Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Transportation Earth

Contrails Cause 57% of a Plane's Climate Impact. Can That Be Changed? (cnn.com) 138

Contrails — the wispy ice clouds trailing behind flying jets — "are surprisingly bad for the environment," reports CNN: A study that looked at aviation's contribution to climate change between 2000 and 2018 concluded that contrails create 57% of the sector's warming impact, significantly more than the CO2 emissions from burning fuel. They do so by trapping heat that would otherwise be released into space.

And yet, the problem may have an apparently straightforward solution. Contrails — short for condensation trails, which form when water vapor condenses into ice crystals around the small particles emitted by jet engines — require cold and humid atmospheric conditions, and don't always stay around for long. Researchers say that by targeting specific flights that have a high chance of producing contrails, and varying their flight path ever so slightly, much of the damage could be prevented.

Adam Durant, a volcanologist and entrepreneur based in the UK, is aiming to do just that. "We could, in theory, solve this problem for aviation within one or two years," he says.... Of contrails' climate impact, "80 or 90% is coming from only maybe five to 10% of all flights," says Durant. "Simply redirecting a small proportion of flights can actually save the majority of the contrail climate impact...."

In 2021, scientists calculated that addressing the contrail problem would cost under $1 billion a year, but provide benefits worth more than 1,000 times as much. And a study from Imperial College London showed that diverting just 1.7% of flights could reduce the climate damage of contrails by as much as 59%.

Durant's company Satavia is now testing its technology with two airlines and "actively looking for more airlines in 2023 to work with, as we start scaling up the service that we offer."

Truly addressing the issue may require some changes to air traffic rules, Durant says — but he's not the only one working on the issue. There's also the task force of a non-profit energy think tank that includes six airlines, plus researchers and academics. "We could seriously reduce, say, 50% of the industry's contrails impact by 2030," Durant tells CNN. "That's totally attainable, because we can do it with software and analytics."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Contrails Cause 57% of a Plane's Climate Impact. Can That Be Changed?

Comments Filter:
  • by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Sunday January 15, 2023 @10:39AM (#63210254) Homepage
    And a thousand thousand conspiracy fanatics screamed out "I KNEW IT!! CONTRAILS!! Been telling ya for years.."

    I for one welcome our new *chan stans.
    • Yep. It's well known that comtrails have to be dispersed over major cities so there's no way any aircraft will be "diverted".

    • "I KNEW IT!! CONTRAILS!! Been telling ya for years.."

      No, that crowd calls them chemtrails and think they are various chemicals used for everything from mind control to birth control.

  • Just wait 'til the chemtrail goofballs get a hold of this one.

  • They create 100% of the government mind control.

    • Well, personally I think various news outlets are vastly superior than anything sprayed into the air in that matter.

  • This issue should solve itself over time. The frogs can only get so gay.

  • Yay! Simple affordable and large impact. Do it.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, 2023 @11:18AM (#63210352)

    we can do it with software and analytics.

    Maybe maybe not. But the impact of all these people flying all over the place can't be mitigated by fixing contrails with software.

    The entire commercial flight industry as a whole is incredibly wasteful. It burns an enormous amount of fossil fuel, all of which has to be extracted and refined, both of which have large carbon footprints. It takes vast computing horsepower to keep the industry working safely which is powered by fossil fuel.

    Then you have the literal geographic footprint of it. Giant airports with runways and taxiways and roads and terminals. These things don't last and have to be constantly upgraded or new ones built further away from cities, which consumes huge amounts of resources.

    And building a modern commercial airplane is not exactly an environmentally friendly process. Most of the materials that make them up start out underground and have to be mined, processed, refined, and machined in huge factories.

    All for what? So you can go to Rome and take a selfie in front of the Coliseum? Go to Yellowstone and take a selfie in front of Old Faithful? So you can get a mango at the grocery store down the street you drive to? Fuck that. Time to stop greenwashing shit like this. Shut the whole fucking thing down.

    • Just stop propping up the industry with bailouts and let it price itself to keep itself in business. Oh what? No one will be able to afford to fly? Well maybe we aren't meant to fly..
      • And we weren't meant to get medical care we can't afford or get food shipped in from around the world or US people weren't intended to have the protection of 2 huge oceans and we weren't meant to have all this communications tech.

        I vote for caves and whatever we can each hunt n gather. The way we were meant to be and we're for most of human history. Current good living is a historical aberration.

        • The comment you replied to is arguing for letting capitalism resolve the pollution problem that air travel has.
          You're trying to use hyperbole to make your point, but it's not working.
    • That's all well and good, but how the hell am I supposed to get to the next conference on global warming, if I can't fly?
      • Try a Zoom meeting.

        But how are you going to get the taxpayer to pay for your vacation trip to that nice location... anyone ever noticed how those conferences are always in really awesome places anyone would want to spend a vacation at rather than, say, East St. Louis?

    • The entire commercial flight industry as a whole is incredibly wasteful .... Shut the whole fucking thing down.

      Or ... stop subsidizing it and let nature take its course.

      There's really no need for everybody to spend so many weekends in foreign places and businesses can do most things by video these days. Raise the price of the tickets to their actual cost and the problem will largely solve itself.

      Local economies will thank you for it, too.

      Maybe there can be some concessions for shipping goods, but not for passengers.

    • we can do it with software and analytics.

      Maybe maybe not. But the impact of all these people flying all over the place can't be mitigated by fixing contrails with software.

      According to this analysis some of the impact can be mitigated. Not all.

      For context, the contribution of global aviation to the greenhouse effect was calculated to be about 3.5% of the net anthropogenic radiation forcing. So, no, this isn't going to solve the problem, and your proposed solution "just stop flying" won't either, since aviation just is not the big effect.

    • Shut the whole fucking thing down.

      Good luck getting elected on that platform.

  • YGBSM! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by eford49 ( 3521375 )
    What a crock of brown stuff! I'm no climatologist but I do have more than 20 years aviation experience and contrails do not "form when water vapor condenses into ice crystals around the small particles emitted by jet engines". Contrails typically form in the wingtip vortices well away from the engine exhaust. The dynamics of air pressure in creating lift combine with temperature and humidity to produce the ice particles that make up these trails. You can see this yourself just looking out the window the
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      What a crock of brown stuff! I'm no climatologist but I do have more than 20 years aviation experience and contrails do not "form when water vapor condenses into ice crystals around the small particles emitted by jet engines".

      You're no physicist, but you know better than they do [wisc.edu]. What other amazing powers do you possess?

      • by Anonymous Coward
        Pipe down, Martin, and respect the other users. You aren't Slashdot's end-all expert.
      • Oh, many, grasshopper.
    • Re: YGBSM! (Score:4, Informative)

      by ThurstonMoore ( 605470 ) on Sunday January 15, 2023 @11:42AM (#63210422)

      Seems like the rest of the world disagrees with where contrails come from. The pictures of them sure do look like they're coming out of the engines. Not sure why 4 contrails would come from two wing tips. I'm going to go as far as calling you a liar.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]

    • You are thinking of condensation that appears in wing tip vorticies when the humidity is very high. In normal high altitude cruise, its the engine exhaust that is the major contributor. If you google 747 in flight contrail, you can see images showing the 4 separate contrails before they merge.

      Under some conditions contrails can seed the formation of large areas of cirrus - you can see this yourself when there are broad straight bands of cirrus in the sky - these can cover a very large area.

      I don't th
      • ...Under some conditions contrails can seed the formation of large areas of cirrus - you can see this yourself when there are broad straight bands of cirrus in the sky - these can cover a very large area.

        Yep! This occurs when the upper atmosphere is supersaturated with water vapor, so initial seeding by the contrails triggers the phase change from water vapor into ice crystals.

        What I don't know is whether the supersaturated water vapor would eventually turn into ice crystals by itself, and hence the contrail stimulus only speeds up a process that would happen anyway, or not.

        I don't think this is "pseudo science". There are some real journal articles https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]

        Not pseudo science at all!

        Interestingly, a lot of what we learned comes from the pause in airline traffic immediately following the 9/

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          What I don't know is whether the supersaturated water vapor would eventually turn into ice crystals by itself, and hence the contrail stimulus only speeds up a process that would happen anyway, or not.

          What we learned form the pause in airline traffic after 9/11, and the decrease during COVID is that contrails create more cloud, they don't just speed up formation that would already happen. We had a pretty good idea already though, as well as the effect on heat radiation, from studying temperatures around WWI

    • Wow, so much wrong in your post, but will focus on your assertion that ice particles in contrails don't trap heat that would otherwise be released into space. It is well known that unlike liquid clouds, ice clouds (cirrus, contrails, etc.) tend to have an overall warming effect on the earth. This is because while they are optically thin with regard to incoming solar radiation (meaning they let it pass), they are very efficient at blocking outgoing longwave radiation from the Earth. So essentially they allow

  • As well.... I find it very difficult to believe that the wisp of a trail effects on anything would be negligible. On a cloudy night, the heat is trapped anyway. You can't just say, "the contrail accounts for 1% of the sky, so that means that 1% of the heat doesn't radiate out." The heat has all night to radiate out. So if you see contrails in the morning sky, well that air is already as cold as it is going to get. So what the article is really saying is that the CO2 emissions are negligible, and so ar

    • 1% is being way generous. Its probably closer to 0.01% and absolutely tiny to that other heat reflective formation that occasionally happens that absolutely can cover 100% of the sky... clouds. We need to find a way to ban clouds.

  • We soon might very well want to MAKE CLOUDS:

    Schneider, now at Caltech, made waves last February by arguing that global cloud cover may have a tipping point, beyond which clouds would “become unstable and break up,” sending warming into an upward spiral. He used a model with a fine-scale resolution that, he said, represented the real dynamics of clouds much better than the models used to calculate climate change. The tipping point would not be reached until CO2 levels were at around 1200 ppm, mo

  • by Macgruder ( 127971 ) <chandies.williamson@NoSPam.gmail.com> on Sunday January 15, 2023 @12:03PM (#63210474)

    TFA doesn't actually list what the impact is. It just says contrails are bad, but never actually explains why they are bad. Does anyone got a ref or cite?

    • TFA doesn't actually list what the impact is. It just says contrails are bad, but never actually explains why they are bad. Does anyone got a ref or cite?

      Overall, because the heating caused by reflection of infrared downward is a greater effect than the cooling caused by reflecting solar radiation upward. (Do keep in mind that the heating is day and night, while the cooling is day only. That's a factor of two for the day/night, and another factor of 2 for the cosine of the sun angle).

      More details, look in the article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
      Go to section 3, "Methods".

  • Even removing 57% of climate impact, the rest still very relevant
  • Again, this is typical of Americans' penchant for monomania. It used to be commies under every bed. Then it was the energy crisis. Then it was recycling. Then climate change.

    There is more than one thing going on at the same time. We should not be sacrificing everything at a single altar of the current monomaniacal religion.

    • Don't you know? The government can only handle one topic at a time, else people wouldn't always ask whenever they do something "How comes they have time to waste on X instead of doing Y?"

    • Again, this is typical of Americans' penchant for monomania. It used to be commies under every bed. Then it was the energy crisis. Then it was recycling. Then climate change.

      You don't seem to pay attention to American news. To first order, zero percent of America's monomania is climate change. Number one at the moment seems to be Biden's classified documents, taking over from last week's monomania, which was Elon Musk's handling of Twitter.

      Even among political issues, climate change doesn't even make the top ten. (source: https://www.pewresearch.org/po... [pewresearch.org] )

  • I don't think my little flight to visit family or take a trip once or twice a year is harming the Earth anywhere close to the frequent, extravagant flights made by legislators, celebs, and the rich every single day.
    • Yes, you do cause damage, and you should be taxed for your flights, as should those who make a lot of flights, especially private jets. This is accordance with the 'polluter pays' principle, where the person causing a mess gets to pay to clear it up. However to reduce the impact on those who make few flights, the money should be returned to the general public via increases in tax disregards for income tax for everyone. This ensures real justice.

      Of course it will hurt the rich, so will never happen.

    • I don't think my little flight to visit family or take a trip once or twice a year is harming the Earth anywhere close to the frequent, extravagant flights made by legislators, celebs, and the rich every single day.

      Absolutely, but they'll take away your car, furnace, stove, and all sorts of other shit before rich people will give up flying.

  • Other than Stealth Bombers and Stealth drones ( which still have contrail issues) We're using MOL the same wing architecture thats been around since the 50's. Surely there's a way to tweak that. Before I get any smart ass replies. Yes I do work for the FAA.

  • The best technical solution is the currently in-development lean burn engines such the Rolls Royce UltraFan which is nearing commercial availability. https://www.rolls-royce.com/me... [rolls-royce.com] These engines will use 25% less fuel and due to their higher combustion chamber temperatures will emit much less particulates, so will therefore reduce contrails.
  • Where I live we have much less jet traffic than the US or Europe.

    During Covid isolation there was almost no jet traffic and I noticed that those summers were, mercifully, much cooler than the previous decades of constantly getting hotter and hotter. I was able to get through those summers without air conditioning, a first in over a decade and twice in a row.

    I'm not saying it's the cause, I don't know and obviously there was less car traffic as well, it's just awfully coincidental.

    With the jets in

    • after 9/11 happened and all flights were grounded, I remember the skies were the bluest I had ever seen the next day. There was a satellite photo timelapse somewhere that showed Air Force 1 and its escort jets being the only planes in the sky, and seeing the resulting contrails of just those 3 planes basically turning the deep blue sky into a hazy white over the space of several hours. I wish I could find that again.

  • You could simply take the train.

  • > In 2021, scientists calculated that addressing the contrail problem would cost under $1 billion a year, but provide benefits worth more than 1,000 times as much.

    So, contrails are causing a trillion dollars of harm per year? I would love to see how they came up with that number.

  • I live 40 miles from one of the biggest airline hubs in Asia.
    At any given moment during the day there are literally +30 planes in the sky according to FlightRadar.
    Not a single contrail.
    They are just not there.
    Coincidence?
    Don't think so.

  • https://e360.yale.edu/features... [yale.edu] Yale had an article on this in 2019

Were there fewer fools, knaves would starve. - Anonymous

Working...