Contrails And Con-Science – In The Service Of Masterplans

Sometimes timing is everything. Yesterday we looked at how a climate scientist is busy making “masterplans” for transforming our society instead of studying the climate.Some people were not happy about my reminder of where this sort of dubious activity can lead. After all, planning societies and claiming absolute truth is not the job of  scientists, especially those as dogmatised as Schellnhuber and those at his Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research.

Organising society is best left to democracy, where everyone’s vote is equal, and must be so – no matter how ignorant Schellnhuber thinks the population is. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best system we’ve got. “Masterplanners” in history have invariably led to disasters. And, as much as people do not want to be reminded of it, a not so little concentration camp in Poland is an example in the worst extreme.

Today, the worst part is that all these “masterplans” are based on flaky, often times fraudulent and alarmist science – all designed to promote panic rather than reason. This has already led to disastrous results (biofuel induced global hunger or landscape desecration by windmills to name two) and will surely lead to even greater disasters.

Another example of a so-called masterplan that has just come to our attention is the latest European proposal to ban all fossil-fuel-powered cars from cities by 2050 – again all this with little or no thought about the potential conseqeunces this junk-science-based regulatory hyper-zealousness could have. The UK Telegraph here writes:

Cars will be banned from London and all other cities across Europe under a draconian EU masterplan to cut CO2 emissions by 60 per cent over the next 40 years.

These masterplans are designed to regulate and control our lives, and have nothing to do with saving the planet – all confirmed by Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission, who said of the masterplan:

Action will follow, legislation, real action to change behaviour.”

The Association of British Drivers reacted harshly to the proposed restriction on mobility, and rightly so. Hugh Bladon, a spokesman for the BDA said:

I suggest that he goes and finds himself a space in the local mental asylum. If he wants to bring everywhere to a grinding halt and to plunge us into a new dark age, he is on the right track. We have to keep things moving. The man is off his rocker.”

This can be said about all the social engineering master planners out there who have taken it upon themselves to tell the rest of society how to behave.

But it doesn’t stop there. The transportation masterplan also includes air transport. The plan provides for the end of cheap flights and has the target of forcing more than 50% of all journeys above 300 km to be done by rail.

Air travel is also a big target of the enviro-zealots. So it should not come as a surprise that a new study is just out claiming that air travel is “even worse for the climate than they previously thought” , this reports the Austrian Der Standard, which leads with:

Scientists calculate the impacts of air traffic in the sky and come to unexpected results. Vapour trails from aircraft and their impacts apparently have a far greater impact on climate than previously thought.”

The scientists who claim this are Ulrike Burkhardt, of the German Centre For Aviation And Aeronautics, and Bernd Kärcher – in a paper published yesterday in Nature titled: Global radiative forcing from contrail cirrus. In the abstract the authors claim:

We show that the radiative forcing associated with contrail cirrus as a whole is about nine times larger than that from line-shaped contrails alone. We also find that contrail cirrus cause a significant decrease in natural cloudiness, which partly offsets their warming effect. Nevertheless, net radiative forcing due to contrail cirrus remains the largest single radiative-forcing component associated with aviation.”

The timing of this contrail paper and the EU masterplan for transportation just couldn’t be more convenient.