Aviation and Climate Change - Essay Example

Due to increase in number of fights, aircraft emissions can affect climate considerably. Carbon dioxide and water do so directly, others effects like production of ozone in the troposphere, alteration of methane life time, formation of contrails and modified cirrus cloudiness, are indirect causes. The emissions that can affect stratospheric ozone i.e. nitrogen oxides, particulates and water vapors, do so indirectly by modifying chemical balance in the stratosphere. Airports growth again is directly affect the climate because expansion or growth of airport need space and may destroy the ecological balance of the place in particular and have overall impact in general.

Manchester airport, which accounts for almost 8.8% of UK civil air transport movement, generates proportion of the pollution from UK aircraft. It would translate into 88,000 tones of carbon from its civil air traffic alone (Manchester Green Party briefing on Emissions charging at Manchester airport, 2nd edition, December 2003). Assessment of Cost-benefit: The ground traffic stimulated by the airport results in emission increase. Manchester airport has experienced increase of almost double number of passengers in last 10 Years, this has increased the frequency of flight to, and form Manchester with the existing felicities at the airport but due to this congestion has increased.

Due to increase in air traffic Manchester airport operator experienced, increase in its income considerably. Growth in the earnings of airport was due to more landing, parking charges etc. directly and customer inflow indirectly increases the earning. In comparison to other major airports in Europe, Manchester experience little growth in terms of numbers of runways. Due to congestion, cost of flying could not be quantified directly. Now it has been increased almost to double. It has been calculated that average direct cost to the airline of every minute that an aircraft was delayed is 21.

80 pound/passenger in 2002. If we calculate cost of delays for Manchester airport where average delay is around 13.1minute with 175000 flights with 23.4pound/ minute, it costs 53 million pound (http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/80/airport_data/2002annual/Table_04_1_Air_Transport_Movements_2002.pdf .).This is direct cost of congestion. Congestion and delay costs the passengers heavily. This delay and congestion cost do not include the environmental cost incurred. However, there are also indirect costs of delays.

Environmental/climate impacts: Congestion also has negative environmental impact as more and more planes are forced to burn more fuel for longer as they delayed on runways or circulating around airports, leading both to increased carbon emissions, additional aeronautical noise and lower air quality for local residents. Surface congestion around airports as both passengers and staff travel to or from the airport can have similar environmental impacts as well as economic costs. These costs to three other significant environmental impacts arising from air traffic i.e., aeronautical noise, local air quality and emission of greenhouse gases affecting climate change.

One of the major area where air transportation affect, is the more use of aviation fuel. It consumes almost 13% of fossil fuels used in transportation. The amount of CO2 formed from the combusting of aircraft fuel is determined by the total amount of carbon in the fuel because CO2 is an