Heathrow expansion to go ahead
 

I'm furious. The Government are a load of slimy, short sighted, lying ****s.

Their Aviation White Paper, last updated in 2006, supports a 'predict and provide' approach, like expansion at Heathrow.

Their Climate Change Bill commits them to 80% cuts in CO2e emissions by 2050.

Aviation currently accounts for just over 10% of UK emissions. Even if the entire fleet was switched to more efficient Dreamliners and the likes, aviation would use up up to 105% of our 2050 'budget' by 2030.

If the government continues doing this, they either intend to throw out their climate change commitments, or they seriously intend to ban fossil fuels (except for use on planes, of course). Option 1 seems more likely.


There is no way I'm even going to consider voting for this lying shitbag Brown.

Re: Heathrow expansion to go ahead
 

You're an idiot in so many ways it's hard to know where to start.

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Please do start somewhere, smith- ! :D

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Earth's climate is always changing. It never stays the same. Thus any government which attempts to contradict the course of nature isn't well thought out. The earth has been warming, for the most part for 26,000 years. It wasn't airplane emissions which brought us out of the ice age. It is as likely that we are going to get cooler as it is that we are going to get warmer.

A more rational climate change policy would recognize the inevitibility of climate change of some sort or another and try to plan stratagies for us to adapt to new realities rather than wasting a lot of time and energy attempting to control that which is beyond our current abilities.

Cutting CO2 emissions by 100% probably wouldn't have any long term effects on the earth. If it did, it would probably be something entirely different than what was expected.

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Can the Fox News "journalist" please log out of dda's account?

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I know in Norway you may not have gotten the news that the ice age has ended, however, there was one. It was in all of the papers.

I am not sure how one explains the warming of the planet over an extensive period of time before man was even possibly a factor in climate.

I also note that most indications are that the earth has been cooling now for about a decade. Your generation will live to see the debate move from what to do about global warming to what to do about global cooling.

I have lived to see the so called "experts" move from dire warnings about the world being on the verge of a new ice age to the current hysteria about global warming. I predict that you will live to see it swing back.

Scientists make their bones and get there grants by backing up the scientific establishment until that gets over done and then the contrarians take over and make their bones and get their grants by proving the proceeding group of experts were idiots.

There was a time when all of the experts agreed the world was flat but that didn't make them right.

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This is a pretty silly thing to say

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The term global warming is a misnomer.

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Climate change then?

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Here's the paper that triggered the 'ice age hysteria'.

Read the abstract, and note that its ice age hypothesis was never tested because aerosol concentrations didn't increase by a factor of 4.

Also, in terms of 1970s published papers commenting on cause, according to this site, 44 projected global warming, 7 projected cooling. You can look for yourself on GoogleScholar or Web of Science if you want.

If you stick to the popular media, then sure, they made some pretty sensationalist claims. If you stick to scientific media, then you get a different viewpoint.

Wouldn't scientists be better off doing what the person with the most money wants them to? Firstly, the fossil fuel industry is orders of magnitude larger than the renewable energy industry, and ExxonMobil's funding of anti-global warming groups is well documented.

The biggest funder of climate science is the US. And Bush was in charge - here's some of his administration's attempts to undermine scientific integrity. Why were the scientists going against the political demands of their paymasters?

Re: Heathrow expansion to go ahead
 

why is the expansion a bad thing, is it just environmentalist idiocy or are there actually reasons to oppose it?

have seen this story mentioned in various newspaper headlines but never cared enough to read about it

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i never knew gate was a dirty hippy

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Seems quite straight forward to me. Bigger airfield = more planes = more pollution, more noise.

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As well as the loss of a village. Add that to the potential for another terminal (which will no doubt be required) to join it up with the rail service and you've got yourself a super polluter

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It's a fuc****** no-brainer nod, and even you should get that.

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I think planes are pretty cool

fwooooooosh

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I would say to the House, as I said to those who joined teh PB:

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So you don't believe that the earth is only 6000 years old?

Looks like we got ourselves a god-hating Communist boys.

Re: Heathrow expansion to go ahead
 

Link 1.
Link 2.

Re: Heathrow expansion to go ahead
 

couldnt care less about global warming, dont be so boring.

Apparently theyre evicting people from their houses to build it though, which is pretty disgusting. Would have thought Zhukov would be all for that sort of thing though, property rights just being a bourgeois construct that shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of social progress and all that.

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This is a major flaw with democracy.

We should have a benevolent committee of scientists to decide everything.

Which would be fun.

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i dont think the economy could cope with the sudden surge in labcoats and thick lensed glasses!

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Its a bad thing for millions of west londoners, the noise under the flightpaths is pretty horrendous.... more runways = more flight paths = more noise disruption for more ppl

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or a scientist

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Isn't it the same thing?

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Well you might argue that one of the big problems with Heathrow isn't the lack of runways, it's the piss poor infrastructure it possesses for an airport of its supposed stature. Apart from T5 they all need replacing and cater for the extra security checks that are now in place after they were built. Never mind the fact that this airport while connected to the road and rail network, is near inaccessible to anywhere that isn't London by public transport, which causes far more traffic than it should.

As for the contribution of aviation, it's argued that while it's emissions are indeed a small percentage of overall emissions, release of CO2 at that altitude has the potential to be far more damaging (i have no idea where i've read this or if its true). I agree there's some hysteria about this though.

Really the biggest controversy is that it appears that the decision was made before the whole process started and that really, the whole planning process is a bit of a shambles.

Re: Heathrow expansion to go ahead
 

There's been research on this. Generally accepted values are 2-4 times the CO2 emissions, some people have calculated lower values (eg 1.2 on p4 of that document). Right now, 2 seems to be the most widely accepted.


Planes might be responsible for 35MT directly in CO2e direct terms, but it's likely the warming effect is 70MT.

Planes are already using over half our budget for 2050, and the government expects a doubling-trebling by 2030, and they're supporting expanding airports to reach that. If the government plans to do this and achieve the climate change bill, then it has to ban the use of fossil fuels except in planes, the production of cement and rearing cows in the UK. They're not going to collapse the economy, so they're throwing away the climate change bill to satisfy the aviation lobby.

Another way of comparing them: a single return flight from Heathrow to NY is responsible for about as much warming as food, or heating, or lighting, or driving, for a whole year.




Gordon Brown has never seriously intended to do anything about climate change. I'm voting Tory next election.

Re: Heathrow expansion to go ahead
 

So whats your solution, should noone be allowed to travel abroad without your permission, or should flights just be taxed ridiculous amounts so that the non-rich cant afford more than one holiday a year?

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It's a little known fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains a clause which stipulates that everyone is entitled to at least 3 holidays a year.

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No idea what your point is meant to be

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You are probably correct about that, but what makes you sure the torries won't do exactly the same as brown?

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I'm not expecting to find any party that's got completely sensible policies I agree with. Labour's record on climate change is awful, and the lib dems have an ideological opposition to nuclear power that just isn't sensible IMO.

The Tories have also promised not to allow the construction of coal power stations without a guarantee of carbon capture & storage. Labour haven't. They also promise more investment in rail and less aviation expansion from when I last checked.

This is pretty big for me, I'd never have considered voting Tory until about a year ago.

Will hopefully get round to the rest of your post when I have more time. <3

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This, er, isn't actually true man. In fact it's not even vaguely true. The only reason I can imagine people even get away with claiming this is true is that 1998 was an exceptionally warm year. For the record here's a link from ****ing NASA. In case you're too lazy to open the link here's a quick snippet from right at the top Climate change isn't measured by comparing one year to the previous one. Climate change is measured in trends over a number of years.

Remember that electricity thing scientists made up as well? Boy were their faces red when we discovered that was all a load of bunk and it was actually magical pixies.

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If you didn't know JBG was Irish you'd be easily fooled into thinking he's an intelligent young man.

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Ah, your specialty.

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Apparently, Mars is warming as well. Our CO2 emisssions must really be astronomical.

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Yeah, and they`ve found lots of methane gas as well.

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That's shit logic and you know it.


Mars' warming is often used to say the Sun is getting hotter. Satellite measurements say it isn't. Which suggests that something is happening on Mars.

We know that changes in albedo ('shiny-ness') can warm or cool Mars by a lot.

Also, Uranus is cooling.

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There's a joke to be made about curry somewhere over here :(

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Any time the masses can be scared someone, notably politicians and their cronies, who find ways to profit from the ensuing hysteria.

I note, as an example, that whenever there is talk of reigning in government expenditures, there are always dire warning that the first thing that will have to go is police and fire protection. We can't reduce the amount of money government is spending without the most dangerous possible consequences.

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And then they cut spending on welfare programs as a ''comprimise'.

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Apparently there is a working CCS powerplant in Spremberg, eastern Germany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_..._sequestration

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It's only a baby one.

At the moment it's about as viable as the flying car, but we're less sure if it works.

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so Gate do you politically hate Brown and are using this enivornmental stuff to point out his flaws or

are you truly an environmentalist?