by Toby Young
University researchers have been branded “hypocrites” for condemning air travel as bad for the planet but then flying to conferences anyway. The Times has more.
A study found that about a third of the academics at a leading U.K. university had flown to at least one meeting in the previous year, despite a large majority expressing concerns about aviation emissions.
“There is a level of hypocrisy: academics know that flying is bad for the environment,” said Professor Jonas De Vos of UCL, the lead author of the study. “But still, we often fly to international conferences, often to [make the argument] that society should be more sustainable.”
Aviation is estimated to account for about 4% of global warming and almost all climate scientists agree that reductions in air travel would be needed to meet the 1.5ºC Paris target. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a shift to holding conferences and other events online.
However, in a study published in the journal Global Environmental Change, De Vos and his colleagues describe how flying remains “deeply embedded in how the global academic system functions”.
Aviation emissions are produced by a small minority of the global population, they add, which means they are often seen as “a particularly unjust” form of pollution. “Academics are one of the groups with privileged, yet highly unsustainable, lifestyles,” they write.
“Despite ever-increasing volumes of academic research and teaching on environmental sustainability… air transport remains a large contributor to academic carbon footprints, even among scholars researching environmental or climate topics.”
The new study provides one of the most detailed snapshots yet of the attitudes of researchers, lecturers and other university staff on flying, and how they ultimately end up travelling. More than 1,100 members of University College London filled in surveys. More than 80% of them said flying was detrimental for the planet.
He said researchers often feel pressured to travel, with presenting work at international conferences seen as necessary to win promotions and funding.
Three quarters of the academics agreed that international conferences should be organised in cities easily accessible by high-speed trains, and that trains should be cheaper and rail networks expanded. Online alternatives to traditional conferences were not seen as offering the same opportunities to network.
On the website NoFlyClimateSci.org, several climate scientists explain why they have decided to cut down on flying for work. They include Dr. Lennart de Nooijer of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who describes how he became uneasy with work travel when he realised many of his colleagues were planning to stay on for a personal holiday after a conference being held in Chile. “Isn’t part of the attraction of attending conferences and meetings the sheer pleasure of visiting other countries?” he said.
Worth reading in full.
You can read a summary of Professor De Vos’s paper in Nature here.
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But, but, their conferences are IMPORTANT. Besides it’s good to get away for a few days, isn’t it
If you’re a climate crusader, just about everything you do makes you a hypocrite.
“Greta’s petroleum-free world”
WattsUpWithThat 30 Oct 2020
In actuality, aviation travel likely has a small cooling impact especially from aerosols, though less so today as sulfur in jet fuel levels are lowered.
Nevertheless, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and Haitians will eat either, sauce or no sauce.
A Boeing 747 emits approximately 1 gallon of water per second at cruising speed, water vapor reflects surface IR. There is no slight cooling involved in aviation, it is a net positive forcing day and night.
The contrails are ice crystals which reflect incoming sunlight, but due to the low pressure these change into H2O gas. The H2O gas and CO2 absorb incoming IR radiation from the sun which results in warming of the thin air and which would not go down to warm the earth’s surface. This warm air then rises up and cools due to adiabatic expansion.
A Boeing 747-800 ER with APC takes off on a long flight with 346,000 lbs of fuel. After combustion, about 445,000 lbs of H2O and 10,874,000 lbs of CO2 would be produced.
NB: ER=Extended Range and APC=Auxiliary Power Conversion
The APC is an electrical generation system located in the tail section which supplies electricity for the plane.
The outgoing IR from the surface is reflected back to the surface by any H2O molecule in the atmosphere regardless of altitude or it’s state, there is no IR from sunlight at the lower Stratosphere. Combustion of kerosene produces an equivalent number of molecules for both CO2 and H2O, that is basic chemistry, CO2s radiative properties are irrelevant in the equation.
Contrails in my area are a damned nuisance, they merge to block out sunlight and it gets chillier.
Harold the Organic Chemist Says:
The H2O molecules do not “reflect” outgoing IR radiation. They absorb the IR and undergo rotational and vibrational excitation followed by very rapid collisional deactivation with N2 and O2 molecules. This results an increase in the velocity of the N2 and O2 molecules and a warming of air.
About 40% of the incoming sunlight is IR light, of which a portion is absorbed by H2O and CO2 molecules. The warmth of sunlight is due to IR light.
In a desert there is little H2O in the air to absorb incoming IR, the absorption of which by the surface causes it to heat up.
I live in Houston and when it decides to get 100 degrees F. it does not matter if it is cloudy or not. Deserts cool amazingly fast at night because of the lack of water vapor. My point is surface IR emissions are always occurring day and night. If you apply an ever-increasing forcing (aviation exhaust) at the top of the troposphere the surface IR has to deal with passing through that. CO2 is irrelevant because it does not matter what humanities emissions are, atmospheric CO2 levels increase by around 2.5 PPM each year and have been doing so for decades. Aviation water vapor emissions are up to around 100 billion gallons per year.
That is around or above the same amount that HT injected into the mid stratosphere. The goofy paper constructed during the 911 3 day no-fly period that concluded that contrails solar reflected vs nighttime radiative effects cancel each other, failed to consider what happens to the water vapor in the contrails after it sublimates. The tropopause is highly sensitive to water vapor and there is very little known about the effects, the worlds knowledge base on this subject is blinded by CO2.
There are numerous papers that acknowledge this, but fail to realize that Anthropogenic water vapor emissions from aviation are a much larger player than realized and explain perfectly why Earths temperature diverged from the solar trend starting in the 60’s (the start of commercial jet aviation).
ACP – Sensitivity of stratospheric water vapour to variability in tropical tropopause temperatures and large-scale transport (copernicus.org)
They enjoy getting away from the “deplorables”.
Which are worse, the hypocrites or the incredibly naive and stupid? Either way, we’re in big trouble.
“”Climate a more fundamental threat than terror – Lammy””
…climate change is a more pervasive and fundamental threat than terrorism.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62d477yg95o
David Lammy is supposedly an educated man.
“”…studied law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London and was called to the bar in 1994. “”
He is in fact a typical ‘quota’ politician of little intelligence, but he knows racism when he sees it…
“”David Lammy has apologised after accusing the BBC of being racist following its tweet which said “LIVE VIDEO: Chimney of Sistine Chapel as conclave votes for #Pope – will smoke be black or white?” Lammy replied saying: “This tweet from the BBC is crass and unnecessary. Do we really need silly innuendo about the race of the next Pope?””
https://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/03/13/mp-apologises-calling-bbc-racist-over-papal-update-black-or-white-smoke-tweet
Here Lammy claims that Henry VIII was succeeded by… Henry VII and that Marie Antoinette discovered… radiation
“ was called to the bar in 1994.”
And has been pissed ever since !!!
I’d say he’s pissed most [normal] people off.
We can but laugh at the pitiful Lammy. And now he’s our Foreign Secretary, the rest of the world will have the opportunity to laugh at him too.
Is his first name “Lame”
“Lame Lammy” sounds so… apt !
“climate change is a more pervasive and fundamental threat than terrorism.”
Should read: climate change Policy is a more pervasive and fundamental threat than terrorism.
How does one tell the difference between terrorism and climate change policy?
Does it matter if I freeze to death unnecessarily or get IUDed walking down the street unnecessarily?
At the height of 10 km where the jets fly, CO2 emissions are supposed to cool the atmosphere. During the Take- off and landing the emissions of course warm. The longer the flight the more the cooling effect.
At that high altitude, H2O and CO2 absorb incoming IR light. This results in the heating of the thin air. Any methane in the air would be burned up in the jet engines.
Aw, gee, I really didn’t want to travel but muh funding made me do it.
Anyone who has ever attended a university knows that their lecturers relish their conference get togethers wherever they might be held…. Take biology
“”Ten Science Conferences to Attend in 2023″”
Where: San Francisco, California
Where: Portland, Oregon
Where: Orlando, Florida
Where: Brighton, UK
Where: Boston, USA
Where: Glasgow, Scotland
Where: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Where: Granada, Spain
Where: Washington DC, USA
Where: Boston, USA
https://hellobio.com/blog/ten-science-conferences-to-attend-in-2023.html
That’s quite the Carbon footprint for attendees of just one subject… Now add in all the others….
Yes, that is BS. Travel is viewed as a perk and, not only from frequent flier credits, academics often use conference travel for enhancing their vacations.
So next climate soiree will be a COP-OUT ??? 😉
Aren’t they all?
I think these people need professional help.
In other news: water branded “wet”. Sky branded “blue”. Violets branded…well…”violet”.
I can’t take the “climate crisis” any more seriously than these people obviously do.
“There is a level of hypocrisy: academics know that flying is bad for the environment,” said Professor Jonas De Vos of UCL, the lead author of the study. “But still, we often fly to international conferences, often to [make the argument] that society should be more sustainable.”
************
Pull the plug on academic climate research funding. Maybe continue some funding for continued research of the natural drivers of climate.
I’ve heard it said that a sizeable percent of all scientific research papers are garbage. If that is indeed true, then there needs to be some kind of reform or mechanism put in place in the area govt funded scientific research to weed out the garbage papers. However, I imagine that it is easier said than done. Politicians will probably be loathe to change anything.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common
“When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized…”
Money corrupts, and lots of money corrupts absolutely.
“Aviation is estimated to account for about 4% of global warming”
How do people actually write this stuff? What percent of warming does cow farts contribute?
I guess there are people who actually think like this.
Good for me, bad for thee.
The whole “climate change” being man’s fault is being exposed as false. So, let ’em fly if they can find the money to do so. Just remove their credentials which were given via false pretenses. Less folks going to fewer conferences equals smaller “footprints” which don’t matter. Just sayin’.
They don’t care – they’re special.
This has been a blatantly obvious hypocrisy since the global warming scam began. Just noticing it now?
I refuse to travel for business, except if the locations of the travel suit my expectations. So Baltimore is out, but Honolulu is OK.
To the Green Blob, hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug, methinks.
An expectation. !!
I stopped reading at “all climate scientists agree”
Then you missed this gem: “Three quarters of the academics agreed that international conferences should be organised in cities easily accessible by high-speed trains, “
How many international conferences could be held in the USA if this became practice?
Ans: zero, zip, zilch, nada 🤠
These CAGW cultists can fly or not I don’t care. What they need to do is stop lying to the rest of us.
The CAGW cultists have been brain washed by the devious IPCC. The claim by the IPCC since1988 that CO2 causes global warming is deliberate lie, the purpose of which is to further UN’s objective of the distribution via the UNFCCC and the UN COP of the funds donated by all the countries to these organizations to the poor and developing countries. The IPCC is also funded by donations.
The amounts of the donated funds is many, many of millions of dollars.
If they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
Scholars in Europe traveled frequently from the time of Isaac Newton (late 1600s). The Danish city, Copenhagen, has given the name to the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics. It was one of several centers of science advancement.
Thus, there is nothing new about academics traveling, only the scale, planes, cost, and CO2 are new.
How and who pays is a little different and that, I think, is what bothers many.
Since 70% earth’s surface is covered with water, the brainy academic researchers should have figured out from square one that H2O is the main greenhouse gas and that since CO2 is minor trace greenhouse gas, it can’t cause any global warming.
How is it possible that the IPCC has been fooling “most of the scientists most of the time and all environmentalist all the time”?