Flying Shame - it's a new "thing"

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I like trains too, but I also like to get out to the west coast every other month to visit friends and family.

Amtrak takes four days. An Airbus takes 5 hours. Sorry, environment.
 
I do environmental work for a living. I don’t care at all about emissions on any of my travel missions, whether work or pleasure. I am shameless.
 
I feel like large industrial parks are worse for the environment than any mode of transportation is.
 
I might buy an electric car or hybrid at some (distant) point, but the airplane will always be happily burning hydrocarbons and depositing dino-residue on its belly.
 
I travel internationally a number of times a year. There aren't any reasonable alternatives.
 
Why do we never see an expose on Super Tankers and other ship pollution?
Want to raise some eyebrows, go look it up.
btw: it might be a little hard to track down the numbers.
 
I don't scientifically or morally object to trying to reduce carbon emissions. As we speak, the atmospheric CO2 concentration has reached 412 ppm, which has increased over 30% in my lifetime, and about double(!) the levels typical in the last millennium. This is not a small change in atmospheric composition, and not everyone is going to be happy with the effects, to say the least.

Air transportation represents only 9% of the CO2 emissions of the transportation sector, which is in its entirety 29% of anthropoogenic global carbon emissions. (Electricity generation and industry, along with transportation, are the bulk of anthropogenic carbon emissions.) So, if you are interested in limiting CO2 generation, at least dig where there's taters. Ground transportation, electrical generation, and certain industrial processes are the largest contributors. Increasing efficiencies in these sectors would go a long way alone toward making progress. But logic is not strength of many social systems.

My former place of work (a place of logic) has a carbon-neutral policy goal (admirable) but goes about it in a strange way: disdaining air travel while buying buying carbon offsets, etc., while sending gasoline-powered buses, delivery, and service vehicles around the grounds. As as scientist, this kind of half-serious policy logic defies me. When we get really serious about digging where there's taters, I'll consider whether or not my Grumman (or flying on an airline) is a significant environmental problem.
 
I have no problem with someone who 'walks the walk' and either takes the train or teleconferences whenever he can to avoid flying. I DO have a problem with a bunch of 'concerned celebrities' taking their private jets to Sicily to attend a Google conference on climate change. I reserve the right to call them hypocrites with a 10/10 Gore rating.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technol...mp-google-to-discuss-climate-change-maseratis

(I know it's FBN, but nobody else will cover this)
 
weilke said:
I have no problem with someone who 'walks the walk' and either takes the train or teleconferences whenever he can to avoid flying. I DO have a problem with a bunch of 'concerned celebrities' taking their private jets to Sicily to attend a Google conference on climate change. I reserve the right to call them hypocrites with a 10/10 Gore rating.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technol...mp-google-to-discuss-climate-change-maseratis

(I know it's FBN, but nobody else will cover this)
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You really don't have to apologize for it being FOX News. The reason you don't see it being reported anywhere else is because the media are just as left and hypocritical as all the ones attending that conference.
 
texasclouds said:
U ever ride a train? I’ll take 2 hrs in a spam can vs 16 hrs on a train with a slightly larger can.
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Yes I have. I really don’t think it’s a 8:1 ratio either, especially if you take into account all the nonsense that goes with the airlines. And if this country would get off its ass and build high speed rails, it would be even better. That’s not to say that trains are a better choice for all routes but depending on the time difference, they can be better.
 
SkyDog58 said:
Yes I have. I really don’t think it’s a 8:1 ratio either, especially if you take into account all the nonsense that goes with the airlines. And if this country would get off its ass and build high speed rails, it would be even better. That’s not to say that trains are a better choice for all routes but depending on the time difference, they can be better.
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You don’t want high speed rail if it goes like ours here in kalifornia..
 
I tried to book a train from here to FL for a trip last year. After seeing that it would literally take me a week, round trip, and over $2000 for the two of us, I closed the browser tab and opened Frontier and Southwest.

And quite interestingly, first time I had seen this and we do this trip regularly... we were better off price-wise AND had a better travel schedule during normal human hours by doing the trio as two separate one-way tickets on each.

And for this supposedly being a United hub, e haven’t seen anything but an RJ headed that route in six years of looking at any reasonable times of day. You can always be shipped off to IAH or EWR and eventually get to Florida, but they appear to have ceded the battle to the low cost carriers to get to that state.

I’d pay reasonably more for a seat on a UA narrow or widebody in Business to do that flight at a normal human time, direct, but they don’t exist. If I wanted the overpriced legacy hub experience I’d hop Delta through ATL. Easier airport to get around in.
 
1RTK1 said:
But what are we going to do about one of the biggest green house gasses.....H2O
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Nothing, because it is not a driver of atmospheric warming. CO2 is the main driver.
 
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1RTK1 said:
Not according to my father in-law that retired from Lawrence Livermore lab. He was/is a chemist/mathematician.
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I think you are confusing the terms "contributor" and "driver"
Water vapor is the largest contributor, while CO2 is the driver
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/...cenarratives/its-water-vapor-not-the-co2.html

I had to read @chemgeek 's post twice as I had the same initial thought as you. I suspect @chemgeek is a chemist as well, from his user name, but I realize we can name ourselves anything here.
 
They used to reroute rivers to power stuff. A little CO2 is nothing compared to what would happen trying to replace that energy with something else. People who are worried about this stuff should disconnect from the grid and stfu.
 
1RTK1 said:
Not according to my father in-law that retired from Lawrence Livermore lab. He was/is a chemist/mathematician.
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That opinion would not be in agreement with the broad consensus of the atmospheric science community, which include the atmospheric scientists that are my colleagues. The whole worldwide scientific community, which includes many different approaches to the problem, didn't somehow "miss" the main drivers of atmospheric thermodynamics. The contribution of CO2 is actually the LEAST uncertain aspect of atmospheric modeling. (The contributions of particulates is the most uncertain, and is one of the most active areas of current research--it is not yet clear if particulates are a positive or negative driver with current data and understanding.)

But to bring things back to the original post...it is a little disingenuous to castigate air travel when it is only 9% of 29% of the overall issue.
 
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Shame. The people who wield it for power are those who know the least about it’s proper function. A brief look around at those who are trying to influence/convince/control by appealing to their corrupted ethic and shaming those who disagree allows me to be quite comfortable in tuning them out and going about my merry way.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
I think you are confusing the terms "contributor" and "driver"
Water vapor is the largest contributor, while CO2 is the driver
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/...cenarratives/its-water-vapor-not-the-co2.html

I had to read @chemgeek 's post twice as I had the same initial thought as you. I suspect @chemgeek is a chemist as well, from his user name, but I realize we can name ourselves anything here.
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You are correct on all counts. A driver is something responsible for initiating change, not necessarily the largest thing in the bucket. The analogy I use is this: consider a large bucket of water with a hole in it, with an inflow that fills it up as fast as it goes out the bottom. Add an additional small drip to the top of the bucket. That small drip will drive the bucket to fill up and overflow regardless of the size of the original equal inflow and outflow, and is the "driver" small though it is. Drivers are typically things that are changing in a sea of things that are not. Those small changes in one direction can be inexorable.
 
Can someone explain to me the idea of carbon credits? The buying, selling, who gets the money and where really does it go.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
I think you are confusing the terms "contributor" and "driver"
Water vapor is the largest contributor, while CO2 is the driver
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/...cenarratives/its-water-vapor-not-the-co2.html

I had to read @chemgeek 's post twice as I had the same initial thought as you. I suspect @chemgeek is a chemist as well, from his user name, but I realize we can name ourselves anything here.
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What was the driver in the last ice age/warming event thousands of years ago?
 
1RTK1 said:
Can someone explain to me the idea of carbon credits? The buying, selling, who gets the money and where really does it go.
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As I understand it, it’s a tax you can pay and keep polluting and others get credit for doing green things. Effectively it means you can pollute and just pay someone else to do the green thing.
 
1RTK1 said:
You don’t want high speed rail if it goes like ours here in kalifornia..
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Come on, who doesn't want to go from Bakersfield to Fresno with 13 stops.

I wonder how much they could have improved air travel and public transit to get to airports in California with the same 100 billion or whatever it's up to these days.
 
I thought the chemtrails were going to solve all this :dunno:
 
1RTK1 said:
What was the driver in the last ice age/warming event thousands of years ago?
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They have no clue. Temperature change is influenced by far more than atmospheric makeup, but the science isn’t well understood.
 
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