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Someone once wrote about the jet-setting, celebrity, global-warming alarmists, “I’ll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.”

I posted earlier about the “sky is falling,” forthcoming report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. The looming apocalypse of global warming is so imminent, we’re told, that unless drastic measures are taken right now to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, “catastrophic” consequences will begin by 2020.

But that’s a trivial concern compared with the need for 10,000 UN bureacrats to have their tax-paid, global-warming conference at one of the plushest resorts on earth, Bali. That the UN is based in New York, and that the bulk of the conference delegates live in New York, is apparently of little consequence when it comes to telling others to live a way that the UN itself won’t adopt. Scott Kirwin points out the global-warming consequences of the UN’s air travel alone:

For this single trip, each participant from New York City will use 1,731 kg of fuel, producing 5,282 kg of CO2 with the warming effect of 16,146 kg. …

But 10,000 people are expected to attend the conference and so far I’ve been unable to find any type of geographic breakdown. So I’m going to make some assumptions:

4,000 participants from New York - that’s where UN headquarters is.1,000 from Los Angeles - for press, Hollywood UN groupies, and UN personnel stationed at west coast consulates.3,000 from Rome - for European NGO, UN and official contingents1,000 from Hong Kong - that will cover participants and press from Japan, China and SE Asia1,000 from Delhi - which will cover South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. …

I will update this post with better numbers as I find them. However my estimate is that the UN conference in Bali will spew over 40,000 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in air travel alone. This CO2 has the warming effect of just over 122,000 metric tons of CO2.

According to this Wikipedia article, trees planted in the tropics remove 22kg of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. That’s roughly 100 trees to remove one metric ton of CO2.

So in order to cover the 40,000 metric tons we would have to plant roughly 4,000,000 trees in the tropics.

So say the Treasury Department’s latest 10-year study of tax-returns analyses.

The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.

Only one income group experienced an absolute decline in real income-the richest 1% in 1996. Those households lost 25.8% of their income. Moreover, more than half (57.4%) of the richest 1% in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005. Some of these people might have been “rich” merely for one year, or perhaps for several, as they hit their peak earning years or had some capital gains windfall. Others may simply have not been able to keep up with new entrepreneurs and wealth creators. …

The key point is that the study shows that income mobility in the U.S. works down as well as up-another sign that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, not accidents of birth. The “rich” are not the same people over time.

That the poor are getting richer is not news, and it’s happening all over the world. See, for example, “Economic iconoclasm,” and, “World income inequality decreasing.” Yet it’s amazing how much the populist hokum that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer continues to drive American politics and churches’ “social justice” agendas.

“It is easier to become a Christian if one is not a Christian than to become a Christian if one is already supposed to be one.” — Soren Kierkegaard (link).

Here is a sequence of photos I took this month as I left Bethlehem in the West Bank and returned to Jerusalem. (Click on photos for fullsize image.)

The pic above was taken from the Palestinian side of the checkpoint. Driving from Israeli-controlled Jerusalem into the Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem area of the West Bank was unencumbered. Vehicles pretty much breezed right through. The Palestinians have no fear of Israeli suicide bombers coming to devastate their buses or restaurant. After all, there are no Israeli suicide bombers.

Security instructions, in Hebrew (top), then Arabic and finally English. All traffic signs in Israel appear in those three languages.

Palestinian graffitti on the Palestinian side of the security barrier.

More graffitti.

Just inside the Israeli side of the barrier is this mural. Sorry for the oblique angle - when we moved directly in front of it, I was too close to get the whole mural in one shot.

I found the mural ironic, since whatever the Israelis and Palestinians have, “love and peace” ain’t it, on either side.

Most of the entire West Bank is enclosed by a security fence, about 700 kilometers. About six percent of the distance is a wall rather than a fence because of the density of the buildings present. The fence generally follows the “Green Line,” but the Green Line is ill defined in some places. The Green Line, btw, is the ceasefire line agreed to in 1949, at the close of Irael’s war for independence. It is not actually a border of any kind.

This shot of the security wall was taken near the unused Jerusalem airport. Rock throwers shut the airport down some years ago. They threw rocks over the wall above at airliners landing or just onto the runway, the horizontal, flat gray feature just below the wall. Any pilot who may be reading can imagine how eager airline pilots were to land on runways covered in rocks.

Despite the international controversy about the fence/wall, it would be very hard to find an Israeli of any political stripe who would call for its removal. The fence was erected by a government very reluctant to do so, and was opposed by both Labor and Likud. But the bombings of the Second Intifada, begun in 2000, became so severe that the people demanded the barrier go up. Since it went up, terrorist violence inside Israel has fallen by 80-95 percent, depending on the region of the country.

The barrier has made life harder for the Palestinians, who complain that it has degraded their quality of life. The typical Israeli responds, “Our lives come before your quality of life.” Hard to argue with that.

Yossi Klein Halevi, a prominent Israeli journalist, said the barrier should be named the “Yasser Arafat Memorial Wall.”

Three Muslim would-be terrorists, trained in Pakistan’s death (to others) camps, have been arrested by German authorities for plotting to attack Ramstein Air Base and Frankfurt International Airport with explosives.

Bombs more powerful than Madrid, London: “Monika Harms, the German federal prosecutor, said the three had trained at camps in Pakistan and obtained some 680kg (1,500lb) of hydrogen peroxide for making explosives.

‘This would have enabled them to make bombs with more explosive power than the ones used in the London and Madrid bombings,’ Joerg Ziercke, the head of Germany’s federal crime office, said at a joint news conference with Ms Harms.” (Guardian)

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is a bleaching agent with common household uses. I’ve used it as a wound disinfectant and it’s particualrly effective at removing blood stains, though it tends to remove fabric color as well as the blood.

The the stuff you buy in a drug store is only about three percent strength, far too weak to use as an explosive. In more concentrated forms it can be used alone as a rocket fuel or as a rocket fuel component. The famed Bell Rocket Belt, for example, used H2O2 as a monofuel. H2O2 is still used for thrusters in spacecraft.

Used alone, H2O2 needs a catalyst to ignite. But it can be combined with acetone to produce a highly volatile liquid explosive. Acetone is also a commonly available household chemical, used in nail polish for example. Larger and purer quantities are commercially obtainable without much difficulty. Acetone plus H2O2 is called triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, an explosive. It is very easy to ignite (hence dangerous to handle). But obtaining H2O2 in the high concentration required to make a powerful TATP bomb is not easy; even chemical-supply companies rarely offer H2O2 in greater concentration than 30-35 percent, and for a big bang from TATP, 70 percent or higher is needed.

Thirty-percent H2O2 can be distilled into higher concentrations. Since the three men were arrested with 1,500 pounds of the stuff, I’m guessing that is what they wanted to do. That amount would distill down to about 650 pounds of 70-percent strength stuff. CNN reported that German sources said the bomb attack, just days from being carried out, would have produced an explosion equivalent to more than half a ton of TNT.

Der Spiegel reports that the three men had legally obtained 730 kilograms (>1,600 pounds) of chemicals, which raised the attention level of the authorities.

A few days ago, police experts secretly swapped the 35-percent solution of hydrogen peroxide contained in 12 barrels for a diluted liquid that only contained 3 percent of the chemical. …

[T]he men had all the necessary components ready — they had even already procured a military ignition mechanism for the explosive device. “An attack was imminent — it was only a question of time,” said one high-ranking security expert. Probably the men wanted to place the bombs in one or more cars and explode them in front of the target.

TATP was said by British authorities to have been used in the London bus bombings and apparently is favored by such attackers because it is free of nitrogen, a common component of explosives. TATP is thus undetectable by nitrogenous-compound sniffing scanners.

Even had an actual high-explosive bomb not been intended, a weaker form of TATP could cause considerable damage if used as an arson agent. It burns very hot and will burn right through aluminum. This was apparently the plan of the 2006 al Qaeda scheme to down 10 airliners over the mid-Atlantic in one day.

Though the planned attacks were intended to take place on airports, authorities said that the actual targets were not aviation facilities or aircraft, but against crowded facilities such as restaurants, bars or clubs at or near the airports. If so, then the 35-percent solution of H2O2 probably would have been sufficient to make a potent flame weapon, basically a low-order explosive (with luck) that spread burning TATP through the targets.

Der Spiegel says that this barely-thwarted attack is a wakeup call for Germany that it is definitely a target of Islamist terrorists. This may be difficult for the German people to accept, since they consider themselves as having good relations with the Middle East. That doesn’t matter to Islamists, of course, who mainly despise the Arab governments with whom Germany gets along so well. The Germans are learning what I’ve said before - you may not be interested in terrorists, but terrorists are definitely interested in you.

In Great Britain, reports the Telegraph, “Holidaymakers are facing such severe delays at airports they are being forced to spend more time stuck in queues than on their flights … .”

Not that things are much better in the US, according to Slate:

For frequent fliers, it is clearly the worst of times. In the first quarter of 2007, only 71.4 percent of flights arrived on time, and 19,260 passengers were involuntarily bumped—up 13 percent from the year before. In July, 16,988 flights were canceled, up 54 percent from July 2006, according to FlightStats.com.

Now consider this news report in USA Today when the science fiction (and I do mean fiction) movie, The Day After Tomorrow, was released. Reported Ben Mutzabaugh,

NASA scientists say condensation trails from jet exhausts create cirrus clouds, likely trapping heat rising from the Earth’s surface, according to a Reuters report. In fact, those scientists say that could account for nearly all the warming over the United States between 1975 and 1994.

Not only that, but jet engines exhaust tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and at high altitudes. The paper reported elsewhere,

… On a New York-to-Denver flight, a commercial jet would generate 840 to 1,660 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger. That’s about what an SUV generates in a month.

So it’s less polluting to drive than fly, right? And it appears that is is rapidly becoming just as quick to drive as fly on not only short-range flights, but increasingly on medium-range flights as well.

So here’s my global-warming-fighting plan: significantly increase the speed limits on the nation’s interstate highways. That will make driving rather than flying even more appealing, more financially attractive and less time consuming.

By “significantly increase” the speed limits, I mean to triple-digit speeds. The present limit in Tennessee in 70 mph. So let’s reset it to 100, minimum.

Consider two comparisons:

Nashville to Memphis, 200 ground miles, flying Northwest Airlines flt. 457. Depart Nashville (BNA) at 0612, arrive Memphis (MEM) at 0715. Cool, just an hour, right? Of course not. You must arrive at the airport no fewer than 90 minutes earlier than flight departure (they say two hours, but let’s assume you check no baggage). And you have to drive to the airport, call that 30 minutes. So you leave home at 0412. Three hours later you arrive at the Memphis airport and have to spend another 30 minutes, minimum, getting to your place of business for the day. Use more time if you checked baggage.

So you spend 3 1/2 hours getting to your destination in Memphis from your Nashville home.

If you drive, Google Maps says it would take 3 1/2 hours just to drive from BNA to MEM. Of course, you wouldn’t start from BNA or end at MEM, so shave a half-hour. Still, many business travelers would consider the extra half-hour spent flying to be worth it, especially if they can use the down time to work.

So let’s raise the speed limit to 100 mph. Using the same route, BNA - MEM, uses 205 interstate miles. Some of this is too congested to permit high-speed driving, probably about 20 miles. Heck, to make it easy let’s say 25 miles. So you cover 180 miles in 1 hour, 48 minutes and the other 25 miles in as many minutes. That leaves 16 miscellaneous miles left, which might take you another 25 minutes. Total time, 2 hours, 38 minutes. You save, basically, an hour.

I would guess that a lot of people would find saving an hour worth driving, especially if it puts them back home that much earlier, also (or a combined two hours earlier).

Second example: my home in Clarksville, Tenn., to my Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, where my son matriculates.

Clarksville to BNA, one hour. There are no passenger flights to Winston-Salem; you debark at Greensboro’s airport. There are no nonstop flights from BNA to GSO; you have to go through Atlanta, Cincinnati or another city. I’ll use the shortest travel I found on Orbitz. You depart BNA at 1024 and arrive at GSO at 1347, making air-travel time of 3 1/2 hours. Add the hour getting to the airport and another 90 minutes for security before flying, as above. Then add 37 minutes driving your rental from GSO to Wake. The add another 20 minutes at least for putz-around time at the GSO terminal itself, and your trip comes to 417 minutes, or 6 hours, 57 minutes.

Three minutes shy of seven hours - that’s only 47 minutes shorter than driving at present speed limits.

Driving straight from Clarksville to WFU at present speed limits, says Google Maps, takes 7 hours, 44 minutes. (Google says the distance is 491 miles, but it’s actually 480 miles. I’ve driven it many times, but I’ll let it pass.)

The vast majority of that 491 miles is high-speed worthy, call it 90 percent easily, or 442 miles. So that’s 265 minutes. The other 49 miles will take about an hour since it’s almost all either low-speed-worthy interstate or major thoroughfare. Add another 12 minutes for a refueling stop. Total trip time: 5 hours, 37 minutes. Time saved: one hour, 20 minutes.

So, since even SUVs are many times less polluting than jet liners, especially of carbon dioxide, then would it not make sense for the global warming alarmists to lobby for raising interstate speed limits to make driving more attractive than flying for many trips?

Oh, wait, I forgot.

Update: Don’t forget all the other, non-fuel pollution the airline industry produces - thousands of tons of food packaging per day, for example. Also, the average wait with engines running waiting to get to the head of the line to takeoff has been growing rapidly; in fact, some major airports have routine waits of an hour. And the enginines are running the whole time. How cabn airlines get away with this? They either build in the wait time to the schedule or simply ignore it. Here’s why - an on-time departure is neither when the liner pulls away from the ramp, nor when it actually takes off.

An on-time departure is accomplished when the captain releases the aircraft’s parking brakes within a small +/- window of the scheduled departure time, as signaled by the “Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (or ACARS).” Link:

This computer transmits the “out”, “off”, “on” and “in” times for the flight. The “out” time starts when the captain drops the parking brake with the main cabin door closed. The “in” time is recorded as the last time the parking brake was applied. The main cabin door opening sends a signal that transmits the “in” time. Unless the captain reset the brake while waiting for the door to be opened, that time is what is recorded

So, the door may open 20 minutes after scheduled arrival, however the time that is transmitted may very well be D.O.T “on time” if the last application of parking brake was within the time limits. Once the chocks are in, the brakes are then released (they can get hot otherwise), so if it takes 10 minutes to open the door after that, the time that is recorded will still be the last time the parking brake was set. That said, you can have an “on time” departure as well- even if you sit at the gate for half an hour, because as soon as the brake is dropped the flight is “out”.

But wait, there’s more!

As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted. Researchers and consumer advocates have taken notice and urged more accurate reporting.

Realistically, I should factor in the high probability (about .25) in my examples that the plane trips will be late, delayed or canceled. Of course, that’s possible with auto trips, too, but 25 percent of the time? Nope.

A couple of commenters pointed out that the average airliner is more full, as a percentage of capacity, than the average passenger car. True, but it only worsens the problem for airliners because the highest occupancies are found on routes and times that are already so jammed with planes that adding capacity isn’t possible even though passenger loads still increase. The result? More delays and more time planes spend sitting on the ground spewing CO2 into the air while not moving anyone. Example:

Let’s use Los Angeles International as an example. At any given time, the most number of runways dedicated to take-offs is two. But if you look at airline schedules, there are currently more than 35 take-offs scheduled for 8 a.m. each morning. Assuming at least a two- to three-minute minimum time separation between each take-off, you don’t have to be a member of Mensa to figure out that a lot of folks will not be taking off at 8 a.m.

But if the captain releases the parking brake at 8 a.m., the plane is on time for departure, even it takes off at 9:30.

Folks, I never sit in my car idling for an hour waiting for the rest of my family to come out to the car or waiting for my driveway to be clear for driving away.