In article , "Leon" wrote:

The environmentalists like to throw false figures out there to get the
uneducated, and apathetic wound up and excited. Recently they whined about
British Airways burning 20K gallons of fuel to make Trans Atlantic flights
with no passengers. That may be true but what they were really complaining
about was the amount of pollution. They claimed IIRC 400 Tons of carbon
pollution.

Pollution in general, or carbon pollution specifically? It makes a difference.

I did the math using their figures and find that burning 20K
gallons of fuel that weights less than 160,000 pounds

A *lot* less. Figure somewhere around 6 lb per gallon.

creates 800,000 pounds
of waste carbon according to their claims. So burning 1 lb of jet fuel
creates 5 lbs of carbon? Nope!

Depends on what's being measured. Carbon, no. Carbon DIOXIDE, nearly. Total
combustion products, probably.

Principal component of jet fuel is n-octane, C8H16 (molecular weight 112).
Complete combustion of same: C8H16 + 24O2 - 8CO2 + 8H2O.
Molecular weight of CO2 is 44, and there are eight of them (352 total, or
almost 3x the weight of the fuel).

Molecular weight of H2O is 18 (144 total). Thus, mass of combustion products
is 352 + 144 = 496, which is about 4.5x the mass of the fuel.

Considering that high-temperature combustion in air also produces some NO2 and
NO3, it's likely that the total mass of all combustion products probably
really is close to five times the weight of the fuel. Of course, more than a
third of that is water vapor (read: cirrus clouds), and it takes a special
kind of mind to regard clouds as pollution.

--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

It's time to throw all their damned tea in the harbor again.