Guardian Continues To Spread Misinformation About Eyjafjallajokull

Excellent rebuttal. So simple, so effective, so beyond the grasp of a Guardian journalist.

Specious sources would, in my opinion, include Woods Hole Institute.

“The Guardian story claims that there have been 2.8 million tons of savings, and the math doesn’t work out. At the time the story was written there had been six days of grounded flights. 206,465 tons/day X 6 days = 1.2 million tons, not 2.8 million tons.”
I calculate that for 5.5 days of grounded flights aircraft related emissions would be reduced by between 2 and 2.9m tonnes for CO2 (depending on what figures are used). I even think these figures are optimistic. Given 29,000 flights/day and average sector length of 2hrs and an average consumption of 4 tonnes/hr I suspect the higher end of the range seems more realistic.
However, due to the lack of infrastructure between the endpoints as well as the highly scalable and flexible nature of aviation, as a total package aviation is the most efficient means of transport on Earth. As you say, rescuing people with ships, cars and trains (that run empty most of the day) is going to cost more.

Sadly, most journalists are innumerate. Even publications in their own field say journalists should never be allowed alone, in a room, with numbers. Remember, most are English or journalism majors and self chose those fields, in part, because they did not like thinking mathematically. Journalism schools teach reporters to try and edit out as many numbers as possible – which often results in articles that are sheer gibberish.
As of the 2005-2006 academic year, the Accrediting Council for Journalism and Mass Communications Schools adopted its first ever math recommendation that “graduates should … be able to” “apply basic numerical and statistical concepts”. This means basic arithmetic, percentages, averages and that is about it.
Consequently, journalists typically embarrass themselves when presented with numbers.

stevengoddard (20:37:25) : — Doug in Seattle (20:32:34) : One thing for sure, Woods Hole…
Side note: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory.
There is a world of difference that is easy to miss in a cursory glance. Think: mistletoe; the common name for a group of hemi-parasitic plants that grow attached to and within the branches of a tree or shrub. Or perhaps leech?

To defend the Grauniad, I got the same result intially based on the SO2 data and the typical SO2/CO2 ratio, and building upon the estimates of the emissions during the first eruption in March. It just happened that the April eruption was bigger at least by one order of magnitude.
I still think it’s fair to say that the “saved” CO2 emissions from the airplanes are comparable to the CO2 emitted by the volcano in the same time – and both of them are negligible. Their effect on the climate is not really worth taking about because it’s in microkelvins.

@AEGeneral (21:23:55) :
>>“Eyjafjallajokull,” on the other hand….gimme an abbreviation….something….anything….<<
Eyjafjallajokull = Are ya feeling loco?
Eyjafjallajokull = Eyes fill a skull full
Eyjafjallajokull = Ah we're all fulla jokes, y'all

According to the USGS, Hot Spot volcanoes (like Iceland) produce huge amounts of CO2. Kilauea produces more CO2 than H2O.
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php

Volcano
Tectonic Style
Temperature 	Kilauea Summit
Hot Spot
1170°C 	Erta` Ale
Divergent Plate
1130°C 	Momotombo
Convergent Plate
820°C
H20 	37.1 	77.2 	97.1
C02 	48.9 	11.3 	1.44
S02 	11.8 	8.34 	0.50
H2 	0.49 	1.39 	0.70
CO 	1.51 	0.44 	0.01
H2S 	0.04 	0.68 	0.23
HCl 	0.08 	0.42 	2.89
HF 	--- 	--- 	0.26

AEGeneral (21:23:55) :
““Eyjafjallajokull,” on the other hand….gimme an abbreviation….something….anything….”
Ancient Norse/Icelandic isn’t my strong side, but here is my suggestion:
“Eyjafjallajokull” – pronounced “eya-fialla-yoecull”
Anglofication – “Island-Mountain-Glacier”
Any Icelanders around to confirm this?

Just found this from a poster named dot_bust, on Wed, 04/21/2010 – 16:18, at zerohedge.com:
Eyjafjallajokull [snip]
———–
AP says “Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl)”
AP also worries about “an even more dangerous eruption at the nearby Katla volcano” which would help. Kat-la.

Eyjafjallajokull = Eyja mountain glacier (translatedish)= Eyja M.G.
How’s that?

Or you could try: I yaf yalla yerkel. Jays are whys.
The name Eyjafjallajökull is made up of the words eyja (genitive plural of ey, meaning eyot or island), fjalla (genitive plural of fjall, whose nominative plural is fjöll, meaning fells or mountains) and jökull (meaning glacier, cognate with the -icle in icicle). A literal translation would thus be the “island-fells glacier” or the “island-mountains glacier”. Wikipedia.

Has anyone placed a link in the comments to this article? did it even make moderation? (my guess is no).
I stopped buying newspapers along time again when i realised they stopped reporting news and started reporting anything that made a good story!
I’ll be gutted when they place the pay wall on the Times though.

“The BBC estimated that these other modes of transport generate as much CO2 as the planes would have.”
The BBC estimated…

Lubos Motl,
“I still think it’s fair to say that the “saved” CO2 emissions from the airplanes are comparable to the CO2 emitted by the volcano in the same time – and both of them are negligible.”
Maybe so, but I would say a large number, possibly the majority, of travellers are still stranded abroad and awaiting flights. What happens to the equations when all these extra flights are factored in.
BTW, I don’t understand the point of the Gaurdian article anyway. Are they saying that Volcanoes are a good thing because they bring aviation to a halt?

It would be an interesting attitudinal and linguistic exercise to analyse said Guardian article and the responses drawn from Guardian followers (i am unsure that ‘reader’ would be a correct definition). In my view, the more evidence emerges that a considerable volume of AGW pronouncements are not a product of any actual branch of science but of advocacy groups, the shriller and more vituperative the comments of Guardianistas become.

The Guardian is nothing more than a propaganda outlet for the government. It’s taken sometime to figure that out. The Guardian is setup to target the middle class with propaganda and dis/misinformation. If only the middle class new that in the long run, it will be the end of them.

In re alternate travel choices during the grounding
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/04/markets-in-everything-5000-taxi-ride.html
John Cleese of Monty Python fame took a $5100 cab ride from Oslo to Brussels. CO2 contribution not mentioned.

The petagrams diagram would be much more powerful if the boxes were sized in proportion to the numbers displayed.
Nice post. And as you rightly pointed out, we now have the volcano AND the planes AND the extra ferries, so big fat raspberry to the innumerate Gurardian.

Well, I opined on this site a few days ago that it was just possible that a green conspiracy was trying to keep the planes out of the air to bankrupt them.
I note the EU is saying that all airlines must pay all expenses of stranded passengers, which will mean:
i. Higher fares for all as airlines need to stockpile a cash chest for a future thing.
ii. A number of airlines shifting toward Chapter 11 or the EU likewise.
iii. A clear signal from the EU that it is looking to hound airlines.
That measure was designed for the odd cancelled flight due to a plane going wrong and no spare being around at that time, inclement weather e.g. snow at a couple of airports grounding flights etc.
It was not designed for things like this.
And the fact the EU is saying it won’t change regulations is worrying.
All I know is, within 24 hours of me saying it might be a green plot, Willie Walsh starting flying planes to England and got the media going.
Well done Willie Walsh.
Flying is a good thing.
Cheap, safe flying has emancipated the people of Europe.
Is that the single most dangerous threat to Eurocrats in the 21st century????

You forgot to add in all the CO2 expelled by politicians, journos, members of the public, with all the adrenalin pumping round their systems through the excitement of it all! Must run to Zillions of tons! On top of that you have to add in all the CO2 & hot air generated by the UK’s General Election campaigning!

“Eyjafjallajokull,” on the other hand….gimme an abbreviation….something….anything….
Eyva – from the same root as “is” in is-land (land of an island).
Fjalla – from the same root as “fell”
JÖKULL, diminutive of jaki, same root as Anglo Saxon. gecele which in its variant gicel was formed to give îs-gicel, whence English icicle. Note also: kul-víss, adjective: sensitive to cold.
gecele an icicle relates to ge-célan (To make cold, to cool). ge- is common prefix so ge-célan is related to célan (to cool) from same root at céle,(A cold, coldness) from which we get the modern “chill” (c->ch)
It’s also worth noting the “is” of island was spelt exactly the same as “eye” in Old English.
From which I would suggest the ultimate Anglicised pronunciation would be:
Eye-fell-You-cool

Re: JAN (23:17:52) :
“Eyjafjallajokull” – pronounced “eya-fialla-yoecull”
—
I saw a couple of YT clips where locals were saying it, and they say it fast with some ‘ch’ sounds in it. Sounded a bit like “eya-fiatchla-yoeclutch”, but if/when Katla joins in, news readers will no doubt breath a sigh of relief.

“Fire and Ice”
[…]
“In 1988, health minister Edwina Currie almost destroyed Britain’s egg industry when she said that salmonella in eggs might cause a human catastrophe – only for it to be later discovered that salmonella could not get into eggs.
In 1996, Britain spent £7 billion killing millions of the nation’s cows in response to the alleged threat of CJD killing humans eating burgers made from cattle infected by BSE. We now know that the likelihood of this was almost infinitesimally slight.
In 2009, the government spent £1 billion on unneeded vaccines against swine flu, which we were told might kill half a million people. The SARS virus, said some ‘experts’, could prove more devastating to humanity than Aids. It was once suggested that bird flu might kill 150 million people worldwide.
University of Chicago Professor Frank Knight described the distinction between risk and uncertainty in these words. “Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated…. The essential fact is that ‘risk’ means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character … It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.” In other words, Knight wanted to differentiate between risks we could measure and those which we could not estimate. Donald Rumsfeld conveyed the same idea much more eloquently and comprehensively.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.”
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/04/22/fire-and-ice/#comments

Re Gregg E: Surely Tigers Hole would fall under Tiger the Golfers prerogative, in whichever of its many connotations.
The thing with Grauniad is that it is not, and was never intended to be, a beacon of truth and neutrality, however much it strives to purport itself that way. It is a commercial paper that is owned and sponsored by someone and that someone has their own angle and agenda to push. I would very much like there to be an office of a media ombudsman who would dish out fines for grossly yet consistently inaccurate claims made in the public domain, very much like in Grauniad’s case. It goes without saying however that such an office would soon be abused, likely for the same purpose this blog is fighting against. Unless lies printed therein can be assaulted using the otherwise much abused UK libel laws, the paper can spread disinformation all they like. Such is the price of the freedom of expression.

“Eyjafjallajokull,” on the other hand….gimme an abbreviation….something….anything….
How about “Volcano E15”? Simple yet technical sounding, the E15 indicates the first letter in the name, followed by 15 more letters. 😉

The left wing British press believe it is acceptable to lie if it serves the ‘greater good’ (or ensures their flatulent Hackney-centric eco-pundits keep getting invited to trendy dinner parties). In the case of AGW it is not even seen as necessary to print a retraction when lies are exposed (I stopped buying the Independent after their ‘Northwest Passage open for the first time’ BS). The right wing British press believe it is acceptable to lie in order to sell more newspapers. AGW gives them infinitely extendible scare copy to terrorise readers over morning tea – fits in nicely beside the ‘*insert item* causes / cures cancer’ garbage.
If everything the British press claimed in the past were true, the entire UK population would be dead by now from brain-eating Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease caused by our taste for hamburgers. We’d be dead again from catastrophic outbreaks of Bird Flu, SARS, Ebola and Swine Flu. Our children would be suffering an autism epidemic brought on by the MMR vaccine. Planes would have fallen out of the sky on January 1st 2000 surrounded by atomic mushroom clouds as the millennium bug ravaged our computer systems. If all that didn’t get us, Saddam Hussain’s supposed WMDs would have wiped us out in 45 minutes (the press, not just the Government were complicit in that claim). And of course, by 2006, Winter snowfalls would have been a thing of the past.
UK national newspapers are facing financial ruin (the Guardian is currently on its deathbed). Editors and proprietors wring their hands and blame the internet for usurping traditional journalism, but the real reason for dwindling sales is the disappearance of journalistic standards. The British public are getting tired of speculation reported as fact by pundits with an axe to grind and lazy hacks filling column inches from blogs, TV news feeds and their own imagination, and they are voting with their feet.
The CAGW fixation is the final death rattle of the British national press, and I can’t say I’ll miss it when it’s gone.

The Long Valley Caldera in California emits enough CO2 to kill trees on Mammoth Mountain.
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/lvo/activity/monitoring/co2.php
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/lvo/activity/monitoring/images/treekilb.jpg
The volcano is not erupting, but still emits over 30,000 tons of CO2 per year.

ScientistForTruth (01:31:51)
Now that they have Google, journalists can publish the first numbers that pop up on their screen and attribute them to experts.
I remember in the early 1970s The Guardian published a well researched piece describing the “first atomic bomb blast at Los Alamos.” I wondered at the time if any of the scientist’s spouses were annoyed at their husband for blowing up nukes in the backyard.

Ref – JAN (23:17:52) :
AEGeneral (21:23:55) :
““Eyjafjallajokull,” on the other hand….gimme an abbreviation….something….anything….”
_____________________________
“Eyekull”

JJB (05:23:09) :
The left wing British press believe it is acceptable to lie if it serves the ‘greater good’
UK national newspapers are facing financial ruin (the Guardian is currently on its deathbed). Editors and proprietors wring their hands and blame the internet for usurping traditional journalism, but the real reason for dwindling sales is the disappearance of journalistic standards….
The CAGW fixation is the final death rattle of the British national press, and I can’t say I’ll miss it when it’s gone.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Very few newspapers now a days pay anymore attention to the truth than the “National Enquirer” and they are not half as entertaining. My Father-in-law, owner of a small newspaper, commented the only thing you can believe in a newspaper is the sports scores. He also said the only newspapers here in the USA that stay close to the truth are the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.

That USGS page on volcanoes has some spurious links – no one can track down the Gerlach paper as the link links back on itself and it was 1991 anyway.
The other evening on the late night ABC radio they had a leading volcanologist from Leicester University – Dr Mike Branney discussing the eruption and answering questions on volcanoes. One of the listeners asked him how much CO2 did a volcano emit. His reply was – we don’t know, no one has managed to accurately measure it. He’s currently leading a team researching Yellowstone.

Mike Haseler (08:00:37) : “Danish, Swedish and to a less extent Norwegian and pronounced roughly in line with how they are written. But from what little Icelandic I’ve heard it seems to be very much a insular Norse dialect were there is very little resemblance between what is spoken and what is written.”
I would say that Danish is the Scandinavian language whose pronunciation has departed the most from the written language.
Anyway, yes, Icelandic orthography is roughly the same as it was 800 years ago, while the pronunciation has changed quite a bit. It’s kind of like if English had kept its orthography from before the great vowel shift. Oh, wait…

Paul Clark (12:40:04) :
Venus has a very dense, high pressure atmosphere. PV = nRT
High pressure means high temperature. Just like on earth, where surface temperatures are as much as 90C warmer than temperatures at 35,000 feet.

Pictures (graphics) worth a thousand words?
Here are some links to “Eykull” (pronounced ‘Eye-kull’) that you may not have seen yet and that will keep you up to date on what is happening, at least graphically.
Main with all links at –
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/
Tremor Activity –
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/gosplott.html
Seismic Activity –
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/eyja_uppsafn.html
PS: Secret to Icelandic pronunciation for anyone not from Iceland or the Great Northwest of Europa: Take the first 2 or 3 letters in the local name and add these to the last 4 letters (“Eyjafjallajokull” = “Ey” + “kull” {pronounced ‘eye-kull’}).

Airlines are running extra flights as fast as they can to catch up with the backlog. All that extra CO2……..
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article7107033.ece

Here you can see how this story is spread to MSM in the western world;
This is in VG, the biggest tabloid in Norway;
http://translate.google.no/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=no&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vg.no%2Fnyheter%2Fvaer%2Fartikkel.php%3Fartid%3D10004233&sl=no&tl=en
They dont dare to give the name of the journalist. They only say its from “NTB” (Norwegian Telegram Bureau) which can be compared to Reuters.
They are hammering in the AGW message. No logic, no data. They just have a “feeling” its so. Therefore it is possibly so. And later in the minds of the reader, it IS so.
Goebbels tactics.

stevengoddard and Ric Werme thanks for the replies. I agree the temperature on Venus appears to be related to pressure. Like on Earth average temperature and pressure decreases with altitude for some kilometres up. Yet, it doesn’t explain that thermal gradient with altitude.
PV = nRT is useful for changes such as a gas container that doubles in size. But, in nearer-equilibrium situations such as the Earth’s atmosphere pressure needn’t have anything to do with temperature.
Put it this way: shouldn’t the high temperature and pressure of the Venusian atmosphere repel itself thus expanding its volume? And shouldn’t the air below eventually warm the air above? Why doesn’t gravity determine the amount of air a planet gets? I have heard the theory that rock absorbs the extra air pressure on Earth compared to Venus, but 92 atm difference?! That’s a lot!