can do this right now, if only our policies would change. I need a description better than pie in the sky for that.
The world economy needs a wrenching transformation from fossil fuels to renewable sources. It is not about la-la land, or cutting down on farting. It is about recognising that vested interests are stymying research into a range of high potential new technologies, of which large scale ocean based algae biofuel is the most promising.

What is really la-la land is the dream that reducing emissions will make any difference for global climate stability other than at the margin. Here is an excellent paper on Prospects for an Emergency Drawdown of CO2 by Professor William H. Calvin that explains why the emission reduction myth is a waste of time and a wrong focus if we are serious about reversing global warming.

Key points from Prof Calvin's paper:
William Calvin wrote: emissions reduction ... has become a largely ineffective course of action with poor prospects... Most of the growth in emissions now comes from the developing countries burning their own fossil fuels to modernize with electricity and personal vehicles. Emissions growth is likely out of control, though capable of being countered by removals elsewhere.
...drastic emissions reduction worldwide would only buy the US nine extra years. However useful it would have been in the 20th century, emissions reduction has now become a failed strategy, though still useful as a booster for a more effective intervention.

We must now resort to a form of geoengineer­ing that will not cause more trouble than it cures, one that addresses ocean acidification as well as overheating and its knock-on effects. Putting current and past CO2 emissions back into secure storage would reduce the global overheating, relieve deluge and drought, reverse ocean acidification, reverse the thermal expansion portion of sea level rise, and reduce the chance of more abrupt climate shifts.

Existing ideas for removing the excess CO2 from the air appear inadequate: too little, too late. They do not meet the test of being sufficiently big, quick, and secure. There is, however, an idealized approach to ocean fertilization that appears to pass this triple test. It mimics natural up- and down-welling processes using push-pull ocean pumps powered by the wind. One pump pulls sunken nutrients back up to fertilize the ocean surface—but then another pump immediately pushes the new plankton production down to the slow-moving depths before it can revert to CO2.
...
The atmospheric CO2 is currently above 390 parts per million and the excess CO2 growth has been exponential. Excess CO2 is that above 280 ppm in the air, the pre-industrial (1750) value and also the old maximum concentration for the last several million years of ice age fluctuations between 200 and 280 ppm.

Is a 350 ppm reduction target, allowing a 70 ppm anthropogenic excess, low enough? We hit 350 ppm in 1988, well after the sudden circulation shift in 1976, the decade-long failure of Greenland Sea flushing that began in 1978, and the sustained doubling (compared to the 1950-1981 average) of world drought acreage that suddenly began in 1982.

Clearly, 350 ppm is not low enough to avoid sudden climate jumps, so for simplicity I have used 280 ppm as my target: essentially, cleaning up all excess CO2. But how quickly must we do it? That depends not on 2°C overheating estimates but on an evaluation of the danger zone we are already in.
...
big trouble could arrive in the course of only 1-2 years, with no warning. So the climate is already unstable. (“Stabilizing” emissions is not to be confused with climate stability; it still leaves us overheated and in the danger zone for climate jumps. Nor does “stabilized” imply safe.) While quicker would be better, I will take twenty years as the target for completing the excess CO2 cleanup in order to estimate the drawdown rate needed.

...we need to take back 600 GtC within 20 yr at an average rate of 30 GtC/yr in order to clean up... we must find ways of capturing 30 GtC/yr with traditional carbon-cycle biology, where CO2 is captured by photosynthesis and the carbon incorporated into an organic carbon molecule such as sugar. Then, to take this captured carbon out of circulation, it must be buried to keep decomposing methane and CO2 from reaching the atmosphere.

One proposal is to bundle up crop residue and sink the weighted bales to the ocean floor. They will decompose there but it will take a thousand years before this CO2 can be carried back up to the ocean surface and vent into the air. Such a project, even when done on a global scale, will yield only a few percent of 30 GtC/yr. Burying raw sewage is no better.

...land-based photo­synthesis, competing for space and water with human uses, cannot do the job in time. It would need to be far more efficient than traditional plant growth. At best, augmented crops on land would be an order of magnitude short of what we need for either countering or cleanup.

Because of the threat from abrupt climate leaps, the cleanup must be big, quick, and secure. ...we must look to the oceans for the new photosynthesis and for the long-term storage of the CO2 thus captured.

Algal blooms are increases in biological productivity when the ocean surface is provided with fertilizer containing missing nutrients...A sustained bloom of algae can be fertilized by pumping up seawater from the depths... To settle out another 30 GtC/yr, we would need about four times the current ocean primary productivity. ... Our 41% CO2 excess is already too large to draw down in 20 yr via primary productivity increases in the ocean per se. However, our escape route is not yet closed off. There is at least one plausible prospect for an emergency draw down for 600 GtC in 20 yr. It seeks to mimic the natural ocean processes of upwelling and downwelling.
This analysis vindicates my research presented at http://rtulip.net/ocean_based_algae_pro ... nal_patent where I proposed a wave powered deep sea pump four years ago.

I am well aware that these ideas are the subject of mockery from the doomsayers who see no way out of our cooking planet, and the idiot denialists who ignore evidence. But there is a way out, harnessing natural ocean energy. It is simply that the ideas have not been discussed or tried.
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DWill

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Re: Air Travel and Global Warming

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Robert, I'm going to admit right now that I haven't read the article yet. Just as you think that certain principles have to be non-negotiable, I think that all this talk about saving the planet is a mockery unless the very basic element of human impact is addressed. To say, as I think you are, that the impact from 40 or 50 billion people with high living standards doesn't have to matter, is no less a delusion than the denialism you attack. To maintain that renewable fuels, whether they be solar, wind, geothermal, or algal, will not only be able to replace fossil fuels, but will remove the impediment of scarcity, is not credible. Your solution is really nothing other than the promise of another technical panacea.

In the meantime, while your utopia is arriving, I suppose we don't have to be concerned with things such as jet contrails. This gives everyone an allowance or indulgence to hit the gas pedal, because no individual restraint will mean anything, anyway.

Algae biofuel, which you know a great deal about, is obviously the leading newer renewable candidate. It faces obstacles to wide commercial production. If these can be worked out, algae biofuel could be a major energy source sometime in this century.
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