Under the volcano

On a clear day from here you can normally see at any one time two or three vapour trails from transatlantic jets at 35,000 feet on their way to London's airports. For five days there have been none. The weather has been fine and the sky blue, so blue that it's easy to doubt whether the density of dust from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland poses any real threat to aviation, or whether it is just bureaucrats being over-cautious.

Whatever the risk, the aviation ban is real and there can be no-one in Britain who has not been affected by it one way or another. The first effect we noticed was when we went to a classical music concert last Friday in Carlisle. The piano soloist was unable to get there so the Mozart piano concerto was played by a stand-in.

I received an email from one Hong Kong eBay seller to tell me that the programming interface for the Motorola radio I bought at Blackpool which I ordered from him would take longer to arrive. I expect other items I have ordered from eBay and elsewhere, including a transmitter module for my dedicated Echolink node radio, will be similarly delayed, as there is no air mail. We take for granted that we can order things from China or the USA and have them in a few days. Not any longer.

Friends of ours who are due to return from Ukraine tomorrow are probably not going to be able to make it unless London Luton airport is miraculously opened. They are due to return to work on Thursday and are very anxious not to provide their employers with an excuse to terminate their contracts.

That's the situation now, but with seismologists saying that the volcano could continue to erupt off and on for the next year or two and even suggesting that another, larger Icelandic volcano is due for an eruption, what is the future for the airline industry? If there's a high probablility of getting stranded abroad like so many people are now, how many are going to decide to change their travel plans and stay close to home for the next few months? I will, for sure.

I dare say canny investors will be selling airline shares and investing in shipping. And I don't suppose it will be long before the first package holiday companies start going bankrupt because of all the refunds and cancellations. Like the banking collapse, I think this is another event that is going to have permanent repercussions.

Trust Nature to cut us down to size. We humans think we are so powerful we can end global warming, yet in a few hours the earth achieved what governments alone could never have managed - a complete grounding of aviation. I suspect that a really big volcanic eruption could have a bigger impact on global climate than any of the measures agreed by the politicians.

More hot air about global warming

I have been trying not to get too annoyed about the vast expense and amount of hot air being talked at the climate change summit in Copenhagen. But one thing I read yesterday made me really angry. There are proposals to cut the amount of flying by increasing air taxes and even by flight rationing. A British government minister apparently told a BBC reporter that an inevitable effect would be to make flying unaffordable for poorer people. And this from a minister in a supposedly "socialist" government!

Britain is an island, and unless you live in the south east within easy reach of the Channel Tunnel, flying is the only way to get out of the place. I am someone who likes to feel the warmth of the sun on my body, and flying is the only practical way to get to places where that is possible. It is also necessary for one's sanity sometimes to get away from English small town life and experience a different culture. In short, the ability to travel by air is a vital element of my quality of life and I will fight like hell if anyone tries to take it away from me.

I don't understand why the climatologists are fixated on air travel being the major cause of climate change. It seems to stem from a hair shirt environmental asceticism that demands that you suffer in order to achieve something. It may even have something to do with extremist left wing views that flying, like owning big gas guzzling cars, is something the rich do and must be stopped for that reason. Ironically, if flying and fuel are made more expensive, only the rich will be able to carry on doing it.

Figures you can easily find on the web show that the carbon emissions of a full modern aircraft, per passenger, are approximately the same per mile as that of a small family car. True, people travel longer distances by air, but most people also make air journeys far less often. Most of us cannot live in the places we like to visit on holiday so the flights we do make are essential to our well-being. But many people could live nearer work. So if the aim is really to cut carbon emissions why is nothing done to curb the unnecessary commuter journeys of people who drive an hour or more each day to and from the workplace?

The eco movement seems fixated on certain symbols of alleged waste yet fails to tackle the real problem. For example plastic bags are now considered bad for the environment. There has been talk of taxing them, and many supermarkets now charge instead of giving them free to customers. Yet the amount of plastic in a bag is only a fraction of that in the packaging of all the products that will be carried inside it. What is being done about that? Precisely nothing.

People are encouraged to turn off TVs, PCs and other equipment at the wall socket instead of leaving them, each consuming a couple of watts of power, on stand-by. Yet no-one seems to have realized that this often just isn't practical. Only a couple of days ago I bought a new radio tuner with wi-fi capability that can play audio from MP3 files on a server on my hi-fi system. If you switch it off overnight it forgets all its laboriously entered settings. Same with the DVD recorder - the clock resets to zero and it loses all the TV channels. If there was any joined-up thinking in government then surely by now the manufacture and sale of products that need to be left on stand-by would be illegal?

What about all the unnecessary waste caused by discarding electronic products because they are simply last year's model. My mobile phone company could not understand why I would not upgrade my phone, for free, after my 18 month contract expired, because the old one still worked perfectly and did everything I needed.

How many still-working computers have you thrown away just because they wouldn't run the latest version of Windows? There is nothing, NOTHING that I personally use a PC for that could not be done on Windows 95, were it not for the fact that many applications now require at least Windows 2000. But I definitely do not need Windows Vista or Windows 7. There is nothing they do that I need. But many people are convinced that they do and so vast numbers of perfectly functional computers, produced at a cost of vast amounts of carbon dioxide, are thrown away, worthless. Should people have to pay more for their holidays while waste of this nature still occurs? It doesn't seem right to me.

Regular readers of my soapbox rants will know I am a climate change skeptic. But I do, actually, believe that we should conserve the resources of this planet, and have done since long before the term "global warming" was invented.

However I think that any measures introduced to encourage conservation of resources for the good of the planet must be fair for all. The less well off and the undeveloped nations should not have to make the greatest sacrifices, and ordinary people should not have to pay more for their two weeks in the sun while so many other wasteful uses of energy continue unabated.

Taking the heat on global warming

Fellow QRP enthusiast Larry W2LJ has been taking some flak for expressing doubt that humans are entirely to blame for global warming. I expressed my own opinion some time ago in an article "The Great Global Warming Hoax". I am in total agreement with former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, who argues that current policies regarding climate change are completely misguided in his book "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming". Lawson shows that there are many reasons to doubt current theories, but that even if they turn out to be true, the cost of the measures that are proposed to prevent climate change would be much greater than the cost of adapting to the consequences of it. Given that we now face a global recession, isn't it time we all took a long hard look at this "inconvenient truth"?

I'm not going to waste time arguing about alleged scientific facts with people who haven't even read Lawson's book - so don't even try. However I believe that the general public of the western world have been taken for mugs, while politicians have jumped on the climate change bandwagon in a quest for greater glory. It's hardly surprising that two of the most prominent political campaigners on this issue have been a failed presidential candidate, Al Gore, and that starry eyed idealist former British PM Tony Blair, the quality of whose judgement can be seen by the fact that he believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

I doubt if so many people would be so keen on "saving the planet" if they realised just what it would cost in terms of their personal lifestyles. Ordinary people in places like India and China are certainly not signing up for this. They don't want to forego their chance to own cars, TVs, fridges and travel the world on their holidays like we've been doing for decades. And how much of those luxuries are we prepared to give up so that they can enjoy a better life without adding to global carbon emissions? I thought not.

People have been hoodwinked into believing that the sacrifices they will have to make will amount to little more than switching off the TV at night instead of leaving it on standby, and changing to energy efficient light bulbs. And they are conned into paying a premium for "green" versions of products. Environmentally friendly has become a great sales gimmick that goes down well with affluent people who can carry on consuming while at the same time thinking that they are helping to save the planet.

In the EU it will apparently be illegal to use filament lamps after 2010. Now I don't like paying more for my electricity than the next man, so I use low energy bulbs where I can already. But there are some applications where filament lamps are the only solution. For example, I like "mood" lighting, and you can't use low energy lamps with dimmer switches. How will this law be enforced. Will "green" police peer through your windows at night and issue you with fines if they see illegal light bulbs glowing?

As radio amateurs, the implications of having the government decide what is a responsible use of energy is worrying. If using a filament lamp is a crime, what about running a 1KW linear amplifier whose sole purpose is in the pursuit of a non-essential hobby? As a QRP enthusiast, it would not be a disaster for me if it was decreed that henceforth, all amateur radio equipment must be powered by renewable energy sources. But really, I think the measures that would be needed to reduce global carbon emissions would have an unacceptable impact on everyone's freedom and standard of living. Given that the justification for this is some suspect predictions based on the theory du jour, which could well be discredited once new evidence comes to light (as so often happens with scientific theories) I think it's time more people stood up and said "Enough of this nonsense."