In another post for Quartz, Holthaus writes that while he's long done things to help the environment (he recycles, doesn't eat meat, brings his own bags to the store, etc.), his flying habits (75,000 miles flown last year) were no longer something he could ignore.

Holthaus used a carbon footprint calculator from UC Berkeley and found that his flying accounted for nearly half of his household's emissions. He found that if he stopped flying, his carbon footprint would go from being about double the American average to around 30 percent less than average.

I’ll still have to travel a lot (by car and train), and I’ll use videoconferencing for meetings I can’t miss. But by removing my single biggest impact on the climate in one swoop, I can rest a bit easier knowing I’ve begun to heed the IPCC’s call to action. Individual gestures, repeated by millions of people, could make a huge difference.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/meteorologist-vows-never-to-fly-again-after-seeing-latest-climate-report-134014509.html