|
"The End of
Travel"
An exert from the
article by James Hamilton Patterson, Granta
2007
It is now clear that
our collective desire to race ever faster and in
greater numbers from place to place, whether by
road, rail, air or sea, will lead to the end of
this planet as a gracious and agreeable habitat for
its dominant species - humans. Everybody knows this
but nothing will be done in time. Evolution has
hard-wired us to worry about the morrow, or even
the coming winter, but not about thirty or fifty
years hence.
 Virtually
all the UK's airports have expansion plans in the
pipeline, the objections from those living nearby
overruled. Just as it is now hard in much of
Britain to find a place where one can't hear the
constant rushing of a motorway or main road, it
will soon be equally hard to find somewhere without
an airline route slicing across its patch of sky.
The environmental damage projected even by the UK's
own Department for Transport is alarming enough,
but it can't take into account as-yet-undiscovered
consequences of high-speed, high-altitude flight.
Jet airliners have an exaggerated impact because
they spew their pollution into the delicate region
between the upper troposphere and the lower
stratosphere, between five and seven miles
up.
Aircraft exhaust gases
injected at high temperature into those icy regions
produce their own clouds in the form of
condensation, or contrails. Following the attacks
of September 11, when all commercial airliners in
the US were grounded, American skies were free of
contrails and in only 3 days scientists noted a
change in the mean temperature.
The implication is that
the cirrus clouds and upper-atmosphere haze, caused
by
aviation, trap outgoing radiation and block
incoming sunshine, making the planet cloudier and
warmer.
It is now belatedly
recognized that commercial aircraft are a major
source of pollution (military aviation - itself a
massive source - is never factored into this
equation and remains unaccountable).
Yet the volume of air
traffic is projected to multiply by up to 8 times
in the next forty years, while aircraft fuel is
zero-rated for taxation the world over on the
unilateral insistence of the United
States.
|
