Earth Week

As I write, three of my unfortunate colleagues are slowly making their way back from Amsterdam to Shannon by land and sea. I don’t envy them. I did my share of 2-day-journeys from the east of France to the west of Ireland, back in the days before cheap air travel. What doesn’t one do for love, when one is young?

Looking at the (much) bigger picture, Gaia, our planet Earth, which in Greek mythology and in the hypothesis of James Lovelock can be seen as a living organism, must be breathing a sigh of relief. Studies using the post-9/11 flight ban as an incidental large-scale experiment in end-of-civilisation-climate have shown that commercial flights have a marked influence on the atmosphere.

In a 2002 Nature article , David Travis and colleagues wrote: “The potential of condensation trails (contrails) from jet aircraft to affect regional-scale surface temperatures has been debated for years, but was difficult to verify until an opportunity arose as a result of the three-day grounding of all commercial aircraft in the United States in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001." I’m sure my colleagues are marvelling at the clear skies over the Autoroutes de France…

The flight disruptions caused by the ash cloud from the volcanic eruption in Iceland last Friday are compared to the scale of the post-9/11 flight ban. While the 2001 results have been disputed – after all, it is difficult to draw statistically significant conclusions from a single event – this year’s renewed experiment in a flight-free western world are bound to generate further studies, which should help to validate or invalidate the previous conclusions.

Happy Earth Week!

Photo by Lonan