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Today the Bow Bells will chime 350 times to mark an International Day of Concern about Global warming. Might take quite some time. And hopefully give many pause to think. Many are left more than a little bemused by the various claims made about the climate and who is doing what to whom. The press in an allegedly high minded attempt to achieve balance seems to print back to back articles by doom sayers and climate skeptic which serves to confuse rather than inform. Some actually seem more bent on inflaming the debate than informing or analyzing. An example is the local Australian Provocateur Andrew Bolte in the Sun Herald.
For what it is worth I have been running thru the literature with a view to reaching some sort of understanding. My qualifications are: an interest and a rather stale PhD from a good university in an unrelated field of Science so make of this what you will.
Once one start trolling thru the literature it emerges that there is a consensus that is truly impressive. The globe is warming and man has contributed to this. The closer the area of expertise of the sources is to climate the more there is the agreement. When the arguments of the skeptics are examined they seem to all be readily shot down. The longer it goes on the more the persistent skeptics seem to be willfully blind and self serving (IMHO).
This being so what are we to think? Well one thing is that we better nudge the political apparatus into a much more vigorous form of action and another is that those with an interest in any particular area should get into the action and start consciousness raising. For Aviation this means getting on the green bandwagon and pushing for more rational ways of achieving our goals.
Aviation is here to stay. It is hard to imagine that the world will relapse back into surface only transport but maybe we need to be more thoughtful about how it is done and what travels by air and when. For a variety of reasons expert propulsion engineers see Hydrocarbons as the drug of choice for large and fast passenger aeroplanes and see that it will be so for some time. Considerations like energy density and the problems of alternative suggest that if hydrocarbons are to be used at all applications such as air transport are the appropriate ones. For many applications however some lateral thinking is going to be necessary. Maybe we should resurrect sail power for freight. Maybe the age of the airship is here again? Maybe many things but for sure one of them is we should think long and hard and also act decisively and early. Mutually contradictory but that is life. My expert friends tell me that capitalism will solve it all. The market will ensure all the necessary trade offs will take place. I fear not. The market seems not to be able to see very far into the future and increasingly the Scientists tell us that the longer we wait the worse it will be. Certainly the market will respond eventually but it could be a tragedy for much of humanity if we wait for that sort of regulation by catastrophe to take place.