Yes - in most parts of the world the damage to the ecosystem is increasing (and that doesn't only include countries far away!). All the more reason then to do whatever we can and set an example.
One reads in some media that the NHS is the envy of the world. Really? How many other countries have adopted the same system? IT has set an example which practically no other country has followed.
How much notice do other people ever take if you 'set an example'? At best some might notice, some might agree, many might think that your action is irrelevant but how many will copy you? Very few. It's the same with countries.
Unfortunately for all of us, climate change - and its likely effects - are now on a scale that is unprecedented;
The Earth's climate has changed throughout history: in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat and the sudden end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago marks the beginning of the modern climate era. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the incident flux of solar energy. I am not denying that the current warming trend is serious because it is extremely likely (I have read that is greater than 95% probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century.
Even earlier, from the Cambrian period, some 450 million years ago, itis known from the fossil record that there have been five major extinctions of life and several minor ones. Common features were changes in the climate and in some cases levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere.
So, yes, the current change could be difficult/disastrous/uncomfortable (to a middle class life style) but, no, is is not unprecedented.
if even some of the possible tipping points happen, then it might not be something we can "learn to live with". I do understand the temptation to stay in denial about this; but better to bite the bullet and make more bearable changes quickly now, rather than have much more cataclysmic changes forced on us in the coming decades.
It is clear that increasing use of fossil fuels for the last 100 years and more has significantly contributed to the the currently measured temperature increase. The question is: 'do aircraft or trains on intra-European journeys generate more carbon dioxide, and if so, by how much?
The assumption is that it is aircraft - but is this true? What follows is a 'back of the envelope' calculation.
An Airbus A320 weighs some 95tonnes at take-off and takes an hour and a bit to get from London to Munich and carries around 190 people. It needs a couple of miles of concrete at each end.
A ICE-sized train from London to Munich will have a mass of some 400 tonnes, would carry some 400 people and take around 10 hours routing via Paris (see
www.seat61). The 'hotel power' consumption alone for this period is considerable, ignoring that for traction. Schlepping that 400 tonnes at 300kph requires an installed power of some 8MW. Assuming that full power is needed for 2 hours of a ten hour journey and half power for the other eight gives a total consumption of 48MWh.
As the crow flies it is nearly 1000 km from London to Munich - for a double track railway using 60kg/metre rail that is a quarter of a million tonnes of rail which needs to be replaced every 25 years. That's 10,000 tonnes of new rail - with all the CO2 released during its production - every year.
The fuel burn rate of an aircraft is highest at take-off when moving slowly - the engines are throttled back after a couple of minutes at a couple of thousand feet. Above this height climb power is set until cruising altitude is reached after about 20 minutes. Cruise power is used for some 30 minutes on a London - Munich flight until the aircraft starts to descend 20 minutes before touchdown with the engines at flight idle. Fuel consumption for a sector such as this is around 4.5 to 5 tonnes depending on load, wind, routing and altitude. Kerosine has an energy density of around 43 megajoules/kg.
In other words, using these figures, the aircraft 'consumes' some 215,000MJ of energy and the train 173,000MJ. This is very much a 'back of the envelope' calculation which takes no account of passenger loading or intermediate journeys in the case of the train - but it does show that the two values are not that dissimilar. And the train benefits from all that embedded energy used in the construction of its route over the last couple of hundred years.
And don't come with the argument that electricity can be generated using renewable sources. It might be possible in the future but at the moment much electricity is still produced - and will be produced for the next ten to fifteen years - from lignite in Germany which emits high levels of carbon dioxide. Under these circumstances the difference between the CO2 emissions from an internal flight and from train travel, in Germany at least, may not be as great as people assume.
It is not clear to me that banning internal flights in Europe would have a significant difference on the levels of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.
In terms of my "comfortable standard of life", we all have different definitions of what's comfortable. Many people don't think my lifestyle "comfortable"; there will be others in some part of the world who consider it luxurious. In terms of Malthus, etc, and "bees in my bonnet", all I can say is that I don't call for other people to do things I'm not prepared to do myself (such as not having children, not eating meat, not flying, etc etc).
