"Boltar" wrote in message
om...
"nightjar" wrote in message
. ..
"Oliver Keating" wrote in message
...
So, massive expansion planned for Heathrow, Stanstead and Luton:

One new runway for the least useful airport for the bulk of the
population
of SE England is hardly a massive expansion. Luton gets to use its
current
ruwnay a bit more and Heathrow might get a new runway, if it can meet
pollution levels that it cannot achieve with the current ones.

Pollution levels do not include CO2 , they usually are only NOx , CO , and
SO2
which are a lot easier to meet. And how is it useful for the bulk of the
population? You think that Fred the bus driver needs to go to an important
business meeting in franfurt every other week?


This seems deeply concerning. If air traffic growth continues at it's
present rate, then in 50 years time air travel will account for 40% of
all
CO2 (greenhouse gas) emmissions.

These minor expansions will not give anywhere near the capacity to
achieve
that sort of level of growth.

Even if its 20% and not 40% , it doesn't matter. Its increasing , thats
the
problem. It should be decreasing.

The figure, being a proportion, is essentially meaninigless. If all other
sources were eliminated, it would rise to 100%, even if cut to one tenth of
its present levels in absolute terms.

....
Holidays may be nice , but they're hardly essential. Ask any farmer.
Besides
which there are plenty of ways to travel without using an aircraft.

None of which are realistic, if you want to travel any distance and don't
want to take needlessly long to do so.

....
Bully for you. And when you wonder why england in 30 years is like the
south
of france (and southern europe is a semi desert) and all the mative faunu
is
dying perhaps you can explain to your kids that it was partly down to the
selfishness, indifference and extravagance of people like yourself.

You seem to have much more faith than I that it is possible to make long
term predictions of climate behaviour from relatively short term
measurements. 40 years ago, we were, with equal confidence, expecting to see
the first signs of a mini ice age by now. The predictions are only as good
as the model used to make them and predictive modelling does not have a
particularly good record, especially where it takes a long time to get
corroborative feedback. AIDS, where feedback can be obtained in months,
rather than decades, is currently on about its fifth model and African
countries that should, according to the model, be virtually depopulated by
now are actually having problems of population growth. Even if you get a
reliable model, that is only as good as the data that gets fed into it. The
first claims for global warming were based upon sea surface temperature
measurements taken by ships. Later automatic equipment showed that there had
been an essential flaw in the basis for the measurements taken, which
virtually invalidated that data. That raises the unanswerable question of
how much reliance can be placed upon the data being obtained now. If, as
seems most probable, there is a real tendancy to global warming, opinions
are deeply divided as to what, if any affect human agencies have to do with
it. The fact that 2003 was the fifth warmest year on record has to be set
against the fact that 1949 was warmer, the worst floods in Europe for 100
years, only show that worse floods have happened before - Budapest escaped
any problems because its builders had allowed for those worse floods. As
yet, the measured variations are still well within what nature is quite
capable of achieving without man's help, although man probably isn't helping
the problem. However, trying to reduce man's impact by limiting what we do
is the way of the Luddite. The only realistic approach is the to follow the
path that we have been on for decades and to reduce the amount of impact
that what we continue to do has on the environment. Cars today produce a
fraction of the level of pollution that they did in the 1960s, despite
being, on average, considerably more powerful and the next generation of
airliners will use 20% less fuel. Those are the progressive ways to tackle
the problem. Of course, the largest single contribution to reducing
greenhouse gasses would be to replace all those fossil fuel power stations
with nuclear power plants.

Colin Bignell