Global warming/Climate Change is so last year! We're all going to freeze by 2030!

Forums › Off topic › Global warming/Climate Change is so last year! We're all going to freeze by 2030!

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#1928439 3-Jan-2018 12:19

Rikkitic:

As above. Anyone who thinks people cannot affect the climate is simply wrong-headed. People affect everything they touch. We have destroyed the ecologies of entire countries, pushed numerous species to extinction, fundamentally altered natural systems. Why wouldn't we also have an effect on the climate?

I can only assume that @Maxlv feels the planet is so large that we can't really make much of a dent in the atmosphere

Sobering reading https://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to-24-million-pounds-per-second/

Also:

There are 1 billion vehicles in the world, spewing out fumes in the time it takes to rack up 10,000km or more per year

There are always between 6000 and 10000 aircraft in the air at any one time, spewing out fumes from the 2 or 4 turboprop or 2 or 4 jet engines

The Earth is big but it isn't that big, and as many greenhouses gases are active for a hundred years, or more, or less, they are added to, not replaced by new emissions

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#1928508 3-Jan-2018 15:15

tdgeek:

There are always between 6000 and 10000 aircraft in the air at any one time, spewing out fumes from the 2 or 4 turboprop or 2 or 4 jet engines

The Earth is big but it isn't that big, and as many greenhouses gases are active for a hundred years, or more, or less, they are added to, not replaced by new emissions

A couple of interesting facts regarding aircraft and weather:

1. In the continental USA, the weather at the weekends is worse than weather during the week, particularly Mondays and Tuesdays. Given that the 7-day week is a purely human contrivance, then any weekly patterns in weather must also be due to human behaviour. I was told, many years ago, that this was due to vapour trails (i.e. clouds) from aircraft. Over the week, the vapour trails accumulate, causing rain, at the weekends. The reduced amount of flying at the weekends means that Mondays and Tuesdays have better weather. There appears to be about a 1-2 day lag between cause and effect.

2. Backing this up are the studies done on weather in the 3 days following 9/11 when all aircraft were grounded in the USA. It is very clear that stopping aircraft from flying had a measurable impact on the weather across the entire USA. The actual effect seemed to vary; various theories said that contrails at night acted as a greenhouse causing warming, whereas contrails during the day caused cooling by reflecting sunlight.

Note the dates of the linked reports -- in 2018 it really isn't news that aviation alone can change climate on a continental scale. If that one aspect of human behaviour can change climate on that scale, surely there's no doubt that the sum total of human activities, of which aviation is only a small part, can change the climate on a global scale.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2179845.stm -- Thursday, 8 August, 2002

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/contrail-effect.html -- 18 Apr, 2004

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/weather/5686288/Weekends-really-are-less-sunny-than-weekdays-weather-analysis-shows.html 29 Jun 2009

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/26/the-weekday-vs-weekend-weather-effect/ 26 Aug 2011

tdgeek

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#1928522 3-Jan-2018 15:54

Nice post Frank

Here is another interesting stat. The fuel usage on an aircraft, see below, is roughly that of a small motorcycle per passenger at best, to say 650cc motorcycle at worst.

So, if someone flew once every few months, its causing fuel burn about the same as if they rode a motorcycle instead. Few hundred km in NZ, couple of thousand to OZ, 10,000 to the US. While you don't fly often, you could use about the same annual motorcycle fuel while flying. Now, we drive our cars a similar distance annually, and most cars will use 3 X the fuel per km than the rarely used aircraft.

As you say, aviation is a real issue, but small in the scheme of things. The vehicle we drive will use 3 times as much fuel per year. Every year. Thats not including trains, buses, trucks. And pollution wise, that's just transport. Then there is coal fired power generation, manufacturing that burns FF

Airlines

A Boeing 787 from Norwegian Air Shuttle

Fuel economy in air transport comes from aircraft fuel efficiency combined with airlines efficiency: seating configuration, passenger load factor and air cargo. For instance, over the transatlantic route, the most active intercontinental market, in 2014 the average fuel consumption was 32 pax-km per L - 3.13 litres per 100 kilometres (75 mpg‑US) per passenger. The most fuel efficient airline was Norwegian Air Shuttle with 40 pax-km/L - 2.5 litres per 100 kilometres (94 mpg‑US) per passenger, thanks to its fuel efficient Boeing 787-8, a high 86% passenger load factor and a high density of 1.18 seat/m² due to a low 11% premium seating. On the other side, the least efficient was British Airways at 27 pax-km/L - 3.7 litres per 100 kilometres (64 mpg‑US) per passenger, using fuel inefficient Boeing 747-400s with a low density of 0.79 seat/m² due to a high 24% premium seating, in spite of a high 83% load factor.[11]

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#1928529 3-Jan-2018 16:50

I'm not sure if you're serious. Motorcycle fuel use more than aircraft?

frankv

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#1928551 3-Jan-2018 18:31

Batman: I'm not sure if you're serious. Motorcycle fuel use more than aircraft?

Per person-km.

Of course, aircraft travel is only really efficient when you get to long-haul.

tdgeek

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#1928604 3-Jan-2018 18:53

Batman: I'm not sure if you're serious. Motorcycle fuel use more than aircraft?

I think my bike, at 656cc is about 4 l per 100KM. Aircraft are generally less than that per passenger

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#1928621 3-Jan-2018 19:35

tdgeek:

Batman: I'm not sure if you're serious. Motorcycle fuel use more than aircraft?

I think my bike, at 656cc is about 4 l per 100KM. Aircraft are generally less than that per passenger

4L per 100 km, 10,000kms a year

3L per 100km, 10,000-20,000kms per flight per leg [AKL - San Fran - 10,000kms, AKL London 18400 kms]

How does the aircraft travel use less fuel?

Plus when you travel, you consume so much disposables it's not even funny.

For example, someone driving around in a V8 knowing that they don't fly anywhere long or short haul and use reusable everything (don't eat out, drink coffee, buy bottled drinks, etc) - business class flying electric car owners have nothing on them.

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#1928628 3-Jan-2018 19:51

If you have more than 1 person in a car, you can easily beat air travel on a per person per 100Km basis. 7 people in an SUV, if you get better than 17.5L per 100Km. (easy in a modern SUV) Then you are beating the most efficient airline from the earlier post.

And I'm sure that you could do even better again comparing a full bus or train.

As for freight, it is far more efficient to send freight by sea compared to air.

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#1928631 3-Jan-2018 20:03

Batman:

For example, someone driving around in a V8 knowing that they don't fly anywhere long or short haul and use reusable everything (don't eat out, drink coffee, buy bottled drinks, etc) - business class flying electric car owners have nothing on them.

That's me, and I only do about 70-72kms a week at the moment (for the last 6 months). So less than 3600 a year (accounting for 4 weeks off work).

Don't eat out, don't drink coffee, make my own work drinks at home (from powder), have LED lighting, no desktop PCs, recycle everything, haven't flown in 2 years, hopefully moving soon to a house that has solar, no town water and a septic.

Turns out is sucks being nearly broke.

edit: worked out Kms better

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#1928759 3-Jan-2018 23:24

Batman:

tdgeek:

Batman: I'm not sure if you're serious. Motorcycle fuel use more than aircraft?

I think my bike, at 656cc is about 4 l per 100KM. Aircraft are generally less than that per passenger

4L per 100 km, 10,000kms a year

3L per 100km, 10,000-20,000kms per flight per leg [AKL - San Fran - 10,000kms, AKL London 18400 kms]

How does the aircraft travel use less fuel?

Plus when you travel, you consume so much disposables it's not even funny.

For example, someone driving around in a V8 knowing that they don't fly anywhere long or short haul and use reusable everything (don't eat out, drink coffee, buy bottled drinks, etc) - business class flying electric car owners have nothing on them.

You are way overthinking this. A previous poster explained how much air travel puts into the air, to the extent it affects local weather.

Not many people travel by air. So with that in mind, the effect of air travel is relatively low, but its still significant.

Expand that to car travel where MANY travel 10 to 20,000km per year at 3X the fuel usage. This is per person.

Conclusion is that if air travel can affect local weather, and that there are so many more cars being driven (1 billion), that shows just what two of the pollutant causers can do.

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#1928761 3-Jan-2018 23:30

Aredwood: If you have more than 1 person in a car, you can easily beat air travel on a per person per 100Km basis. 7 people in an SUV, if you get better than 17.5L per 100Km. (easy in a modern SUV) Then you are beating the most efficient airline from the earlier post.

And I'm sure that you could do even better again comparing a full bus or train.

As for freight, it is far more efficient to send freight by sea compared to air.

Agree. That all helps, but for some reason so many cars are 1 person transport, or 2. Kiwis want to use the car, Americans too. Public transport does exist and in many cases its widely used, more by necessity I feel though. We need to get people on public transport more and more. The rest in EV's

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#1928800 4-Jan-2018 06:56

MikeB4: My brother in law is a climate scientist at NIWA. I have talk with him many times and he tells me climate change is real, it's accelerating and it scares the pants off him. He believes everyone needs to wake up and act now as time is running out fast. He says anyone that denies now in face of the avalanche of evidence is akin to a flat earther.

I agree.

But at the same time I would urge anyone who had doubts to look at the IPCC findings themselves and try to understand the basic elements of the evidence that supports a finding of human-caused climate change.

Any faith-based opinion - right or wrong - is vulnerable to a more appealing argument that may be at odds with the evidence.

This may require some people to spend some time learning the fundamentals of how the science works. It's worth doing....

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#1928801 4-Jan-2018 07:01

tdgeek:

for some reason so many cars are 1 person transport, or 2. Kiwis want to use the car, Americans too. Public transport does exist and in many cases its widely used, more by necessity I feel though. We need to get people on public transport more and more. The rest in EV's

I'm one of those people, 90% of the time. Driving to and from work, there is no public transport option. I really wish I could buy a small, light, single-seater car, but no such thing exists AFAICT. Electric would be even better.

Geektastic

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#1928937 4-Jan-2018 11:08

tdgeek:
Rikkitic:

As above. Anyone who thinks people cannot affect the climate is simply wrong-headed. People affect everything they touch. We have destroyed the ecologies of entire countries, pushed numerous species to extinction, fundamentally altered natural systems. Why wouldn't we also have an effect on the climate?

I can only assume that @Maxlv feels the planet is so large that we can't really make much of a dent in the atmosphere

Sobering reading https://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to-24-million-pounds-per-second/

Also:

There are 1 billion vehicles in the world, spewing out fumes in the time it takes to rack up 10,000km or more per year

There are always between 6000 and 10000 aircraft in the air at any one time, spewing out fumes from the 2 or 4 turboprop or 2 or 4 jet engines

The Earth is big but it isn't that big, and as many greenhouses gases are active for a hundred years, or more, or less, they are added to, not replaced by new emissions

However if we were to copy, say, the UK where annual road tax (rego) is in tiers based on the CO2 emissions of your vehicle, there would be lots of complaint. The highest annual charge to discourage CO2 emission is NZ$4000 per year.

Can't have it both ways.

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#1928941 4-Jan-2018 11:10

frankv:
tdgeek:

for some reason so many cars are 1 person transport, or 2. Kiwis want to use the car, Americans too. Public transport does exist and in many cases its widely used, more by necessity I feel though. We need to get people on public transport more and more. The rest in EV's

I'm one of those people, 90% of the time. Driving to and from work, there is no public transport option. I really wish I could buy a small, light, single-seater car, but no such thing exists AFAICT. Electric would be even better.

BMW i3?

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