One meteorologist explains why he won’t fly again | Hacker News Reader

One meteorologist explains why he won’t fly again

salon.com

63 pointsjseliger62 comments

What some of the other comments here seem to miss is that he isn't suggesting to replace air travel with other modes of transport. He suggests cutting back on unnecessary long distance travel. And if you have ever seen scientists' travel schedules, you might be inclined to agree. I find it bizarre that those people who should be the first to understand climate change are among the most active producers of CO2.

As a grad student I once flew half way around the world (18 hours + 2 hours flight time) to present a paper to a room of 10 people who had traveled similar distances to get there. Because the paper was more or less mistakenly assigned to a "robots for hazardous environments" session, exactly none of the people in the audience cared. And because I was last to present in a session of 6 presentations and the 5th presenter didn't show up, I started mine ahead of schedule. A few acquaintances who wanted to stop by just to see me present came in just after I finished. Nobody gained anything from this 15 minute presentation.

If I had skipped the trip, my paper would not have been included in the conference proceedings. Publishing papers at conferences is one thing you have to do to be considered a successful scientist and this was only my second conference paper. The story is only one anecdote, but the entire system of science is built around encouraging people to travel long distances frequently. It's stupid.

Similar story. When I was grad student, I was flown half way around the world (Oregon -> Italy) to present someone else's paper (!) because they were feeling ill. I had only the most rudimentary knowledge of the contents, since it was such a last minute affair. So, as in your experience, the presentation was hardly worthwhile at all, much less the expense (environmental or financial) of sending me, in aggregate, all the way around the world.

He won't fly? Or he won't travel?

Big, big difference. Because flying is one of the MOST efficient ways to travel. FAR more efficient than even taking a bus.

> If more would cut down on just one long-distance flight per year, he maintains, that would also have a major impact.

That's terrible advice because people will drive instead. And adding "long-distance" makes the advice worse since long-distance flights are more efficient than short ones (most of the work is getting in the air, not staying there).

The ONLY was to cut down CO2 emissions is nuclear power plants. Nothing else is practical. If you care about CO2, and you have the opportunity, lobby to have a nuclear plant installed near you[r city].

I don't think you're right about efficiency. Trains and boats are definitely more fuel efficient than flying, and cars are close. The figure for planes is about 90 passenger-miles per gallon, for fully loaded (55 people) deisel buses it's about 330. (All from this lovely article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transporta...)

Of course it depends on your stopping and starting.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...

For more realistic figures rather than theoretical maximums.

And I especially found it interesting to note that as typically used, cars are better than busses.

I think buses are better than cars, for inter-city travel. Wikipedia's numbers are probably more relevant to transit buses (i.e. the ones local governments run, which are often empty). Greyhound doesn't run uneconomic routes.

Bicycles are really healthy, cost little to acquire, are easy to repair, last for ages, and work reasonably well in most climates.

the bicycle is one of the most efficient forms of transport... half the energy per unit distance of walking ... converts to about [there are 2 claims in wikipedia, 732 and 879 mpg]

I strongly suggest any hackers (aging and pot-bellied or otherwise) give long distance cycling a go: it's truly pleasurable and great for your brain! I spend much of my 20s doing this in foreign countries.

> work reasonably well in most climates.

If you like to be boiled in the summer and frozen in the winter, not to mention having to cycle on icy roads with no shoulder and sixteen-wheelers bearing down on you.

Anyway, if you do cycle, please don't make a habit out of blowing past pedestrians at full speed, and think twice about riding on the sidewalks.

Perhaps consider moving to a less automobile-obsessed culture and a better climate.

Your snark aside, I don't cycle. I walk. Mainly, I'm concerned with getting knocked down by a cyclist who thinks that sidewalks are a wonderful place to go full speed without having to worry about anyone else.

Do you think perhaps they may have a similar concern regarding significantly larger mass vehicles moving at higher speeds some distance to your side?

> Do you think perhaps they may have a similar concern regarding significantly larger mass vehicles moving at higher speeds some distance to your side?

So they're justified in acting recklessly around me because others act recklessly around them? If it's that much of a problem, they should walk.

But planes are more likely to be full than buses or trains. From personal experience buses and trams are only full at rush hour and are sparsely populated at other times.

There is also a question of how efficient a mile is. When talking about transportation efficiency, the distance you want to talk about is the distance from point A to point B. When you talk about miles per gallon, you generally are talking about the total distance traveled which, unless you are moving in a perfectly straight line, is greater than the distance between the two points.

I assume that air travel would travel closer to a straight line, so a single air mile gets you further than a single bus mile. I haven't actually checked this, and have no idea if this difference is large enough to cover factor of ~4 difference you are citing.

>The ONLY was to cut down CO2 emissions is nuclear power plants. Nothing else is practical. If you care about CO2, and you have the opportunity, lobby to have a nuclear plant installed near you[r city].

Agree 100%, and I've been saying this for years. I'll even say that I don't take anybody talking about the threat of climate change/global warming seriously if they aren't willing to do this. Everything else I've heard suggested about how to actually go about massively reducing global CO2 emissions sounds like a joke. Am I supposed to believe that they think the threat is real when they won't advocate for the only thing that has a decent chance at making a difference?

Anything involving changing your personal lifestyle won't work. Food, living space, transportation habits, whatever. Maybe it makes you feel good somehow, but it won't scale to the world population, so it can't make a difference.

I am actually in favor of more walkable cities, since I personally like walking, but it isn't going to make a difference as far as CO2 emissions. A city with less motorized transportation, and more of it electric like trains and such, probably does produce much less CO2, but our cities are already built. Rebuilding them to be like that would produce so much CO2 that it would probably take the better part of a century to actually see a net reduction in total CO2 emitted.

Renewable energy is nice where it works, but I'm not convinced that it's capable of scaling big enough fast enough to solve the problem. Prove me wrong by all means, but while we're working on getting that going, how about we get started on something that we know will work? I was given to understand that this was urgent and all.

That's terrible advice because people will drive instead.

Or - more likely - they'll choose a closer destination for their summer vacation and avoid losing six days driving the round trip from New York to San Francisco.

Energy consumption does not equal warming impact.

Jet aircraft produce a number of non-CO2 emissions with high warming potential, and deposit them directly into the high atmosphere where they do the most harm.

The IPCC estimates that the total impact on the climate of jet aviation is 2-4 times greater than the CO2 emissions alone.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?idp=2...

It's not just about efficiency though. From carbonfootprint.com - "Emissions from planes at high altitudes impact climate change more than if the emissions were released at ground level. To take account of this you have the option to factor up the CO2 emissions released by aviation Radiative Forcing Factor of 1.9"

"That's terrible advice because people will drive instead."

More likely, given the time, and $XYZ in the bank account, people will probably find something to do other than pointless movement. The local, momentary optimum of what to do with my spare time and spare money rarely randomly rolls the dice "fly!" although on rare occasions it does.

If he buys land and plants a forest on it while meditating, well, thats probably a net positive. On the other hand, having the extra money laying around maybe he gets a second car or a ski boat or spends the time installing a fireplace in his house, that's probably a net negative.

Rather than fly to Ireland this summer my kids drove out in the country where my cousin at his vacation cottage pulled them around behind his speedboat and/or rode around on my cousin's son's jet ski. I'm not sure which possibility ruined the earth more. Probably the amortized environmental capex of a vacation home and all the gas powered toys greatly exceeds any actual consumed fuel environmental cost by a couple orders of magnitude so they may as well burn a little gas to get something out of the damage caused by creating the infrastructure to burn it. Merely not flying isn't going to automatically fix anything.

The real tragedy of the story is the inhumanity of it. So flyers are treated like worthless cattle by employees, like freely abusable guilty until proven innocent enemy of the state terrorists by .gov, ripped off by the airlines, and all that inhumane treatment is perfectly OK with this guy, its just that he doesn't like some numbers on a report that won't really affect anyone anyway. And that is the inhumane tragedy of it. It would be like protesting the holocaust ovens not on moral and ethical ground but merely as an air pollution issue. Or protesting slavery pre-civil war not because the whole thing is inherently wrong, but because human slavery messes up financial reports somehow. The whole concept of the story makes me feel icky when seen in this light.

I'm pretty sure that flying is the least efficient way to travel that's not a partially-filled car, and it's only more efficient than individual car travel when you assume that less available or more expensive air travel will result in an equal expansion in the mileage of car travel.

The low price of air travel causes people to travel when they normally wouldn't travel and wouldn't be reasonably expected to by employers.

>The ONLY was to cut down CO2 emissions is nuclear power plants.

Or to cut down on burning jet fuel.

> I'm pretty sure that flying is the least efficient way to travel

You are wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...

> Or to cut down on burning jet fuel.

The amount is utterly minuscule compared to how much energy is used for everything else. It's gets lots of press but is a mostly worthless reduction.

Or migrate to places with abundant hydroelectric power.

While flying is efficient, on the other hand you don't drive the same distances that you would fly. The more you stay where you live, the less emissions. If you choose a walkable town, you don't need to drive except occasionally.

There's an interesting response to this, in which the author argues that "for the sake of the planet, please fly!":

http://qz.com/131024/its-ok-to-have-a-big-carbon-footprint-a...

> http://qz.com/131024/its-ok-to-have-a-big-carbon-footprint-a...

It's bit like saying "it's ok to each caviar at charity dinner". It may be right economically but it's very morally shady if costs of caviar and benefits it brings to fundraiser aren't carefully, unambiguously calculated.

This guy is reducing his quality of life to save the environment (or so he believes). That's more than most of us are willing to do, and that's why his sacrifice is futile. He's the exception that proves the rule. I don't think any civilization has ever voluntarily reduced its resource consumption. Adapting to climate change or reversing it with geoengineering is probably easier than changing human nature.

You can fly and drive all the miles you please knowing that you will never impact the planet as much as someone who has 2 or God forbid more kids. Because there is one and only one thing that will save the planet, and that's fewer us.

How haughty to assume that the onus is on us to "save" the planet. How absurd to also assume that the only way we could accomplish this is by some quota of human beings.

Oh the planet will do fine without us, but using the commonly accepted meaning of the phrase to mean preserving a familiar ecosystem, then yes, the only was todo that is to consume less. If we abandon modern tech that will happen anyway since we rely on industrial farming.

So we can reduce our load on the ecosystem in a managed way likeChina did, or we can have it forced upon us, but it is going to happen.

Not at all what I expected. But this feels like the very definition of a power law problem: the few people out of the human population who fly regularly have so much more impact than the rest combined.

This is South Park material. I would love to see an episode with ManBearPig, Al Gore and the crying meteorologist.

And this is the type of poisonous, vacuous comment that makes Hacker News a worse place.

If you want to make an argument that Climate Change is not an issue: Make it. If you want to say that this person's reaction is irrational, make that argument. Don't be snide and claim "This person's emotional response is obviously stupid, and he deserves to be mocked without justification".

As it stands, we have no idea why you feel that this is stupid (though your reasons are probably crap). You're simply being offensive, and not adding anything to the discussion. People who disagree with you are disadvantaged, because you've made no actual points; and so you can dodge any criticisms with "Where did I say that?". Which of course, is the main point, you haven't said anything. You're just being an ass.

Man-made climate warning is most likely a hoax that fuels a multi-billion-dollar industry and is used, among other things, to erect protectionist barriers against Chinese and Indian cars. So there are extremely powerful vested political and economic interests to ensure that there's no possibility of an honest debate, even to the point of falsifying data I would suspect (never mind the indoctrination of young children across most of the western world).

Even if that weren't the case it would still be pointless to worry about it as trying to change people's behavior outside the marketplace can only be done with totalitarian methods, which is exactly what environmentalists propose. Not to mention, since this is Hacker News after all, that I would love to see CO2 concentrations go up 50 times to reach those recorded during dinosaurs' time (sorry, too lazy to check exact era), as a much denser atmosphere would allow almost car-sized airships to be built, or even human flight with wings and how cool would that be.

Environmentalism is the new communism and Gaia-worshiping is a religion with Al Gore as its main tele-evangelist. The guy has even set up his own company selling carbon credits. I am certainly not going to write a lengthy exposition identifying the errors in Benn Hinn's theological doctrine. Ridicule saves time.

> Man-made climate warning is most likely a hoax that fuels a multi-billion-dollar industry and is used, among other things, to erect protectionist barriers against Chinese and Indian cars. So there are extremely powerful vested political and economic interests to ensure that there's no possibility of an honest debate, even to the point of falsifying data I would suspect (never mind the indoctrination of young children across most of the western world).

What you present here is, as far as I can tell, an argument that there are (well-monied) interests that stand to gain from having people believe in AGW. That is a valid point to make, but it does nothing to prove the conspiracy that you sketch. Do you have any proof?

You go on (sorry, it's cumbersome to quote on my phone) to suggest that the fact that there are people who take a religious view towards environmentalism matters for the debate. I agree to a certain extent that this is a problem, but the solution is simple: don't listen to the enviro-religious people. Listen instead to the science.

Even assuming that man-made global warming is true and that high concentrations of CO2 is a bad thing, what does science tell me that's really actionable? Coordination is impossible in prisoner's dilemma type games. No solution, no problem. The only way to "solve" the "problem" is with world-wide totalitarian measures which would produce untold misery as a side effect. I 'd much rather have the sea level go up 2 meters. The crying meteorologist is to me on a par with the British young woman who had an abortion "for the environment". To recap: powerful interests, alarming indications of intellectual fraud (e.g. accusations of data massaging, gradually speaking more of "climate change" than "global warming"), nothing to do that's compatible with me pursuing my interest, yes selfish interest - is there another kind? -, in a market economy. Case closed for me.

Yeah, do your trolling elsewhere.

Thats actually not bad as a list of traditional ad hominem attacks.

If you really want to troll em, try something like "history is nothing but billions of years of climate change, so paleoconservatives who want to preserve the 1500s eternally are anti-scientific".

Another hilarious one is going into geographic politics. Everyone living along the coasts has roughly the same weather so they freak out at the idea of temp going up or down. Non-coasties (and their ecologies) thrive in areas with dramatically varying temps, but coasties always excrete vast clouds of smug over non-coasties so anything good thats not coastal cannot exist. For example, worst case delta T scenarios are unthinkable for coasties who think +/- one degree counts as "weather" but for me, the worst case is basically like moving about 40 miles south. This is a fun one that gets them all wound up.

There's also a hilarious personal responsibility game. People who build stuff in stupid places are about to have their chips cashed in, displaying their epic fail. And the problem with that is what exactly? Right up there with those people who get flooded out by rivers every other year and get .gov to pay to rebuild them every time, oh how my heart aches for them LOL. Hey did you just hear? The coasts are going to flood in a century. I suggest... moving? You've only got a century best start getting moving or start those .gov financial claims...

Now thats the way to really get them going...

This is serial!

I don't recycle because it's not an economically viable activity without subsidization (robbery).

In my office, I found out that the cleaning crew had been trashing the carefully segregated recycling for months. I had a good laugh.

"I don't recycle because it's not an economically viable activity without subsidization"

But that's not the point, and I presume you know that as well. Sometimes I try to imagine how future generations may experience living in totally totally artificial environments where nothing can be taken for granted, not even the breathable air or the (living) space. If you can envision such perspective (and at least some reasons for its necessity), you may then deduce that there is a transitory path that must be prepared ahead.

He says he recycles.

What does he recycle? Because only metal is worth recycling, everything else is not worth the extra pollution and water.

Combustible garbage can be usefully turned into electrical energy.

The city I grew up in, did just that with all of its garbage in the 60s/70s and had to shut down in the 80s because it was a net loss once the full cost of exhaust scrubbers, disposal of whatever they scrub out, etc, was taken into account.

They were having profitability issues as it was once labor costs, boiler certification and related costs, maintenance, and ash disposal were factored in, so it didn't take much environmental cleanliness regulation cost to wipe out any profit from the incinerator.

Or rephrased, you can burn trash to make X units of electricity, it'll just n*X units of electricity to operate the plant, pay the workers, clean the fumes from the smokestack, maintain the boilers, operate the facility... Some factors are O(1), some O(n), some probably O(polynomial) if not exponential so simply making a bigger facility doesn't help (and a bigger facility means burning more diesel to haul the trash, no free lunch...)

You realize that was fifty years ago, right? This is like saying computers are impractical because their vacuum tubes require too much power - here in the 21st century, Sweden has actually run out of combustible garbage because it's working for them. They now have to import garbage as a fuel for power generation.

It works for Sweden because the population does the work for them.

They have like 10 different bins for garbage http://blog.liu.se/rhiannonbristowstagg/category/life-in-swe...

So the power plant hardly needs to do any sorting - all the combustibles are already separated (which means much less ash). Of course no one counts the work of the population when factoring costs.

In fact, machines sort garbage better than humans. In the UK, we're moving away from having people do lots of sorting, towards having everything "recyclable" going into one giant bin. The factory then sorts that into metals, burnables, glass & whatever... it's cheaper, easier and better for everyone.

Do the machines shred? That would be an interesting advantage to machine sorting, shove an old car thru the shredder, and the glass chips go this way, the metal chunks go that way, and the plastic pieces go this way.

Maybe we don't often throw cars into the residential trash, but I could see this working with kids toys, or plastic bottles with metal caps.

Here's a good video of a modern plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzqP5pnOF0

Its much older than 50 years, thinking about thermodynamic cycles and power generation and all that. Its not like burning a piece of paper in 1960 magically produced more watts, or modern plastic burns cleaner than ancient wood.

It would be interesting to find a full analysis of the situation in Sweden. My guess is a lot of cheating... They don't count their labor costs because if they closed all the workers would be on welfare making the same expense, or sure we burn 10K gallons of diesel to transport 1K gallon equivalent of garbage. Everyone gets health care for free, oh hows it paid for, we all pay for it, we just don't budget for it. Sure the capex for the boilers is huge, but the local .gov paid for it so the depreciation cost is "zero" on our budget, although in the real world maybe it would cost $5M/year.

I'm just not seeing it work for a legit operation in 2013, because a legit operation in the 60s couldn't run a profit while totally disregarding environmental issues, not seeing how paying $4/gallon for gas instead of fifty cents and actually caring about the environment suddenly makes the budget swing positive.

You can run a .gov project and even issue pretend financial statements, but the laws of thermodynamics are not to be denied.

Climate change is alarming enough, and has been for long enough that I don't get responses such as these. Wikipedia says a 747 rates 91 passenger-miles per US gallon. We need big changes to the energy supply system that will be incredibly difficult to attain. We don't need irrational responses. The hard problem is to de-couple energy from coal and oil from wealth. Without accomplishing that, air travel won't matter one way or the other.

And what is the carbon footprint of VTC/telecommuting? I agree that travel by flight is ridiculously efficient compared to cars (and also ridiculously safer), but this guy did an analysis of his own carbon footprint and decided that the biggest chunk was his flying.

All that said, I can heartily agree that we need to find a way around depending on coal and oil, both as wealth and fuel. I can't wait for the day to get a driverless electric car.

Air travel do matter and there is nothing irrational in doing our best to decrease it. Just because Americans first compare it with cars that is the most inefficient way to travel doesn't mean that air travel is efficient compared to busses, trains or boats. (Also, 91 passenger miles per gallon is slightly less than me and my wife gets when travelling in our Prius together.)

The point is that we have to learn to live with travelling much less. Both me and my wife are scientists, and we have become used to 2-4 intercontinental trips (back and forth) per person and year for conferences and collaborations. That contributes much more to our total carbon footprint than everything else we do summed together. It just have to stop.

OK, but that may say more about the limits of carbon reduction in discretionary actions by individual consumers than about air travel as a problem. At some point you have to start transforming the supply balance at a significantly faster pace than demand growth, or you can't make a dent in the absolute components of coal and oil in the energy supply, nor will carbon-conscious consumers like you be able to achieve further savings.

We must do both. Of course we need to change how our energy is produced, but we must also decrease the amount of energy we consume at the same time. Otherwise we have no chance to succeed.

And of course I am know very well that what I and my wife do is just a piss in the sea. The point is that it is much easier to argue that you should do your part to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases you are responsible for, and even support legislations that forces you to, if we already have done our part and a little more. It would be much easier for the US to ask China to do something about their greenhouse gases if the US per capita emission wasn't something like 4 times as high as China's.

New people are convinced of its truth or severity every day. As usual, there's an xkcd for it: http://xkcd.com/1053/

Anyone else get auto redirected from Salon to Candy Crush Saga in the app store (on iphone)?

I don't want this to sound the wrong way. I certainly accept human caused climate change and all that. However, I think this is an example of how some people are just too dramatic for their own good and really should avoid quick fire social media tools.

I just flew throug SFO last week and what made me sad was the skid marks in the grass reminding me of the recent crash.

Right, and that's pretty normal.

According to what I assume is a 100% scientific pie chart the leading cause of global warming is fire. So I don't know why this guy is concerning himself with air travel.

http://i.imgur.com/AvIHovx.jpg

What do you feel that this adds to the discussion? Seriously - if you want to express yourself, please do so in a way that adds to the conversation.

(I realize that this very comment of mine also does not add anything.)

We need to throw money at this kind of stuff - http://www.gizmag.com/eads-voltair-electric-airliner/18988/

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