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#carbonbombing

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urlyman
Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social · Jul 31, 2026
#carbonBombing 1/n Yesterday, I saw the phrase “carbon bomb” from Ketan Joshi, used with respect to data centres. It got me thinking about bombs. When I was a kid growing up in the 70s I was in thrall to the heroics of Bomber Command, especially the Avro Lancasters that flew out of places like RAF Scampton in the north of my then home county of Lincolnshire. It was of course a heavily romanticised childhood fascination, devoid of any sense of what happened beneath the bombs they dropped…
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urlyman
Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social · Jul 31, 2026
Replying to @urlyman@mastodon.social
#carbonBombing 2/n …One of the heaviest bombed places in WW2 was Dresden in eastern Germany, near the borders with Nazi-occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden The distance from Scampton in Lincolnshire to Dresden is 1,000 km. Apparently, the incendiary bombs dropped typically weighed 1.8kg, although the RAF later developed a ‘Superflamer’ 14kg bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device#Development_and_use_in_World_War_II
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urlyman
Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social · Jul 31, 2026
Replying to @urlyman@mastodon.social
#carbonBombing 3/n …Estimates of commercial aviation CO2 emissions vary. https://www.sostenibilidadambiental.com/suite/en/ecology/flight-emissions-calculator/ says: “A short flight can emit 251 g of CO2 per km, while a long one emits 195 g/km.” But it’s much worse due to radiative forcing: “Aviation contributes to global warming not only through CO2, but also through a series of non-carbon related effects. These factors, known as ‘radiative forcing’, can double the climate impact of a flight, according to a study by the German Aerospace Center.”
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urlyman
Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social · Jul 31, 2026
Replying to @urlyman@mastodon.social
#carbonBombing 4/n …Globally, average aircraft occupancy is about 135 people: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116946809548817236 So we can perhaps extrapolate. A ‘short haul’ flight from London Heathrow to Berlin (also about 1,000 km), carrying 135 passengers, might emit 250 kg of CO2 (250g x 1,000 km). Which is about 1.85 kg per person. And that is a *carbon bomb* equivalent to 1 small incendiary dropped on Dresden in 1945. But it’s not a bomb, because we can’t see it, right? #climateDiary
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urlyman
Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social · Jul 31, 2026
Replying to @urlyman@mastodon.social
#carbonBombing 5/n No-one got bombed, right? The 190kg or more of CO2 per flight per 1,000 km flown for the 135,000 flights that fly every day …didn’t burn anyone, right? Even though the aggregate CO2 weighs more than 14,000 WW2 incendiary bombs (per 1,000 km) https://climatejustice.social/@muellertadzio/117002259967264822
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