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Eyjafjallajoekull - climate activist extraordinaire

Statistician | 16.04.2010 23:44 | Climate Chaos | World

Here's to an incredible first action ..

In 24 hours the Eyjafjallajoekull Volcano made a small estimated release of 7,412 tons of CO2, in doing so grounding 60% of European flights for the day and preventing the release of 206,465 tons of CO2. I make that the most successful direct action of all time - hats off to the world's latest domestic extremist.

Statistician
- Homepage: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/planes-or-volcano

Comments

Hide the following 9 comments

Temperatures set to increase

17.04.2010 20:30

Interestingly though without the dimming effect caused by aircraft contrails temperatures in Europe are now set to increase by a couple of degrees, similar situation occurred during the grounding of US flights after 911. The associated contrails from aircraft and their impact at increasing atmospheric albido actually helps to keep us a couple of degrees cooler.

Reading the science


It took long enough...

18.04.2010 10:51

...for the gloating to start.

AH


Warming effect of aircraft contrails

18.04.2010 17:26

re: Temperatures set to increase

The idea that aircraft contrails reduce global warming is just pseudoscience from troofer conspiracy theorists, the oil industry, and right-wing libertarians. It originates from the fact that temperatures rose for a few days after the 9/11 attacks when aircraft were grounded. But obviously you can't measure climate change over just a few days and it turns out it was just warmer due to random fluctuations in weather.

In fact, aircraft contrails actually contribute slightly to global warming by trapping heat in: "Studies have found that vapour trails or contrails trap outgoing longwave radiation emitted by the Earth and atmosphere (positive radiative forcing) at a greater rate than they reflect incoming solar radiation (negative radiative forcing). Therefore, the overall net effect of contrails is positive, i.e. a warming."
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail

See also this article: "Can aircraft trails affect climate?"
 http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335.html
"Examining patterns of cloud cover and temperature in early September at US weather stations from 1971 to 2001, Hong and his colleagues found that thicker, low clouds are the dominant influence on temperature extremes, whereas high clouds such as contrails have a minor effect at most"

The main mechanism for global warming is still increased CO2 though. This nonsense about aircraft contrails is typical climate change denialist distraction.

anon


Interesting

18.04.2010 17:55

Interesting debate on the contrail's albedo effect. The notion that the reduction in contrails lead to temporary warmin -- or that it normally contributes significantly to cooling --- is stated as fact on wikipedia's eyjafjallajokull page. It does sound completely spurious...

In any case it's completely moot because the important issue is long term CO2 build up. It is obviously a legitimate scientific question, nonetheless, but unfortunately it's just the sort of canard deployed by corporate astroturfers

FOOBIE BLETCH


stop the chemtrails

18.04.2010 18:35

contrails aren't the issue ...chemtrails are, the purposeful, not-side-effect, distribution of chemicals on to us from the air, via aircraft.......the iceland volcano is saving us from chemtrails.
check chemtrails in youtube for more info...,,,
we are being poisoned

me


@ 'çhemtrails'

19.04.2010 00:26

There's nothing remotely scientific or evidential to do with 'chemtrails'/

see  http://chemtrailscience.com

Sorry.

G


start today

19.04.2010 11:36

Is it not out of our hands if we live or die. What 'power' do we really have? I doubt anybodys finger who visits indymedia is on the life or death button.
To me, alot of our opinions/perspective depends on trust.
According to the elite climate scientists, there has been no 'rise in temperature' since ' 98, yet co2 has risen without a break - explain that one!
Come on lets just face - we don't know about invisable co2, and talking about it is like getting all pationate about a football team - irrelevant!
Is it not, and always has been about pollution. Pollution is something we can change, we can see it, we can directly take action - the question is, can we be arsed?

polutedstream


Everything

19.04.2010 23:51

Chemtrails - true or false (and I don't believe it personally, I have to say... but, then again, who knows for certain?!) we know for sure that poisons are put into our food, our water, our medicines, our air, purposefully a lot of the time (fluoride, mercury, pollution... GM foods, medicines in general...) We know we're being poisoned, whether the people doing the poisoning mean to or not (Governments, etc. / people driving cars, dumping fuel, etc.)

Also, whether you believe that global warming is the fault of man or not, practices like flying, mining, etc. are always destructive in some way anyway, so there are plenty of reasons not to take part in those practices anyway - planes dumping fuel, the pollution released from the fuel in the first place, the expansion of airports, etc. etc., the digging up of natural Earth and resources...

Environmentalists that fly... people who decide not to believe that climate change is our fault just to make life easier for themselves so they can justify flying. Do you really care about the World or will you stop resisting when it gets too hard for you?

JK


re: we don't know about invisable [sic] co2

21.04.2010 18:40

@polutedstream: "Come on lets just face - we don't know about invisable co2, and talking about it is like getting all pationate about a football team - irrelevant!"

Um, just because something is invisible to the human eye doesn't mean a thing! Most things today are measured by instruments that are far more sensitive than human eyes and things like "invisible" CO2 are no problem for them at all.

It's pretty much universally agreed (even by the anti-AGW crowd) that CO2 directly causes global warming. The questions really are how much warming will it cause and might there be other side-effects of rising temperatures or increased CO2 that have a negative feedback causing a compensatory cooling effect.

At the moment it seems fairly sure that increased CO2 will cause runaway global warming, but the Earth is a complex system so it's difficult to predict with 100% accuracy.

anon