Golden Age of Flying: Two contrasting comments

An article in the Telegraph today talks about the end of a golden age - the golden age of flying, brought about in part by the crash of Flight038 to Heathrow which, miracle of miracles, belly-flopped onto the edge of the runway instead of into the back garden of il Castillo di Thornhillaggio - situated near the border of Ealing and Chiswick, natch. It could just as well have landed a few miles up the road in even denser populated Southall, ruining the day just as intensely for my fellow West Londoners as it would have had for me.

I am biased. I declare an interest in wanting a new airport in the Thames Estuary, as I live in West London. I don't want to have a plane land in my garden and crumple my Apple tree and rose bushes*. The shed needs replacing, but that is not an excuse. An airport in the Thames would cut the impact of noise pollution upon people immensely. Yes, for Nature as a whole it just moves it a tad, but then most of the noise will be over water. Importantly the approaches would be too. Over water, not over row upon row of Victorian, Edwardian and inter-war terraces and semis**. Pollution would be dispersed over the Channel, not over London. London gets a vast new area well connected by transport links to build new housing - the old Heathrow site.

Back to the article, it basically talks of the lost golden age not just because of Flight038, but also due to restrictions on the horizon caused by carbon hysteria and synthetic costs created by the EU and other agents of World Government. Two comments leapt out at me. Polar opposites, if you pardon the expression.

The first, by a self-loathing, likey pinch-faced killjoy who needs to do us all a favour and log on to Bebo and get chatting...

Each Western baby selfishly conceived will have a "carbon footprint" over its lifetime equal to several thousand transatlantic flights.
Posted by Michael Purches, Abingdon, Oxon. on January 24, 2008 8:33 AM

So, Purches, be faithful to your belief and go stick your head in the oven, ok? Do us all a favour. Oh, and before you do that, cut off your sultana sized nads, roast and eat them so you need not worry about your DNA being used to produce selfish vile western carbon producing babies in future. Today would be nice.

The second is a cracker and I reproduce it here and give kudos to the writer, Ian May.

There is a golden age coming to an end: the golden age of global warming. The rise in surface temperatures over the past thirty years or so are as much apparent as real, these records being contaminated by the climatology community's refusal to take proper account of the urban development effect. The least bad measure currently of global temperature is the satellite reading of the lower troposhere. The recent downtrend in the chart on this referenced web page speaks for itself:
link
Incidentally, this decline in global temperature probably explains the shift of emphasis within Greenspeak from "global warming" to "climate destabilisation", or "climate impact". This is quite a smart move on the part of the socialists in the Green Trojan Horse as thanks to New Labour's ongoing assault on the educational tradition, not many people will notice the corollary. That is, anything we do beyond growing potatoes and hand basket-weaving, whether it results in temperature increases or not, shoves Mother Nature off her perch. This is axiomatically "bad", and activities thereof must be banned, or preferably regulated and taxed. (Regulated and taxed more, I should have said.)

Posted by Ian May on January 24, 2008 8:04 AM

Spot on. I wonder if Ian is a Libertarian?

Let us not allow the AGW creeps off the hook. Climate Change has occurred for 4billion years. Don't you miserable worms try and kid us that was what you were really on about you wretched Authoritarian scumbags!


* Noise is less of an issue, before you yell NIMBY. It is annoying, but not enough for me to demand the airport move, as I gain from being a 25mins drive or tube away. And before you say why drive if you have the tube, I do so because the intellectual pygmies who constructed the tube placed the stations as far as possible away from any of the terminals and put innumerable passages, stairs, lifts, gates and gratients between it and them.

**I know some greenies almost get a semi over the prospect of shutting down Heathrow, but not for the basic reasons such as safety, but for synthetic and soon-to-be-discredited reasons put out by a lying religion.