A First Class Ticket to Iceland for Mr Branson Please

Well my flippant comments about Iceland's volcano seem a little out of place now that most of Europe is cowering under a blanket of ash. Airports all over the continent have been shut down and passenger planes lurk nervously in their hangars afraid of getting glass in their gears or something.

Trains, ferries and second hand pogo sticks are in high demand as the ever resourceful Europeans find creative ways of getting back to their local welfare offices. We appear to be one kraken attack away from a complete transportation breakdown. Poland in particular must think air travel is cursed. Having lost half their government in a plane crash the shut down of airports meant that a good number of the guests couldn't make it to the funeral. Australia's own Governor General was stuck in Bahrain, long may she remain so. The Poles must be wishing the volcano had erupted a couple of weeks earlier.

Various commentators have been grimly prophesying the financial collapse of the airline industry and the concomitant devastation of the crappy novel and airport hotel hooker industries. Other commentators have been no less grimly (but probably more accurately) predicting that there will be massive government bailouts to avoid the above. Another likely casualty is cheap airfares to Europe. Prices go up when a commodity is scare and at the moment air travel to Europe is non existent. This will lead to the amusing situation where the same industries howling for financial support will be charging like maniacs when flights resume. "Financial Support" in this case is a euphemism for dumping a swimming pool full of taxpayers money onto an industry that apparently doesn't take changes to the atmosphere into account despite the fact that they fly through it every day.

To be fair to the airline industry they have been pestering the authorities to let them fly and to hell with the ash or glass or whatever it is. They claim the threat is nowhere near as great as has been reported. I have some sympathy with this view when you consider that the airports of Europe were shut down on the basis of computer modelling conducted by an organisation that can't accurately predict the weather two days running even when there isn't a volcanic eruption.

There has been one other kind of commentator out there as well; the environmental commentator. It's been an interesting week for global warming proponents. On the one hand the volcano has just dumped more carbon and other nasties into the atmosphere than an average sized country. On the other hand grounding all air traffic into Europe has lead to a remarkable reduction in emissions. On the third hand the increased use of cars, trucks, boats and trains in compensation has led to a serious increase in emissions. Thus we can see that the environmental impact of the volcano was either terrible, fantastic or business as usual. A slight diversion from the standard environmental theme came from George Monbiot (who else) who pointed out the dangers of relying so utterly on a system that can fail so easily. George says that our reliance on air travel means that a sudden prolonged loss of it would lead to deprivation and misery. Warming to his theme he highlighted that a single major solar storm would fry every electrical connection on the planet leading to even more deprivation and misery. As is normal with George he invalidates a perfectly good point by suggesting something incredibly stupid. His idea is that we should do without these things. That is we should insure ourselves against possible future deprivation and misery by ushering in certain deprivation and misery right now.

Still we should try and do something. If modern techniques fail us we should look to the past. Perhaps more traditional methods of weather forecasting should be implemented. We could drag the planes out of the hangar and as long as all the moss on the fuselage is on the north side they're good to go. Reaching even further back maybe we should try and propitiate the volcano. Traditionally volcanoes are appeased by tossing them a virgin but in today's inflationary society allow me to be the first to suggest we up the ante by tossing the volcano Richard Branson. To be fair I bet I'm not the first person to suggest throwing Branson into a volcano (to be very fair I'm probably not even the first person this week) but if the volcano gods are pleased with our sacrifice perhaps we can get flying again. There is some circumstantial evidence in favour of this idea. About the only airport still functioning in northern Europe is Keflavik in Iceland. I think the volcano gods are trying to make it easy on us. If not it might be time for all of us to take up fishing for cod.