Boeing, an American builder of aircraft, estimates that the increasing demand for flying will require 44,000 additional commercial planes during the next 20 years. These new planes will be added to the current fleet of about 25,500 presently serving the flying public. Of course, Boeing expects to build a generous portion of these planes, while competing with Airbus and a rising Chinese aviation industry.
The issue that Boeing’s prediction raises is not who will build the planes, but the assumptions underlying its optimism. What will the future be in 20 years with an additional 44,000 aircraft flying hundreds of millions more people around a warming planet. Flying is already responsible for about 3% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, has an energy source which is unlikely to be replaced by alternative fuels that are carbon-neutral, and is presently the most carbon intensive activity in which any individual person can choose to engage. Despite soaring electricity production from solar and wind, oil production is not going down, carbon dioxide emissions are not being reduced, and the global temperature is rising in tandem with human population and per capita consumption. The steady and reliable climate structure of the 12,000 years of the Holocene—the period since the end of the last ice age that has served us so well—is destabilizing.
Perhaps the future has always been difficult to imagine, but particularly now that the rate of change is accelerating faster than the consequences that we can contemplate. It’s difficult to find appropriate analogies that describe our circumstances, but one is offered by Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist from Columbia University in the US. “If the pace of temperature change coming out of an ice age is like a pedestrian walking on the street, then the pace of change for us getting to 3°C by 2100 would be like a car passing by at least 250km/h.” (Oliver Milman, “Timeshift: How extreme heat of today compares with Earth’s past climate”, The Guardian Weekly, August 23, 2024). The last time the warming effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide were this high was about 3 million years ago, however the rate of change is unprecedented.
“But we are now being wrenched from our era, the Holocene,” writes Milman. “As the global temperature approaches 1.5°C hotter than preindustrial times, it more resembles the climate of the Pleistocene, a time of wooly mammoths up to 2.5 million years ago. A bit hotter, which could happen this century if emissions are not curbed, and it will be comparable to the Miocene, which started about 23 million years ago.” Such temperatures will eventually guarantee tens of metres of sea level rise, a catastrophe which will inundate the two-thirds of coastal cities that are within one metre of sea level. A hotter planet will also guarantee more intense and destructive weather events. Sobering, too, is the paleo-biological evidence which has found that fewer grasses grew at 3°C warmer—the grasses that form the crops of rice, grains and corn which are the major source of food for billions of people.
We are already getting a sense of what this future will resemble—a future that Boeing is predicting will be a boon for aircraft production. But, by many other measures, the prospects are not so cheerful. Heatwaves in Europe were responsible for the death of an estimated 50,000 people in 2023, a disaster that would have been 80% worse if preventative measures had not been taken. About 1,300 people died of heat at the 2024 Hajj in Mecca. And in America’s city of fantasy, Las Vegas, at least 300 people a year are dying from heat, which reached 49°C in the summer of 2024. Shadeless streets were hot enough to cause second degree burns in seconds (Gabrielle Canon, “Heat Alert: Simmering Sin City is pushed to the brink”, The Guardian Weekly, August 9, 2024). “There was the woman whose leg was amputated after she got third-degree burns from passing out on a scalding sidewalk.” Another woman, 81 years old, was revived after going unconscious in similarly hot conditions, but her three pet dogs did not survive the heat. “Welcome,” the city’s sign says, “To Fabulous Las Vegas”.
If this is a sample of the world into which Boeing is hoping to add 44,000 new commercial aircraft, then the optimism of its prediction seems to be disregarding some essential considerations. But the same would apply to those who live in the comfortable innocence of the moment while being oblivious to the impact of their behaviour. Currently, only about 10% of the human population flies, meaning that these select people are responsible for 90% of the 1.1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions that airplanes currently produce each year, not to mention the particulates and high elevation condensation trails that also contribute to climate change. Given the global rising temperatures, building even more airplanes to fly even more people around our beleaguered planet seems like an ominous strategy.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: Going on vacation – Photo by Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash