According to Boeing a 747 carries either 48,445 or 52,410 U.S. gal (183,380 L) of fuel. A completely accurate calculation requires knowing specific gravities determined experimentally and depends on batch processing, temperature and fuel type. Searching Google for a back of the envelope calculation I found this which seems to agree reasonably closely with a couple of other places I looked. So depending on fuel type we have 290670, 331363.8, 314460, and 358484.4 pounds of fuel for options. Using a weight converter (I didn’t recall the conversion factor and found this searching Google) we get 131.85, 150.3, 142.64, 162.61. But we’re not quite done yet. The atomic weight of carbon is 12.0107 and the atomic weight of oxygen is 15.9994. Which gives us a maximum output of 483.12, 550.73, 522.66, and 595.83 tons if we assume all of the fuel is carbon, which it is not. Working through the various passenger configurations and you wind up at maximum productions of between 1.05 and 1.63 tons per passenger. A Google search for direct conversions without the math shows a typical conversion rate of about 3 pounds of CO2 per pound of jet fuel, which accounts for water being the other primary output of the oxidation reaction. Using the higher 3.1 pound rate I saw in the Google blurbs the worst case tonnage is 0.89 to 1.38 tons per person, assuming all the fuel is burned on the trip.

So while the plural is wrong, about 1 ton of CO2 per passenger looks reasonable as a rule of thumb. The real issue isn’t so much whether the math is correct on these sorts of easily checked calculations, it is whether or not the models they use to predict the catastrophic warming have accounted for all of the feedback loops, including the ones that mitigate warming.

“Let me emphasize something very strongly as we begin this discussion. The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6 percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14 percent.””

Yes, that is Kerry sayin in effect, we have reduced emissions by 6% and it has only cost 3.6% of the nations workforce losing their jobs in the past year so we only need to lose another 2.33 times that number of jobs to hit 20% reduction.

Yay for the US.

Maybe we can lose 20% MORE jobs and reduce CO2 emissions by 30%!!

I am intimately familiar with F-14′s and S-3′s [Navy aircraft] and I know that the F-14 carried ~ 18,000 lbs of fuel topped off (9 tons) and the S-3 carried ~ 17,000 lbs topped off (8.5 tons).

I would garner that an A-319/320 or a 737-600 would carry a lot more than either of the F-14 or S-3.

I am not disagreeing with your premise (that the statistics are bunk); only that the weight of fuel carried is a lot more than you thought.

For example, can someone tell me how every person on an airliner has a carbon footprint of “tons”, when the aircraft itself carries at best one ton of fuel?

These people are worse than Muslim fundamentalists (who have a tendancy to slip the decimal point one or two places to thier favor). I don’t trust a single number they put out anymore.