Eyjafjallajoekull - climate activist extraordinaire
Statistician | 16.04.2010 23:44 | Climate Chaos | World
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
Reading the science
It took long enough...
18.04.2010 10:51
AH
Warming effect of aircraft contrails
18.04.2010 17:26
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."
See also this article: "Can aircraft trails affect climate?"
"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
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
check chemtrails in youtube for more info...,,,
we are being poisoned
me
@ 'çhemtrails'
19.04.2010 00:26
see
Sorry.
G
start today
19.04.2010 11:36
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
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
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