Piloting aviation industry through a changing climate

There’s something rather unsettling about eerie pictures of flooded airport runways, and it’s not just the submerged jet bridges. Such photos capture the type of disruptive scenes that could become more common in the future, as the effects of climate change continue to ramp up.

Flying into a changing climate.

New attention to the issue shows that airports and airlines around the world will be affected by climate change in various ways. Consider this past summer’s spate of heat-related groundings in Phoenix, when 120 degree-air temperatures spurred a single carrier to cancel more than 40 flights out of the city. A recent study by scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, at Columbia University, anticipates more troubles along those lines in coming years).

“There are a number of potential climate change impacts on aviation operations,” said Perry Flint, a spokesperson for the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Impacts range from “reducing the take-off performance of aircraft, to increased storminess – meaning flights have to route around weather more frequently,” he said.

Read the Yale Climate Connections story by Daisy Simmons - “Piloting aviation industry through a changing climate.”

Pay attention of we could lose the earth - Anders Levermann

Anders Levermann
 is a professor
at the Potsdam
Institute for Climate
Impact Research, and
 an IPCC lead author.

Most people are sensitive to the changes in our weather, praising or damning it, but only a relative few seems able, or willing, to admit to the root cause of those differences.

Climate change will be unquestionably serious, unsettling with the world’s infrastructure to make serious inroads on social stability most in the world have come to accept as normal.

Readers of The Guardian blog under the heading: “Heed the warning in extreme weather – or risk losing earth” were told, Anders Levermann has written “Unmitigated climate change will hit global infrastructure hard and test the limits of our way of life”.

Climate change efforts on 'life support'

Efforts to halt climate change are, according to an article in the magazine “Foreign Policy” on life support.

It says the world’s scientists as considering some radical cures, but then rightly asks: “Could the cure be worse than the disease?”

The story entitled: “Playing God”, discusses two options for easing the challenges associated with climate change, neither of which are truly understood or proven and could bring with them frightening unintended consequences.

 What’s proposed is unquestionably unsettling, but equally unnerving is the do nothing attitude of the business as usual boosters, back by their powerful legions of fossil fuel lobby groups.