Contrails Map

>The CO2 emitted by aircraft only causes about half the climate impact of aviation. The other half comes from contrails— artificial clouds that are created by soot in the engine exhaust.

Then what does that mean?

I find it strange. Clouds happen naturally. Contrails are mini clouds (literally a cloud chamber), are we saying that all those “chemtrails” are pollution?

Or are we saying the unspent fuel particulate inside that they formed around is?

This is where this bizarro science is going off the deep end for me. As any object traveling through the atmosphere at that altitude, disrupting air, is going to form condensation and cloud trails. The more moisture in the atmosphere, the more trails. Sure there’s a little bit of unspent kerosene particles but hardly enough to even be a glycerin on a well working engine.

Are we suggesting changing flight routes and wasting more fuel (which pollutes more) to protect the ground from these 0.0000001% reduction in light cloud trails? Seriously. I want to know the science behind how this plays out.

I’m all for shutting down the black exhaust engines and cleaning up how we produce thrust. I’m all for that. This argument that clouds cause pollution is just wacky.

What about wingtips. Those cause trails (though not as pronounced as the engines turning at 12,000rpm), those contain no particulates and yet, they exist. Atmospheric science can explain a lot of what you see at 30,000ft (10,000m). This all sounds like NIMBY science posturing and pseudo-science to me.

The general point here is that your individual behavior as a consumer likely doesn't impact this mechanism. An aircraft doesn't skip a flight just because you waited a week to go on vacation. Aviation infrastructure is something of a fixed-cost which would likely only respond to systemic changes in travel demand, economic impacts on maintenance or fueling, or possibly some other form of regulation (e.g. a penalty for inducing contrails).

Below is a comprehensive list of geoengineering-related patents, compiled to the best of my knowledge. Based on the language and scope of several of these patents, their stated purposes do not appear to be inherently human-friendly in any form as the language escalates from weather influence to planetary irradiation, artificial plasmas, relativistic particles, atmospheric weapons-scale energy systems, and even the generation of destructive weather events.

https://gist.github.com/pupdogg/4e796ed1bb0d24338a3f6523e404...

Examples:

    1. System and Method for Irradiation of Planet Surface Areas
    2. Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere, and/or Magnetosphere
    3. Broadcast Dissemination of Trace Quantities of Biologically Active Chemicals
    4. Method and Apparatus for Creating an Artificial Electron Cyclotron Heating Region of Plasma
    5. Method and Apparatus for Triggering a Substantial Change in Earth Characteristics and Measuring Earth Changes
    6. Planetary Weather Modification System

> As for contrails, disturbing the atmosphere is going to cause some freezing (clouds) at that altitude, at that temperature. How do you suggest we mitigate that? Fly lower and burn more fuel? Fly less and tell people to take the train or that their package will arrive next week?

See this article: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/12/1089620/how-rero...

Here are some highlights, in case the paywall is a problem for some.

First, how much do contrails matter?

> This cirrus-forming phenomenon could account for around 35% of aviation’s total contribution to climate change—or about 1% to 2% of overall global warming, according to some estimates

> A small fraction of overall flights, between 2% and 10%, create about 80% of the contrails. So the growing hope is that simply rerouting those flights could significantly reduce the effect, presenting a potentially high leverage, low cost and fast way of easing warming.

Breakthrough Energy, Google Research, and American Airlines conducted a test:

> They employed satellite imagery, weather data, software models, and AI prediction tools to steer pilots over or under areas where their planes would be likely to produce contrails. American Airlines used these tools in 70 test flights over six months, and subsequent satellite data indicated that they reduced the total length of contrails by 54%, relative to flights that weren’t rerouted

Avoiding the contrail prone regions would use more fuel, so the question is how much would it cost to avoid those regions?

> A new study published in Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability explored this issue by coupling commercial tools for optimizing flight trajectories with models that simulated nearly 85,000 American Airlines flights, both domestic and international, under various weather conditions last summer and this winter.

> In those simulations, the researchers found that reducing the warming effect of contrails by 73% increased fuel costs by just 0.11% and overall costs by 0.08%, when averaged across those tens of thousands of flights. (Only about 14% of the flights needed to be adjusted to avoid forming warming contrails in the simulations.)

There are also a couple of other factors to consider, such as:

> There are also some thorny complications that still need to be resolved, like the fact that cirrus clouds can also reduce warming by reflecting away short-wave radiation from the sun.

> The loss of this cooling effect would have to be tallied into any calculation of the net benefit—or, perhaps, avoided. For instance, Shapiro says the initial strategy might be to reroute flights only during the early evening and night, which would eliminate the sunlight-reflecting complication.

Another one is the the increased fuel will add to CO2 to the atmosphere. CO2 stays in the atmosphere a lot longer than water, so it is possible that reducing contrails would be a net positive in the short term but a net negative over the long term.

I've never taken much of an interest in the chemtrail thing, but it does seem funny that governments are proposing to do more or less the same thing they denied doing!

I can't see this being the answer though. Maybe I'm wrong, but it wouldn't be the first time environmental measures have proven destructive. Some of the most invasive pests have been brought in to control a less invasive ones e.g. cane toads in Australia. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.