Flying on holiday is a sin....................does it make you feel guilty

[zippitippitoes]

so says the Bishop of london as the church of England brings forward a plan to encourage everyone to step lighter on the planet

are you justified in flying abroad on holiday?

this is starting to remind me of the 4x4 debatate with similar posturing by some!

Haven't read more than the first few posts but probably the bishop of London has not yet heard of Global Dimming... if he had he would advise to keep flying! (apparently global warming effect are far worse than we believe but the effect of jet released steam on the atmosphere is reducing the effect of Sun rays over the planet!)

So... keep sinning we are damned if we stop we are also if we don't.

LOL. Yes, global warming is all down to me. I am quite an ethical consumer actually. I try to do my bit. I don't have a "I make no difference" attitude, but I do think it's easy to put pressure on the private consumers and forget about the big fish who really make the difference.A bit like the water companies making out the consumers are just showering too much. Look at their profit and their leakages.....
I am hardly going to stop flying home to see my family. I happen to have a disabled sister I help care for. I have other friends who fly frequently to care for elderly and sick parents. I am sure the bishop would approve of looking out for people in your family. He is partly right of course, but to call people sinners for going on holiday abroad? I think the bishop needs a good beach holiday in Ibiza myself (in a nice air con flat).

lol

I cant afford to buy from farmers markets. But I try to buy only European fresh produce when its in season.
I once read that a kilo of kiwis from new zealand makes a kilo of co2 to bring them to europe. Dont know if that is true or just a handy headline figure, but it is an easy way to cut down flying. And I dont fly on holiday, because I cant afford holidays.
Really, who needs strawberries in winter??

Only read the OP.

I'd love to be able to justify flying abroad on holiday.

I'd love to go on holiday.

No, no, no, I'll not have it - put your violins away, I tell you!

That article is so infuriating. Well if I'm a sinner for flying on holiday then so be it.

I do not feel guilty about driving or flying or wasting electricity by spending hours on the computer when I could be doing something else & I will not be made to feel guilty.

The government does do something - there are many legislation I believe for factory emissions etc etc etc

What about all the other things that are causing pollution - factories, those who still have coal fires, central heating, trains, boats, etc etc etc. Surely they should all be blamed as well as flying?

Perhaps we should suggest that we should stop people like the RAF flying and the red cross flying aid out to poorer areas due to air pollution? Yes that's a very extreme suggestion, but so is the one in that article.

Mind you I guess you have to believe in sin to be a sinner.

Chandra just read your post. I've heard that planes create vapours or something that blocks the suns rays out in a similar way to clouds. (That was a long time ago I heard that so probably not very technically rememberered!)

sorry, but that sounds to me like a red herring created by the aviation industry. Even if its a genuine effect, it must be small and temporary compared to the more permanent effect of all the CO2.

Blondilocks, there is more about global dimming here

P.S. Airplanes emissions (those cloudlike lines in the sky) are described in the site as contrails.

I feel increasingly anxious for the world DS will bring his children up in - with a mixture of whatever the effects will be of increasing emissions etc, AND an oil crisis. I can see DC's blade of grass analogy - but whatever effect we can't quite decise it will be, it will almost certainly have difficulties - and may lead to war in the case of a global oil crisis. (well, it has already, hasn't it, and that's just price, noy bottom line availability).

We are moving house so that DS can walk to school, and I don't think we will be going on holidays that involve flying - although we will fly to visit dp's parents once every 3 years or so.

I am fed up with stuff, with high-tech entertainments, by the fact that kids 'need' so much energy using stuff, by the fact that more and more people 'need' hot tubs, 4x4s, jet ski bikes, electric gadgets to do what muscles can do easily and effectively. It really depresses me. I'm not a 'live in a croft and be self-sufficient' type, but I find myself becoming a little greener every day. Yes, thames water and thier bloody leaks infuriate me, but I'm not going to stand around arguing whose worse with my hopepipe swilling away.

The Big Companies WILL take notice if they see trends within thier customers. Their competitive success lies in following the trend. So lets set it!

Chandra - haven't looked at the site you linked to (just about to!) but I thought that contrails are not actual emissions, they are caused by upper air instability (GCSE Meteorology!) ie like mini clouds hence some days you get long contrails (lots of upper air instability) and some days v. short contrails.

I can only apologise for that thoroughly dull and pointless post - I nearly fell asleep just re-reading it

NO need to apologise Betty, I saw the Horizon program (which left my normally cynical self reeling about the incoming end of the world for three days) and today I just skimmed through the site and wikipedia.

The average car does 7-8 miles per liter whereas an average short haul a/c does about 10 miles per liter of fuel when you work it back, per liter per person per mile, and aircraft like the A380 are far more efficient per person per mile again!. It is still a very economical way of travel. Also the fuel used by aviation jets is a far cleaner burning fuel than used by cars and truck, it produces less particulate per ton (ESP AGAINST DIESEL)! So before you start battering the airline industry and having your say I suggest you do some research and stop speculating, which is a very typical thing for people not in the know do. Everyone, including the media, is quick to say what they think about the airline industry, whereas most of you know very little. You should consult people in the know before stating what you consider to be a fact.
Going back to the A380, as far as aircraft are concerned bigger is better for fuel economy. For example an aircraft which carries 400 people will not use twice the fuel require for a 200 seater aircraft. This therefore is better for the economy and environment. And for those of you who were not aware, Concorde when flying at 60,000ft and mach 2 increased the north Atlantic upper atmosphere circulation which has subsequently decreased since its demise and possibly resulting in the jet streams movement and a change to the Azores High pressure systems movement more over the UK (i.e. hotter for longer)
Aviation is used as an easy target at the moment, everyone has an opinion but not many people actually understand the bigger picture of the industry. I personally agree with one NASA scientist who in his studies believes that the earth is in it?s usually geostationary orbit corrections towards the sun, and then eventually away from the sun (IE the Ice Ages which happen a regular intervals throughout history!!). There wasn?t any cars and aircraft when the earth warmed up as it passed the last ice age, but I?m sure if we were there then some over opinionated scare mongers would say ?it?s us, all out fault, it?s all those camp fires keeping us warm?. And if you look back on these predications (which always make there way into certain newspapers which would have you believe that it written by aliens and earthlings are the problem and scum!) then the world should have ended at the millennium and we?d all be driving around in cars that fly by now.

Mr Blondilocks

"There wasn?t any cars and aircraft when the earth warmed up as it passed the last ice age, but I?m sure if we were there then some over opinionated scare mongers would say ?it?s us, all out fault, it?s all those camp fires keeping us warm?."

yeah - remember King Canute?

Mrs Beef

George darling? is it you talking from the White House?

I believe the problem are the cows... too much methane released into the atmosphere

Interesting about the geostationary orbit thing.

We've also got proof of fairly huge wobbles in the location Earth's magnetic north too, even to completely reversing its polarity in a very short space of time.

There's still an awful lot we don't understand about solar sunspot cycles and how that affects our temperatures and weather cycles.

Geologically we're on a pretty volatile piece of rock.

And if we manage to deal with all that and escape getting hit by a very large asteroid, precipitating huge tsunamis and a long nuclear winter, we're home free...

Blondilocks, asking the airlines if they are major polluters is like asking saddam if he is guilty of war crimes.

Fairymum

GeroginA's entirely right. We keep finding even worse things. Yellowstone is actually a supervolcano, all those hot springs & geysers are a sign of very hot rock near the surface. When it goes, everything in N.America dies.
We see what looks like a pattern to large scale extinctions. We don't know what causes them, but anything that kills >80% of life on Earth can be assumed to be bad.
The Tsunamis we seem ay be tragic, but we know that vastly higher ones have happened.
Heat may be bad, but the ice over the Lake District was several miles deep in the last ice age.
The Moon is probably the result of the Earth being hit by something the size of Mars, and both melting and flying to bits.

The Gaia effect is not just some sort of God substitute for Greens with grossly defective educations. It's a real and testable model, and certianly fits lots of known facts.
It has gone wrong at leastr once that we know of.
The Earth originally had an atmosphere of methane and CO2. The first life arose in this. CO2 and CH4 are "reducing", basically they do not support anything like combustion, or animal metabolism as we know it. The Earth was covered in life that liked it that way.
One day, one of the plants mutated to produce something vaguely like chlorphyl.
It started to produce oxygen from CO2. Although we take this as a fact of life, it is in fact a highly wasteful thing to do.
However, O2 is very highly toxic to anaerobic life , and the effect was not unlike if sea plants started to release hydrochloric acid from the salt water.
The theory is that very nearly everything on Earth died, except the first plan, and a few microbes like botulism, which managed to hide inside rotting life. Even now it can be killed by oxygen, and modern plants mostly still haven't quite got used to the "new" atmosphere which is why they grow so rapidly is you give them ammonia based fertiliser or increase the availability of carbon dioxide.

I don't know much about the science of this global warming thing, but you have to admit that going to Milan, Prague, etc, for the weekend has to be frivolous. I know many people who do this sort of thing, for the cost of around £100. I also know people who own houses/flats in Florida and also in Spain, Portugal and France. The European house owners fly sometimes every weekend - again, totally frivolous to my mind - why do we Brits have this total obsession with owning property? Personally, I would find it rather boring to have to go on holiday to the same place each year and have all the up keep associated with a second home.

Just my opinion, but it does annoy me when I hear people "showing off" about how much they contribute to the death of our planet and expect me to be impressed. (ie, by showing off about their home abroad and flying there every bloody weekend)

Blu - just read your post - I couldn't agree more. I too am fed up with all the stupid useless gadgets - flat screen tvs - playstation portables, etc. What are they for and where do we put them? We are rampant consumers who are eating up the world. It is capitalism gone totally mad - I sound like a Marxist. Some of my friends kids have a tv, a dvd player, a pc, a playstation 1 and 2, xbox and games cube(?) in their rooms. We are turning our kids into robots. What is wrong with lego and meccano? Why do we feel that we have to buy our children these things? Rant over!