Footprinting topical things

I saw this headline today

"London 2012 Olympics: tickets will be flown over from Arkansas as printing contract goes to American firm "

with the piece referencing the CO2 emissions and the fact London is meant to be a "green olympics"

I did a quick calculation for the ticket weight (assumed 2g per ticket) and 11m tickets = 22 tonnes.

Using AskAMEE, this is easy, I just asked

"fly 22t of cargo from BYH to LHR"  (BYH is the airport code for Arkansas)

this gave ~102tCO2. However, clicking through to AMEEdiscover, I noticed that Radiative Forcing (RFI) wasn't included.

Adding it in to the calculation actually nearly *doubles* the footprint to 194tCO2!

That's about 18g of CO2 for every 2g ticket!

I thought this was really interesting - there's been a lot of controversy about RFI, and now I see why! Any comments from the team on RFI?

James

I am no scientist, so won't discuss the hows and whys of Radiative forcing, but will just clarify what it is for casual readers. Basically, CO2 emitted high up in the atmosphere has a greater warming effect than releasing it at ground level, so aircraft emissions in flight are more damaging than the same emissions on the ground. See AMEEdiscover's page on it for more info.