The Air Traffic Controller travels by train

I have made three trips for work this year, one to Toronto, one to Cornwall, and last week to Edmonton.  I’ve already confessed my ecological sins from the Toronto trip in a previous post.  After that trip I promised myself I would do better on future trips.

The schedule for the Cornwall trip did not allow any method of getting there other than the usual airplane ride (Winnipeg to Montreal crammed into an RJ – uggh) but a look at the train schedules revealed on opportunity to ride the rails back to Winnipeg.  My meeting ended at 3:00 on Tuesday, and at 4:40 I was on the train from Cornwall to Toronto.  At 9:30 I boarded the Canadian at Union Station in Toronto, and at 10:00 we were rolling north.  The train arrived in Winnipeg 7:00 Thursday morning (one hour early!) and I was at work at 8:30.  If I had flown back, Wednesday would have been my travel day, and I would have been back at work at 8:30 on Thursday, so taking the train did not cost me any work time.  This seems surprising given that the total time on board was 37 hours, but the train offers the advantage of comfortable overnight travel.

For my Edmonton trip last week, I did even better.  I travelled both ways by train, in sleeper class.  The total cost of the trip was the same as if I had flown, and again, I did not miss any extra time at work, and in fact was away from home only a few hours longer than if I had travelled by air.  This statement has been met with disbelief.  One friend commented that he “didn’t see the wormhole option on the VIA website.”  There is no wormhole (though if you think the idea of trains traveling through wormholes is cool, then I highly recommend “Pandora’s Star” by Peter Hamilton) but only the magic of overnight travel.  Here’s how it worked:

On Monday I left home at the usual time to go to work.  I spent 3 hours at work before heading to the train station for a noon departure.  There’s no need to arrive 90 minutes early to check in, go through security and all the other hassles of the airport experience.  From curbside to sitting in my compartment on the train (including check-in) took 6 minutes.  The train arrived in Edmonton 6:00 on Tuesday morning (that’s 30 minutes early for anyone keeping track).  I picked up my rental car and headed to work.  Wednesday evening after work I enjoyed the sights in Edmonton and then headed back to the train station.  The train left just before midnight, and arrived into Winnipeg at 8:00 pm Thursday (again, 30 minutes early). I was home by 9:00.

With sleeper accomodations, the train did cost more than airfare, but the overall cost of the trip was the same because I required two fewer hotel nights ($250 savings), one less rental car day ($50 savings) and meals were included in the train fare.  And this isn’t the crappy food you pay ridiculous prices for on the airplane.  I feasted on roast beef and yorkshire pudding, grilled arctic char, a lamb burger with mint infused mayonaise, and perfectly cooked prime rib.

Many of the people I met on the train were amused by the irony of an air traffic controller traveling for work by train, but all agreed that the train is a much more civilized and human way to travel.

Of course, the most important question is how much I reduced my CO2 emissions.  If I had flown back from Cornwall, the trip would have been 105 km by van to the Ottawa airport, and then 1688 km by air.  Instead, I travelled about 2500 km by train.  This results in a reduction of 200 kg of CO2.  My round trip to Edmonton was about 2600 km by rail and 108 km by car, whereas flying would have been 2372 km by air.  This results in a reduction of about 350 kg of CO2, for a total of 550 kg for both trips.  How significant is this?  Best current estimates say that we need to reduce emissions to about 1,200 kg/person/year to avoid a climate catastrophe.  550 kg is almost half of one person’s sustainable level of emissions for an entire year!

The Joy of the Journey

I was browsing through the Winter 2010 edition of “Going Places”, the CAA Manitoba magazine, and an article about train travel drew my attention.  “Trains-formers” by award winning author and journalist Charles Montgomery (www.charlesmontgomery.ca) eloquently expressed my own thoughts and experiences with train travel.  I’ve written on that subject here already, but a writer with 14 significant awards in the last 10 years can probably say it better than I can:

For if you are ever masochistic enough to calculate your own carbon footprint, you’ll realize that flying is just about the nastiest thing you can do to the planet.  Each passenger on a transatlantic flight blows out about as much greenhouse gas as they would driving a Hummer to work for a year.

After boarding the Eurostar high speed train from London to Paris:

As I sipped my Brut…it struck me that if I had chosen to fly, I would still be en route to Heathrow. Once I reached the airport, I would then have to spend two hours being poked, prodded and herded through its infernal collection of duty-free shops, deep-fry vats and flocks of rumpled departure lounge castaways.  And if my flight left on time…I would lift off at just about the moment my 10:40 am Eurostar train was to pull into Gare du Nord in central Paris.

There is something deliciously cinematic about moving across this earth by rail.  While air travel renders the world an abstraction from 6,000 metres, rail is inherantly voyeuristic, offering peeks through the world’s back door.

This next quote, better than any other, sums up my experience and feelings with long-distance train travel.  After two days on a train, I’m not weary or fatigued.  The only disappointing thing is that the journey is over, and it’s time to get off. 

I have a friend, a climate worrier, who decided to take the train from Vancouver to a job in Texas, even though the patchwork journey would take him the better part of a week.  He insists he had a marvellous time.  The trip was transforming, “like a dream.”  And he thought, deeply.

Via Rail’s Canadian…ambles between Toronto and Vancouver.  Yesterday’s traveller might consider the journey three days lost.  But slowness can be a virtue.  The train’s engineers are apparently so unhurried that they’ll take stop requests anywhere in the wilderness between Sudbury and Winnipeg.  Want to go wandering up the third creek east of that grey hill?  Just ask.  They’ll dump you and your backpack wherever you like and continue on their way.

I had my first experience on the Canadian when I chose to return from a business trip to Cornwall two weeks ago by train instead of by plane.  The relatively slow pace of the train did not discourage me, but quickly came to be something to rejoice in.  At one point, inching along a siding waiting for a freight train to pass, the conductor pointed out a fox watching us from beside the tracks.  Other similar pauses allowed me and my fellow travellers to drink in the beauty of the remote wilderness  through which the train travels.  Station stops allowed me to step off and see out-of-the-way places I would never otherwise experience.  Was 34 hours too long to travel from Toronto to Winnipeg?  I think it was just barely long enough.  When we booked a 2.5 day train trip to Jacksonville for our cruise in January, I must confess to being a little concerned about how long it would take.  My only regret looking back?  I wish it had been a little longer.

Going south

For Canadians, it is a time-honoured tradition:  going south for the winter.  Retired folks go for months at a time, while those of us that still need to earn a living sneak away for a week or two at Christmas or spring break.  This year, we took a 5 day cruise out of Jacksonville, Florida January 3 to 8.

The difficulty with going south for short trips is that it usually means flying and, as I have demonstrated in previous posts, there is probably nothing worse that you can do for the climate than getting on a jet aircraft. This year we decided that for our trip south, we would take the train instead.  We could not have been happier with the results.

Instead of flying to Jacksonville from Winnipeg by way of Minneapolis, we boarded the train at Grand Forks, changed trains in Chicago and Washington, and arrived in Jacksonville 2.5 days later.  You might think a two and a half day journey would be exhausting, but it was exactly the opposite:  it was so very relaxing.  Coach class seats on a long distance train are far more spacious than on an airplane.  They are really like business class seats only with even MORE leg room.  Each train had a snack/observation car where we spent much of our time reading, playing games, watching movies, or just looking out the window.  The food in the dining car was superb – I still say that may be the best steak I have EVER had.  No lineups, no invasive security checks, no stupid rules about liquids, no getting undressed for the metal detectors:  we LOVED travelling by train, and will do it every chance we get.

On the way back, we did not have enough time to take the train all the way, so we flew from Jacksonville to Milwaukee via Atlanta (which was a nice reminder of just how annoying flying has become), and then took the train back to Grand Forks.  We had a wonderful trip, and as an added bonus, saved $1000 on our travel costs.  But the big question is still whether our choice of transportation reduced our impact on the climate.  The answer is a resounding YES.

Flying return from from Winnipeg to Jacksonville would have been a trip of 3,150 miles in the air.  Based on figures published by carbonfund.org, that would have made us responsible the equivalent emission of 4,536 kg of CO2 (remember that CO2 emitted at high altitudes has approximately double the effect of CO2 emitted at ground level because of the effects of radiative forcing).

Instead, our trip consisted of 308 miles of driving, 947 miles of flying, and 2921 miles of rail travel, for total equivalent CO2 emissions of 3,312 kg, or a reduction in CO2 emissions of 1.2 tonnes.  The train is now without a doubt our preferred method of long distance travel.

Another new fuel

Joule Unlimited is a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachussetts.  They have engineered a microorganism that uses sunlight and carbon dioxide (which they propose to obtain from power plant exhaust) and excretes diesel or ethanol, with very little refining required for use in standard vehicle engines.  This doesn’t really reduce emissions directly.  Rather, it delays emissions from the power plant until the new fuel is burned in your car. 

Indirectly, there is the potential for significant carbon emission reductions if the synthesized fuel were to replace fossil fuel usage.  This indirect reuction in emissions is also the benenfit of biofuels such as ethanol (usually made from corn).  Unfortunately, biofuels have never really been viable as a significant part of the global warming solution because significant energy inputs are required to grow the crops and then refine the fuels, and because they require large land areas that are needed instead to grow food for growing populations.

Joule’s process, if it works, will be a significant improvement over corn-based ethanol and any other biofuel currently available.  Because the power supply for the process is the sun and the bacteria secrete a substance that is basically ready to burn, the enregy input required to manufacture the fuel should be relatively small.  The space required will be substantially smaller for litre of fuel produced but will unfortunately still be too large for whole-scale replacement of fossil fuels in the transportation industry.  According to Joule’s own numbers, a land area greater than that of New Jersey and Connecticut combined would be required to produce enough fuel to replace all the gasoline and diesel currently burned in the United States.

Speed pollutes

Our drive to and from the train station in Grand Forks last month was our first highway trip with our Prius.  I was looking forward to the chance to learn about how the car performed at different speeds.  The learning opportunity turned out to be even better than expected.  You drove to Grand Forks in the middle of a serious winter storm.  Most major roads were closed (we were fortunate that I-29 was open as far as Grand Forks) and visibility was severely reduced due to blowing snow.  From Winnipeg to the border we were able to drive about 80 km/h.  From the border to Grand Forks, conditions were worse, and we drove about 65 km/h.  On the way home 2 weeks later, the roads were good, and I set the cruise control at 100 km/h for the whole trip.  The following table shows the fuel economy we achieved at these different speeds: 

	l/100km	mpg (imperial)	mpg (US)
65 km/h (40 mph)	3.9	72	60
80 km/h (50 mph)	4.5	62	52
100 km/h (62 mph)	6.3	44	37

Every car has a speed at which it achieves its best fuel economy.  For conventional gasoline powered vehicles this speed tends to be between 80 and 100 km/h, depending on the size of the vehicle and the size of the engine.  In general, larger vehicles will be more efficient at lower speeds, but vehicles with larger engines will be more efficient at higher speeds.  At speeds below optimum, the engine does not operate as efficiently, but at speeds above optimum, increased wind resistance forces the engine to work excessively hard.  This drag effect is not linear, but grows exponentially with increased speed.  This is because the force of the air resistance operating on the vehicle is proportional to the square of the speed.  This means that doubling the speed of the vehicle quadruples the air resistance experienced.

For a hybrid electric or electric vehicle, optimum speeds are lower.  This is because an electric motor is more efficient at lower speeds than a gasoline engine.  For our Prius, that optimum speed appears to be somewhere between 60 and 70 km/h.  For a pure electric vehicle like the Nissan Leaf, the optimum speed will be even lower.  This doesn’t mean that hybrid vehicles are a poor choice for highway driving.  Our highway fuel economy is still better than that of comparable conventional vehicles.  It simply means that the fuel advantage is greater at low speeds.

For any type of vehicle, the posted speed limit of 75 mph (120 km/h) on many American highways is an invitation to pollute.  Policy makers during the oil crisis in the 1970s knew that cars burned less gas at lower speeds, and lowered speed limits across the country to 55 mph in an effort to reduce fuel consumption. 

When we drove home from Grand Forks, I started the drive at 110 km/h, but quickly noted the sharp increase in fuel consumption (about 7.6 l/100km) and reduced our speed to 100 km/h.  This speed reduction added only 13 minutes to our driving time, but it reduced our fuel consumption by 3.1 litres, and our CO2 emissions by 7.1 kg.

The business trip

I just got home from teaching a 3 day course at our facility in Toronto.  I saw a couple of things that I really liked while I was there:  the TTC’s fleet of new hyrbrid-electric buses, and the electric vehicle charging station in the underground parking at my brother-in-law’s condo.  The condo development is being marketed as environmentally friendly (http://www.tridel.com/nuvo2/) but in some aspects, it doesn’t appear to be living up to expectations. (Comments from those of you who live there?)

And what about my trip?  Did I succeed in making it eco-friendly?  In answering that question, the 2 words that come to mind are “abject” and “failure”.  I flew.  I drove a rental car.  I did manage to take the subway for my one foray into the central part of the city.  I think I could have done better if I had more time to plan, and if VIA Rail ran more than 3 trains per week from here to there.

A new fuel

A British corporation claims to have developed a synthetic hydrogen based fuel that will produce zero carbon emissions when burned, retail for $1.50 per gallon, and work in existing internal combustion engines without any modifications required.  It almost sounds too good to be true, and only time will tell whether the product can live up to the claims.

http://www.gizmag.com/breakthrough-promises-150-per-gallon-synthetic-gasoline-with-no-carbon-emissions/17687/

Whether or not it works, I still have some concerns.  Hydrogen is a great fuel to burn because it produces only water as exhaust, but unlike fossil fuels, there are no great reservoirs of hydrogen just sitting around waiting to be exploited.  Hydrogen must be produced from other sources.  Hydrogen is most commonly produced from natural gas.  The chemical reaction is as follows:

CH4 + 2(H2O) => 4(H2) + CO2

In other words, the hydrogen production process itself produces carbon dioxide, so the claim of zero carbon emissions is rather spurious.

Hydrogen can also be produced from water, but this requires a significant input of electrical energy.  The standard internal combustion engines they propose using to burn the fuel have always been a very inefficient way to power a vehicle. (Electric motors are about 4 times as efficient.)  While this fuel may provide carbon savings over gasoline combustion if it is manufactured using clean electricity, it would likely lead to a net increase in carbon emissions in locations without reliable renewable energy sources.  And, regardless of where the hydrogen fuel is manufactured, it cannot hope to be as efficient as an electrical vehicle. 

If the product can be brought to market quickly with hydrogen manufactured from clean electricity, it might provide a good stop-gap measure until electrical vehicle technology has advanced to the point that will make it practical for all vehicle uses, but I would hate to see excitement about this less promising technology take away from the development of something that will ultimately be a far superior.

The Manitoba Hydro building.

About a year ago, our local electrical utility, Manitoba Hydro, completed construction of a new headquarters building in downtown Winnipeg.  As well as being very aesthetically pleasing, the building is a model of energy efficiency.  It is a wonderful example of the application of existing technologies to drastically reduce heating and cooling costs without sacrificing any comfort for the occupants.  The Globe and Mail has an excellent article about the building:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/property-report/the-right-building-for-where-it-stands/article1865144/

What does “normal” mean?

In my last post, I used the phrase “14 consecutive years of above normal temperatures.”  One of my faithful readers saw this and asked, quite reasonably, what I meant by “normal.”  To be completely honest, I’m not exactly sure, as the article I used as a source didn’t say, but when talking about climate and climate change there are two commonly used meanings of “normal”.

Every ten years, climatologists publish a set of “climate normals”.  These are a set of averages for the previous 30 years.  The set currently in use is based on data from 1971 to 2000.  When The Weather Network says that the normal high for today is minus 14, what they mean is that the average high between 1971 and 2000 was minus 14.  Now that the year 2010 is history, a new set of climate normals (1981 to 2010) will be in production, and when they are ready, they will be the new “normal”.

These new normals will certainly be warmer than they previous set.  In fact, looking at a series of climate normals over the last few decades would give a good picture of changes in climate, as the 30 year averages smooth out the wide year-to-year variations.  Older climate normals are hard to find (though I’m sure they exist in archives somewhere) but Environment Canada is kind enough to have both the 1961-1990 (http://climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/climate_normals/index_1961_1990_e.html) and the 1971-2000 normals (http://www.climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/climate_normals/index_e.html) for Canada available on their website.  Comparison of these two can be particularly instructive, as large scale rapid climate warming due to greenhouse gasses seems to have commenced in about 1980.  The 1961-1990 normals are therefore the last set of normals comprised mostly of years before the onset of rapid global warming, while the 1971-2000 normals are the first comprised mostly of years since a sharp warming trend became obvious.

Winnipeg’s average annual temperature increased from 2.4 C to 2.6 C between these two periods.  This is a small but significant change.  Based on the continuing warming trend over the last 3 decades, I would expect that the next set of normals will show a larger increase.  I did a quick survey of 13 Canadian cities (one in each province and territory) and found that all but one showed an increase in average temperature from the first set of normals to the second.  The only exception, St. John’s, showed no change.  The largest change I noted was in Yellowknife, with in increase of 0.6 C.

This brings us to the other meaning of the word “normal” in relation to climate.  Particularly in discussions of climate change, “normal” is sometimes used to refer to the state of the climate before the onset of human-caused warming, in other words, to the climate of the early to mid 20th century.

The hottest year so far

2010 was the hottest year on record for Canada, with temperatures across the country averaging 3 C above normal, and beating the previous record year, 1998, by half a degree.  Of course, hotter than normal years are to be expected, but in the realm of average annual temperatures 3 degrees is an enormous deviation from the mean.  Anyone inclined to think that last year’s temperatures were simply a freak random deviation should know that the last year that Canadian temperatures were NOT above normal was 1996.  That’s 14 consecutive years of above normal temperatures.

That Canadian temperatures are now consistently above normal is no surprise.  All climate models agree that the warming caused by greenhouse gasses will initially be most pronounced at higher latitudes.  Indeed, the greatest deviation above normal temperatures (4.3 degrees) came in the arctic. 

As the arctic permafrost melts, large quantities of methane are bubbling out of the tundra and into the atmosphere.  Methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so we are seeing the creation of a positive feedback loop where warming temperatures release methane into the atmosphere, which accelerates the warming, releasing more methane and so on.

Another feedback loop resulting from the warming of the arctic is caused by the melting of arctic sea ice.  Ice is white and so reflects as much as 90% of incoming solar radiation back into space.  As the portion of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice decreases, more water is exposed to the sun.  Water is dark, and therefore absorbs most of the solar radiation striking it.  This heats the water and inhibits the re-formation of ice in the fall.  This is why climate change is threatening the polar bears.  Without sea ice to stand on, polar bears are unable to hunt the seals that are their main source of food.  When the ice doesn’t form in time, the inevitable result for the bears is death from starvation.