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Science

Cheap Fix Floated For Plane Vapor's Climate Damage (bbc.co.uk) 50

AmiMoJo writes: The climate-damaging vapors left behind by jet planes could be easily tackled, aviation experts say, with a new study suggesting they could be eliminated for a few pounds per flight. Jet condensation trails, or contrails, have spawned wild conspiracy theories alleging mind control and the spreading of disease, but scientists say the real problem is their warming effect.

"They create an artificial layer of clouds, which traps the heat from the Earth that's trying to escape to outer space," said Carlos Lopez de la Osa, from the Transport & Environment campaign group, which has carried out a new study on the solutions to contrails. "The scale of the warming that's associated with them is roughly having a similar impact to that of aviation carbon emissions."

Tweaking the flight paths of a handful of aircraft could reduce contrail warming by more than half by 2040, at a cost of less than $5.1 per flight. Geography and a flight's latitude have a strong influence on whether a contrail is warming. Time of day also influences the climate effects of contrails. Those formed by evening and night flights have the largest warming contribution. Seasonality is also important -- the most warming contrails tend to occur in winter. "Planes are already flying around thunderstorms and turbulence areas," Mr Lopez de la Osa said. "We will need to add one more constraint to flight planning, which is avoiding areas of contrail formation."

Cheap Fix Floated For Plane Vapor's Climate Damage

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  • I'm glad the mind control chemicals are thousands of feet above me instead of in my drinking water.

  • Reducing damage from catastrophic flooding and storms even a little bit would make it a very, very good investment.
    • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      It's much easier for them to simply void flood coverage for anybody living in some areas which is actually what they do. "Acts of God" aren't usually covered either.

    • by dbialac ( 320955 )
      Didn't we just read in June 2023 on science.(org?com?) how the trails left behind by sulfur from ships were reflecting sunlight back into space, reducing warming? Why would contrails be any different?
      • Didn't we just read in June 2023 on science.(org?com?) how the trails left behind by sulfur from ships were reflecting sunlight back into space, reducing warming? Why would contrails be any different?

        Because aircraft don't burn diesel oil.

        • by wiggles ( 30088 )

          No, they burn kerosene, which you'd think would have a similar impact.

          • No, they burn kerosene, which you'd think would have a similar impact.

            Since diesel and kerosene are basically the same thing? In fact, lots of ships don't burn diesel. They burn "bunker fuel", the cheap and extremely dirty remnants of the refining process.

      • by darkain ( 749283 )

        Trails from planes do the same.

        But from TFS, there isn't just one action taking place. As noted, the artificial clouds are trapping in surface heat at night, compared to reflecting light in the day.

    • Reducing damage from catastrophic flooding and storms even a little bit would make it a very, very good investment.

      The Insurance Industry? Seriously?

      The Insurance Industry would love to sell forest fire insurance to people who live in the middle of deserts. No risk there, right? So the perfect money-making market.

  • Along one of the major routes, there are days where the entire sky can be "clouded" solely due to contrails. I have counted as many as 40 in the sky at one time. Go ahead and try and tell me those don't have climate effects.
    • I remember reading something a few years ago, at work so can't really Google it, that scientists did some experiments during that time after 9/11 when planes were grounded and compared local weather / temperature patterns against similar periods / patterns when planes were in the air flying around and did see a difference in the local climate / air quality.

      Again, at work, so I don't have much time to go look up what they'd found - I just remember that they did find something.

      • Re:Where I'm at... (Score:5, Informative)

        by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @01:44PM (#64943153) Journal
        and did see a difference in the local climate / air quality.

        You may have been thinking about the initial study which has now been questioned and probably is not correct [bbc.co.uk].

        The problem here is that air traffic never actually stops. But for three days after 9/11, that's exactly what happened when all commercial flights were grounded. A team led by David J Travis of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater took the necessary measurements, crunched the data and published the findings in the journal Nature.

        The result? DTR did indeed widen by a full 1ÂC during those three days, in distinct contrast to the three days before the grounding and the three days after flights resumed.

        But now a US study by Dr Gang Hong of Texas A&M University has found that DTR variations of 1ÂC during September aren't all that unusual and that the change in 2001 was probably attributable to low cloud cover. Elsewhere, a team at Leeds University, working with the Met Office Hadley Centre, ran contrails through its climate models and found that you'd need about 200 times the quantity of flights over America to produce a significant effect on DTR.

        • Interesting, I was like the prev poster remembering this study.

          Still, the awareness to take such a catastrophe and be able to harness it for a study you literally couldn't do otherwise was some A+ level initiative.

    • I have counted as many as 40 in the sky at one time.

      That's nothing. Sometimes I look up and the entire sky is cloudy.

  • This makes no sense (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @12:45PM (#64942941)

    Contrails moderate day/night temperature swings. Presumably while they may insulate at night, they're increasing albedo during the day.

    This effect was noted both after 9/11 and during COVID.

    • Yeah I was gonna say this as well. The only caveat I can see is that the albedo effect is only active during daylight hours. But the heat trapping effect is always happening. So it should be a net positive in terms of heat trapping.

      • Apparently you're guilty of my sin - I failed to RTFA.

        So 'day contrails good, night contrails bad' is already noted.

    • by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @01:05PM (#64943011)

      I don't expect people to read the article but the summary clearly states: " Time of day also influences the climate effects of contrails. Those formed by evening and night flights have the largest warming contribution."

      • by rossdee ( 243626 )

        Well they should charge more for flights at night, since there is the extra cost in powering all those runway lights.

    • Presumably while they may insulate at night, they're increasing albedo during the day.

      They insultate during both night AND day. The difference is that during the day this is offset by the increased albedo reflecting the incoming heat from the sun which is obviously not there at night. This is is why, if you read the article (yes I know, it's Slashdot), it says that the plan to mitigate them is to have fewer flights during the evening and night.

      This will clearly not work for long-haul, east-west flights i.e. trans-atlantic, trans-pacific etc. due to time zone difference making it all but

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I used to fly west to east during the day. It wasn't ideal, jet lag on arrival was bad, but it certainly wasn't "impossible".

    • After 9 11 when all civilian aircraft were grounded, average temps over the US went UP. That doesnt square with the contrail overall warming theory.

  • To the effect of the additional fuel burned to alter the routes?

  • When shipping switched to cleaner low sulfur fuel [nature.com], that caused more radiative warming.

    What are the differences in mechanism for water vapor different from sulfur dioxide?

    Anyone on this site knows?

    • Sulfur just stays up there longer, but it's also highly toxic and causes acid rain. I'm sure we could figure out how to make the trails stick longer with something significantly less poisonous.

  • Let's ask the one and only question that truly matters: How much will this impact profits for those flights affected? If it's more than a penny per flight, this plan is right out the window before it was even fully conceptualized. That's the problem with all climate driven changes. If they impact profits, at all, they are inconceivable to the corporations controlling actual policy. There shall be no negative impact on profitability. Planet be damned.

  • by Qwertie ( 797303 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @02:03PM (#64943231) Homepage
    Excuse me! Excuse me. I'm a Canadian. Could we keep those please? In fact, how about you guys tweak your models to increase the warming contrails over Canada in winter?
  • I'm not really a "tinfoil" type... but as long as I remember the idea being floated out there? There was a big deal made about a distinction between your average airplane contrail and what they claimed was a chemtrail instead.

    If you want to argue that they're flat out wrong, and planes are simply not ever purposely dumping/spraying chemicals out the back while flying -- that's fine. But I'd say it's absolutely something possible to do and really has little or nothing to do with jet condensation trails, othe

  • Doomed to fail (Score:4, Interesting)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @03:04PM (#64943421)
    This idea will obviously go no further because there's an international conspiracy of lizard people with Jewish space lasers controlling everyone's minds with G5 chips that were injected in the COVID-19 vaccines. They don't want us to know the truth!!!
  • Planes are so weight-sensitive that any battery tech we have or can even conceive of that uses metals won't work, even if we had nuclear fusion working to charge them for nearly free. However, jet fuel uses oxygen and there are working prototypes of batteries that are extremely energy dense because they require oxygen to operate. This would be the #1 case for this.
  • I am a bit confused, maybe someone can help me? I remember reading that more clouds = reduced surface temperature, why would contrails increase the temperature?

  • haven't been able to find any concrete stats on what that warming actually amounts to? more than half of what?... and if we're talking about diverting flights to do this... doesn't that also have costs in terms of fuel, and passenger time? for safety, sure... but at thousands of flights, and hundreds of people per flight... this will quickly rack up jet fuel, and human time...

    A Boeing 747 burns about 240 liters of fuel per minute and can carry between 416 to 660 passengers...

    So every extra minute of flight

  • That is a simple and effective solution to the climate contribution of air travel. People would have to use other ways to travel so you won't eliminate all the climate contributions from travel, but it would eliminate the lions share. Obviously we won't do that. Because we are still mostly climate deniers who believe the problem can be solved without any real changes to our lives.

    So we spend a lot of effort nibbling at the edges with lots of fanfare. We buy a new car, but its an EV. We fly, but we pay some

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