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Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

sustainabilitybynumbers.com

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Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

#51

Post by PunchyHamster »

steanne wrote: post #6
jagged-chisel wrote: post #3

How much will it cost in fuel (additional miles) and time (flyers’ lives) to reroute?

> The proposed detours typically result in a 1% shift (and again, this is only for a small percentage of flights). That means increasing fuel use and flight time by around 1%. So if your flight is three hours long, it’s only adding an extra two minutes. For a 10-hour flight, six minutes. This seems socially acceptable to me; most people would barely notice.

the question is whether the contrail produces the amount of warming equivalent to extra fuel used, of which I'm doubtful

Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

#53

Post by Oarch »

exabrial wrote: post #49

Did I miss the part of the article stating what percentage of all effects this would have? Like if it moves the needle 0.000001% is it worth the effort? Not to play whatabouttism, but the top 8 countries after China (US through Germany) together emit about the same amount of CO2 as China alone. Not saying we shouldn't improve where we can, as the sum of many small efforts helps the whole.

I'm wondering if I missed this too. The percentage of the sky covered in contrails must be... absolutely minimal?

If it was even 1% we'd surely be up in arms about how awful it looked.

Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

#54

Post by maltyr »

exabrial wrote: post #49

Did I miss the part of the article stating what percentage of all effects this would have? Like if it moves the needle 0.000001% is it worth the effort? Not to play whatabouttism, but the top 8 countries after China (US through Germany) together emit about the same amount of CO2 as China alone. Not saying we shouldn't improve where we can, as the sum of many small efforts helps the whole.

> How, then, do contrails stack up in terms of total warming? They contribute roughly 2% to the world’s effective radiative forcing; tackling them would reduce that by a similar amount.

Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

#55

Post by grues-dinner »

burkaman wrote: post #24
grues-dinner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not crazy or conspiratorial to look at these giant lines in the sky and think "those things must be doing something" I think more accurately it's not crazy to think they might be doing something. I could equally be convinced if researchers crunched the numbers and concluded they might seem big but they're negligible on a global scale. In fact the same figure of "only 3%" of flights really have an effect" could easi…

Sure, I meant "must be" in the colloquial sense of "I have a suspicion", not "I am absolutely certain". Like "it's 5pm, must be a lot of traffic on the highway right now". If traffic turned out to be light I would be mildly surprised, update my assumptions and move on with my life.

Fair enough, it was pedantic. But the distinction is exactly where conspiracists come unstuck.

Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

#56

Post by bityard »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #27
dylan604 wrote: post #4

"Why aren’t we doing more to eliminate contrails?" I'm just having a hard time groking that contrails are really that impacting. TFA just quotes a bunch of numbers, but does not actually discuss how the numbers were derived. Maybe I've just been around too many people into Chemtrails, but this just reads to me as an offshoot of that type of thinking.

Wikipedia[1] states it very clearly: > It is considered that the largest contribution of aviation to climate change comes from contrails. 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. In 1992, this warming effect was estimated between 3.5 mW/m2 and 17 mW/m2. In 2009,…

> in places near busy airports I hear that a sizable fraction of all cloud cover is due to lingering contrails

Hmm. I don't know about that. My understanding is that contrails only (or mainly?) form at higher altitudes. Most of the traffic around a busy airport is low-altitude take-offs and landings. I live practically next door to a busy international airport and can't say I ever notice contrails, except for a few off in the distance around dusk.

I notice a lot more contrails when I'm out in rural "flyover country", but that might also just be because you typically get to see much more of the sky when you're out in the middle of nowhere.

Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

#57

Post by actionfromafar »

andrewflnr wrote: post #33
SoftTalker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airlines will certainly notice a 1% fuel cost increase however. But, they'll just add it to ticket prices.

They'll all need to do it at once though, or people will just pick the cheaper flight that doesn't go around the contrail-forming region, basically every time. Of course it's a coordination problem. It probably needs to be a regulation before it will actually happen.

1% less fuel will not be 1% less ticket cost, but something much less.

Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

#58

Post by [deleted] »

exabrial wrote: post #49

Did I miss the part of the article stating what percentage of all effects this would have? Like if it moves the needle 0.000001% is it worth the effort? Not to play whatabouttism, but the top 8 countries after China (US through Germany) together emit about the same amount of CO2 as China alone. Not saying we shouldn't improve where we can, as the sum of many small efforts helps the whole.

[deleted]

Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

#59

Post by anon291 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #31

It'd be worth it just to shut the chemtrail nuts up.

I hate to break it to you, but the individual chem-trails that you can only see with my patented tin foil glasses are more dangerous than the visible ones. If you knew about the people trying to control you, you would know all about this.

Re: Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap

#60

Post by jvanderbot »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #51
steanne wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The proposed detours typically result in a 1% shift (and again, this is only for a small percentage of flights). That means increasing fuel use and flight time by around 1%. So if your flight is three hours long, it’s only adding an extra two minutes. For a 10-hour flight, six minutes. This seems socially acceptable to me; most people would barely notice.

the question is whether the contrail produces the amount of warming equivalent to extra fuel used, of which I'm doubtful

The entire initiative is based on the idea that it is more friendly to route around contrails. I work actively in this area on the routing side (flightscience.ai), and can assure you it's actually fairly cheap climate-wise to reroute a flight given enough warning. If you check out their map (follow TFA's links), you can see that contrails are formed in fairly localized areas.

Go to aviationweather.gov, and you can see huge boxes of alert areas that we already have to deal with. It's really just another day at the office.

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