>>>But there was no demand. The roads were rather empty. Nobody traveled much unless they had to.
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>>Interesting. I never knew that. BTW, it's roughly £0.95 per LITRE here at the moment!
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>>Reduction in travel: I saw a docu a year or so ago, about global cooling, and how it's helping to mask the full effects of global warming. The vapour trails of airliners actually have a marked effect on terrestrial temp. During the 3 days or so after 9/11, when aircraft were grounded, the temp. over NY rose by several degrees, without the criss-cross contrails everywhere.
>
>Mmmm... NY of that week is the best place to get slanted statistics, with all the things which were out of the normal - different traffic patterns, smoke/dust in the air etc etc. I somehow doubt that the jet exhaust is beneficial to anything but the owners' pocket, and maybe postcards (can't have nice sunsets with clean air). Are there any wider statistics, to cover all of the States and maybe Canada for that week?

I'm not going by stats but by the doom-and-gloom docu I saw. 9/11 was famously a perfect day (weather-wise) and I guess the weather continued like that for a few days, so a pretty stable test environment. We're talking the NY area here - not just the dust-filled skies over NYC. Evns os, if there WERE dust in the air, and the temp. was still higher then that's more indicative evo I guess.

I've notices just being on the beach that when the sun goes behind a dispersed series of vapour trails it can get decidedly chilly.

Anyway, at first I thought the prog. was giving us some hope, in that polution in the air has a cooling effect, thus ameliorating some of the GW problem. However, its message was really that if it weren't for this GC we'd REALLY be in the proverbial! And that as we get better at "cleaning up our act" ("scrubbed exhausts", reducing industrial chimney emmisions, etc.) then GC will reduce and GW will go ape.

DISCLAIMER: This is not to say that I lend GW or GC theory, predictions, etc. any credence or that my feet are in either camp, and this is not meant as a challenge to an ecological argument. I'm just reporting what I saw and heard. :-)

Talking of nice sunsets: Last week when driving home along the coast, the sea was like a mill pond, silver, as was the sky, such that it was hard to discern where one ended and t'other began. The sun, just touching the horz. was a perfect ball of dark blood-orange. Just above it there was a ziz-zagging expanding V-shape of whispy little clouds (could have been vapor trails) glowing in the sunlight and looking like smoke coming from the top of the sun. Absolutely stuning and, as is always the case, I didn't have my camera with me. Sigh!