WTF? Global Warming Means Airplanes Won’t Take Off?

Air travel is about to become even more frustrating according to sell out climate scientists.  The latest stupid claim coming from the Global Warming hysteria has been made by two scientists at Columbia University, New York, who went on record saying that Airplanes of the future will have to carry lighter loads thanks to global warming. [1]  Townhall have dubbed this latest alarmist claim as “downright idiotic.” [2] They wrote a paper for the American Meteorological Society entitled “Climate change and the impact of extreme temperatures on aviation” where they detailed the methodology of their research. They reached their conclusion by creating models which predicted that by 2060 there will be more warm days but no commensurate technological advances in the aviation industry. [3] The two scientists, Coffel and Horton, looked at a phenomenon known amongst pilots as ‘density altitude’, which affects a plane’s ability to take off. Essentially, on hotter days the air is less dense, making it harder to get a plane airborne. It is a particular problem at airports with short runways, as the planes will take longer to lift off.  So, according to a couple of computer models that these scientists worked up (because, clearly, computer models can never be questioned), hotter temperatures in the future will adversely impact the ability for airplanes to takeoff… Thus putting substantial strains on the industry.  [4] Commercial aviation overcomes the problem by issuing weight restrictions at the airport on particularly hot days. Coffel and Horton sought to predict how many more weight restricted days there will be by 2050-2070, and decided, through use of models, that the “number of weight restriction days between May and September will increase by 50-200 percent at four major airports in the United States by 2050-2070,” and that “these performance reductions may have a negative economic effect on the airline industry.”  [5] Their solution is for the aviation industry to start “planning for changes in extreme heat events” to “help the aviation industry to reduce its vulnerability to this aspect of climate change.”  [6] To compensate, airlines will have to reduce passengers or cargo, the team says, unless the aviation industry lengthens runways or designs more aerodynamic planes.  But as Anthony Watts of the blog Watt’s Up With That points out: “Of course they are assuming that [their] models produce an accurate output, and that airplanes of the 2050-2070 era have the same airfoil efficiency and take-off power of today.” Neither of which are by any means certain. [7] On top of that, their dubious science notwithstanding, the duo seem to have a precarious grasp of commercial evolution. Coffel and Horton  apparently believe that the airplane industry will be incapable of any meaningful innovations in the next 50 years. According to their “models”, the airline industry will be using the same engines, materials, fuselages, and practices of today, half a century into the future. [8]