"nightjar" wrote in message ...

...
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.

For long distance yes , for medium and short distance no.


...
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

40 years ago we didn't have computer prediction, they basically were
working on guesswork. Aside from models theres the basic physics that C02
is a green house gas and more CO2 = more trapped energy in the atmosphere
whatever effect that may have.

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,

So in other words you can't tell if the models are correct until the predicted
result has come about. Well thats a great argument for doing nothing, lets
wait until the climate goes haywire THEN start worrying eh?

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

People are a teensy bit harder to model than atmospheric physics. You dont
have free will to take into account. Bad example.

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

And the last decode had the other 4 warmest years too. So 1949 was hot? Big
deal , all that shows is that short term random fluctuations can cause
short term perturbations as great as the overall long term change.

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

I'd imagine the population of the Easter Island took the same point of view.
The end result is that they destroyed their enviroment and died out.

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

Err no, thats a specious argument. Cars produce a fraction of SOME pollution
compared to the 1960s. Mainly NOx, CO and SO2. You'll find however that the
most important pollutant (ie CO2) has only been reduced by something like 30%
per unit of distance travelled , and considering there are probably 4 times
as many cars on the roads (in the UK anyway) as in the 60s .. well I think you
can do the maths.

being, on average, considerably more powerful and the next generation of
airliners will use 20% less fuel. Those are the progressive ways to tackle

If the volume of air traffic is to double as the forcasts suggest , how exactly
is a 20% reduction going to help? Overall there wil still be 1.6 times the
amount of fuel being burnt. I don't call that progress.

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.

Well we finally agree on something. Nuclear power is a far mroe realistic
and reliable alternative to wind farms, wave machines etc but its been killed
off my green activists who couldn't tell you the difference between and alpha
and beta particle if their lives depended on it. Ah well, as history has
shown time and time again, humanity seems to have to learn its lessons the hard
way.

B2003