Hey Sam! A note form a ‘local’: I live about a 20 minute drive from Heathrow, and 45 minutes from Gatwick airports. Usually there is plenty of cloud cover here in England, but some days you can see the sky, and then it is covered with streaks of dumped fuel from planes. (You know, those white lines that you love watching as a kid but grow to hate as a Green). Today there is not a cloud in the sky AND NOT ONE SINGLE PLANE. The ash which is preventing the planes is several kilometers high, and cannot be seen by the naked eye. The statistics you wrote are staggering, and all I can say is that I hope it stays around a bit longer!
Thanks Fanni! Amazing stats, but I should point out that I didn’t put it together. All credit to David McCandless and Ben Bartels over at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
Also, as wonderful as it is to not have all that carbon dioxide churned out into the atmosphere, we also have to consider the impact on lives and business and everything else of grounding all those planes…
April 18, 2010 at 1:34 am
Hey Sam! A note form a ‘local’: I live about a 20 minute drive from Heathrow, and 45 minutes from Gatwick airports. Usually there is plenty of cloud cover here in England, but some days you can see the sky, and then it is covered with streaks of dumped fuel from planes. (You know, those white lines that you love watching as a kid but grow to hate as a Green). Today there is not a cloud in the sky AND NOT ONE SINGLE PLANE. The ash which is preventing the planes is several kilometers high, and cannot be seen by the naked eye. The statistics you wrote are staggering, and all I can say is that I hope it stays around a bit longer!
April 18, 2010 at 10:02 am
Thanks Fanni! Amazing stats, but I should point out that I didn’t put it together. All credit to David McCandless and Ben Bartels over at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
See their original post at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/planes-or-volcano/ for some info on how they derived the CO2 info for the volcano.
Also, as wonderful as it is to not have all that carbon dioxide churned out into the atmosphere, we also have to consider the impact on lives and business and everything else of grounding all those planes…