I was hoping this was going to be about eliminating the heat trail of a plane.
Then learned it’s just about rerouting a flight to climate zones that will less likely form a vapor trail.
Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
131–140 of 206 posts
Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact: the B-2 bomber has a LIDAR-based contrail detection sensor, called the Pilot Alert System. https://tridsys.com/our-divisions/optical-precision-sensors/
There’s always been something disturbing about public internet advertisements of military equipment. I suppose it’s dual use, but it seems like baiting a malicious actor to play with it in detail.
If anything there should be more public info.
Seeing people having to FOI request details of the chemicals they were exposed to in their service, is much more disturbing.
Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 5G RF is invisible, yet still being used by the government to control our brains. Well it's one of the main last-mile mediums people use to doomscroll their propaganda feeds, so... yes?
It's funny how often the conspiracy types are both right and wrong. We have precision targeted ~~propaganda~~ content streaming straight to the tracking device everyone willingly carries, but they land on 5G being some sci-fi form of mind control. It's some form of motivated reasoning. The same people who will tell you a secret cabal of billionaires controls the government will roll their eyes if you bring up the her…
I can't upvote this enough.
I would find CT believers fascinating if it also wasn't sad. I have one in the family and she lives below the poverty line and has been missing most of her teeth since her late forties (fluoride works, people).
Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
#134[flagged]
The article claims that the warming effect from bouncing heat back down is overall larger than the cooling effect from bouncing heat back up. If you disagree with this assertion, you'll need to say why, not just call someone a liar. The article does agree that 9% of contrails have an overall cooling effect, and perhaps that could be magnified by a larger or more persistent contrail.
> The article claims that the warming effect from bouncing heat back down is overall larger than the cooling effect from bouncing heat back up. If you disagree with this assertion, you'll need to say why
I'm not sure they do. It's an extremely counterintuitive claim that would need to be justified, and while the author does cite (their own) paper, it sounds like the model they came up with is highly parameterised and not particularly physically validated. If it's really the case that contrails reflect more heat down than up (unlike what the scientific consensus says is true for regular clouds), then there should be an explanation for what contrail-specific factor causes this, not just "here's a pile of math equations that say it doesn't, don't ask where we got the parameters to fill them out from".
Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
#135So hard to get done though. Needs global cooperation. The overlap with chemtrails and climate change means Trump might hate it on vibes and ban this correction for US airlines.
Airlines are on wafer thin margins and for the longer turnaround times affecting schedules wont love it. The fact that it is a small % is worse: if you get hit you become less competitive!
Pilots workload is increased too.
Its a great technical idea but not sure how you'd get it off the ground.
In an alternative timeline with a carbon price it may work. You get x$ carbon credits for a detour. Let the planes decide if they want it.
Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
#136There are a lot of comments here mocking “chemtrail” believers, but I think the confusion is understandable. There seems to be a mix-up between three terms: contrails, chemtrails, and cloud seeding. Contrails are just condensation trails caused by jet exhaust and air pressure differences at high altitude. Cloud seeding, on the other hand, is a real weather-modification technique that uses aircraft to disperse substan…
The chemtrails conspiracy nuts aren't confused about cloud seeding. They believe contrails are visible evidence that airplanes are used to disperse mind control drugs over the populations below.
There are many people that believe the contrails, that they refer to as chemtrails, are about weather control. Those are the people that I think are confused. Just search "chemtrails weather control" or "manipulation". I have also spoken to many people that hold this belief.
Also, read the wikipedia on chemtrails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory
Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact: the B-2 bomber has a LIDAR-based contrail detection sensor, called the Pilot Alert System. https://tridsys.com/our-divisions/optical-precision-sensors/
There’s always been something disturbing about public internet advertisements of military equipment. I suppose it’s dual use, but it seems like baiting a malicious actor to play with it in detail.
B-2 is not dual use. There is no civilian use for it.
Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
#138Given that the warming impacts of contrails are short-lived (roughly a day), I think it is a good idea to do research now on the weather forecasting needed to avoid producing contrails. But I don't really see a reason to actually start avoiding them now, with the associated costs in terms of fuel, CO2 emissions, and time. We can start avoiding them in a few decades when it might have become urgent to have cooling.
There was a really good section of the article that went into great detail of the math and how it would easily outweigh the CO2. How it would only require something like diverting 2% of all flights as it is only that percentage of flights that make the majority of the contrails and that the diversion of the average flight would be something small like an extra 2 minutes flight time for shorter flights and like 6 minutes on a longer flight which the article states is not much increase in fuel consumption as well as not such a time increase to dissatisfy customers. So if the article is accurate in their math then the associated costs in all three fuel, CO2, and time are not an issue.
Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
#139I can't imagine that contrails are a significant percentage of cloud cover.
This is bullshit. How can anyone pretend the radiation reflecting from it is significant? How wide are these things? 20 meters?
That’s narrower than a Boeing 737’s wingspan, and when you look at planes leaving a trail behind them, you can often see the trail fan out much wider than the plane.
Not sure how wide that would be, but the length has to be factored in too, which begs the question, how wide and long is a piece of string/cloud?
On the ground looking up the sense of scale falls apart a bit.
Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article claims that the warming effect from bouncing heat back down is overall larger than the cooling effect from bouncing heat back up. If you disagree with this assertion, you'll need to say why, not just call someone a liar. The article does agree that 9% of contrails have an overall cooling effect, and perhaps that could be magnified by a larger or more persistent contrail.
> The article claims that the warming effect from bouncing heat back down is overall larger than the cooling effect from bouncing heat back up. If you disagree with this assertion, you'll need to say why I'm not sure they do. It's an extremely counterintuitive claim that would need to be justified, and while the author does cite (their own) paper, it sounds like the model they came up with is highly parameterised and…
I'm not going to argue the point, I'm no climate scientist. But Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail disagrees with you as well, so you'd need to argue with their sources too.
"In general, aircraft contrails trap outgoing longwave radiation emitted by the Earth and atmosphere more than they reflect incoming solar radiation, resulting in a net increase in radiative forcing."
Shiny bright light goes through or gets scattered. Dull red blackbody radiation gets absorbed. Doesn't sound too counterintuitive to me, but again I'm no expert.