Thursday, April 15, 2010

Where are the environmentalists!?

An immense plume of volcanic ash cast a silent pall over the skies of Northern Europe on Thursday, grounding air traffic across Britain, Scandinavia and elsewhere, halting flights to and from North America, stranding travelers and isolating much of the continent to an extent that was without precedent in recent memory.

The culprit: an Icelandic volcano that could continue spewing grit into the atmosphere for months or years to come.

The material spewed by the volcano consists of fine, sharp-edged particles of rock and glass, most of them ranging in size from about one-twelfth of an inch in diameter down to about 1/25,000th of an inch, and they are capable of circulating in the upper atmosphere for months. If they are inhaled by humans or animals, they can damage air passages. If they are sucked in by a jet engine, they can shut the engine down.

The most abundant gas typically released into the atmosphere from volcanic systems is water vapor (H20), followed by carbon dioxide (C02) and sulfur dioxide (S02).

All three can contribute to climate change. Although the level of carbon dioxide (C02) is only about a tenth of that of human any normal year nowadays, over the millennia it's no contest. Also certain years or when the larger ones erupt they can reach or maybe even surpass human activity.

I will not go into all the other gases or what impact this has on life on the planet. Partly because no-one really knows and partly because that’s not my level of expertise.

What we can be sure about however is that emission like this Icelandic one is, according to ‘the green’ tree-hugging freaks, the same as murder. Also since a proposal have been put forward to declare mass destruction of ecosystems ("ecocide") a crime on par with genocide, it raises a lot of questions about how we should handle volcanoes.

Is the Icelandic volcano(s) liable for murder, "ecocide" and can be sued for the economic cost of delayed flights?

I also noticed that the heat melted the surrounding ice and flows of meltwater started coming off the glacier. A glacier melting eh? How horrific, that has never happened before and should also render lots of sleepless nights to the doomsayers within the ‘green’ asylum. It also caused flodding, another scary thing that ONLY comes from manmade global warming.

Someone argued that this is how the ‘greens’ what our future to look – no air travel. But the small relief the environment might have from this pause cannot even compare to the volcano and its activity. It would have been better, in the eyes of the righteous ‘greens’, to have planes in the air without the volcano.

So again, the question remains; is the Icelandic volcano(s) liable for murder, "ecocide" and can be sued for the economic cost of delayed flights?

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