This is something the military, e.g. fighter jets worry about. The altitudes (in a given airspace) that form contrails are briefed as part of "tactical weather". You try to avoid them if able, because no matter how stealthy you are, you are lit up for all to see if you fly at those altitudes.
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.
I saw some photos of those ads on twitter a few years back about a certain manufacturer's engine being the correct choice for a specific in-development military plane.
It's weird seeing physical advertising be so targeted. Like, multiple physical ads to target less than a dozen people total.
It's a little broader than that, because these are general defense contractors who have their fingers in every pie. So it's seen by contracting officers, partners, potential employees, etc.
It's a bit like a Coke ad -- you do not need to be informed about Coke, but it creates an atmosphere of nebulous positive feelings. Still, kinda weird.
> If you're ever in DC, you should check out the ads in the metro stops near the Pentagon. Seeing those kinds of ads in real life is even more shocking.
"Vulgar" is the word I'd use. Like a child sneaking out of the house to play with gasoline and matches.
Our capital (if such a thing even remains relevant) will feel much more dignified when there's no incentive to hock machines of death in the public transit.
A malicious actor is probably not going to meet them at their place of business and do FBI background checks, in person DOD interviews, even polygraphs, to be able to really talk to them.
Avoiding con-trail creation has been a factor for military aviation since at least WWII; bomber pilots then were briefed on what altitudes to fly at to avoid them as well, but not because they were especially stealthy.
If you take a 8K camera with a standard 50 mm lens, its angular resolution is about 20" / pixel.
A 50 mm lens has a FOV of about 40°. It covers a cone of about 0.38 strad. A full hemisphere has 2·pi = 6.28 strad, so we need at least 16.5 such cones to cover the whole area; actually we need likely 20-25 because of imperfect geometry and some safety margins at intersections. We can, of course, mount fewer and scan.
If we take a plane like A320 (larger than a typical fighter jet), and remove it 25 km from us, its angular size would be about about 5', or 300". Our A320 would be 15 pixels wide, assuming very good optics, and very clear skies. This is not much to determine what craft is approaching us. At the cruise speed of 800 km/h, or 220 m/s, the plane will reach us in 122 s, or less than 2 minutes. Not a lot of warning. A fighter jet making 500 m/s would be there in 50 s.
This is, of course, without any clouds. Even very light clouds or haze would conceal the aircraft at 25 km. To say nothing of the night time.
We could of course take in IR camera, but I don't remember 8K IR cameras being cheap, or even available. A stealth aircraft like B-2 does a lot to make its thermal signature very faint, including the exhaust.
Most camera sensors already detect in the IR range, you just need to remove the filter. I've done it, works great and pretty fun to convert some old webcams, robot vacuums lidar scanners look especially cool.
Clouds also don't save you (unless you have two thick layers to fly through) because this technique is even easier with satellites. Stealth effectively no longer exists for most nation-state level tech. The B-2 is a very cool plane but is unfortunately obsolete. Still great for when you want to put on more of a show than an attack.
"Clouds also don't save you (unless you have two thick layers to fly through) because this technique is even easier with satellites."
This is incorrect. A typical satellite will orbit once every 100 minutes or so (military spy satellites more often because they fly lower, but that only makes the next part even worse). To have any kind of resolution the swath it can scan is very narrow. It'll pass from horizon to horizon in some 10-14 minutes or so, if if passes reasonably overhead (which it'll do once, the next orbit it'll be far from overhead or not seen at all, depending on your latitude).
For a satellite to spot an airplane you need to be in luck. A coincidence. It's not something you can use for spotting airplanes. The harder you look (the more you increase resolution) the more narrow the swath gets. You can have more satellites. There's still no chance of actively detecting airplanes on a regular basis. And this doesn't even take into consideration that the data must be processed after having been dumped from the satellite. The satellite is by then elsewhere.
You could use a geostationary satellite, to monitor a good third of the planet at once. But then you're nearly 36000km above equator and you can't see any details. So, not that either.
Satellites are great for scanning the surface of the planet. And for that we're now at a stage where it's hard to hide anything, for very long at least. But moving airplanes is something entirely different.
(My job is about processing data from satellites).
Curious if you saw any difference in far IR vs near IR on cameras with removed filters. When I tried camera without filter or camera with IR filter (one that only lets IR through and look redish black to naked eye) attached I had nice b/w images of trees on long exposures or better pictures of tv remote leds. But if I make a picture of an iron or pan they look the same when either cold or hot.
This is very different from thermal cameras I used where you can clearly see unevennes of the pan heat, dark image on tshirt being warmer on the sun, person at night etc.
I can speculate that thermal exhaust falls into the second category.
Does a consumer-grade 8K camera sensor detect a 20°C difference in a few pixels? Cameras have to aggressively fight against thermal noise. Visible light is much more energetic than IR; detecting a faint IR signal with a sensor which is about as hot as the object it's looking at is hard. You need to cool the sensor down; old military aircraft even carried a tank of liquid nitrogen for that.
I mean, yes, you can take a low-noise sensor, add cooling, add a telescope lens so that you'd see the shape more readily, put a bunch of these telescopes on a rotating platform to scan the sky, etc. This is doable, but the thread started with an idea that it's doable with consumer-grade ("cheap") tech. I doubt that.
While at it, even if we assume that stealth does not exist for fast and heavy aircraft, it seems to effectively exist for slow, lighter-weight drones. Ukrainian drones, built from ultralight aircraft like Aeroprakt A-20, somehow penetrate 700 miles into Russian territory to burn refineries. With a cruise speed of 70 mph (sic), it should take them 10 hours to fly this distance. Were they detected efficiently, that would be enough time to scramble an interceptor a hundred times. Apparently this does not happen.
How many of those attacks were successful? Russia has fairly advanced radar that is quite capable of picking up a plane like that. I think the more likely explanation is that it was incorrectly deemed not a threat or a minor threat.
700 miles is far more than the standard range of the A-20 (210nm). Is it possible they launched it from well within Russia thereby making it much less likely to be considered a threat?
These attacks were so successful that Russia is having fuel shortages right now, and decreased its exports of oil products by about 10%. It is estimated that about 30% of Russia's refining capacity is disabled by now. (E.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czx020k4056o)
So no, these are not isolated incidents, this is a big hole in air defense, and Russia used to produce some competent air defense systems. They are just not geared towards the drones, much like Patriot air defense systems are not either.
But there has been one very well published Ukrainian attack launched from Russian soil[1].
If Ukraine had could regularly smuggle several drone aircraft's and explosives into Russia and launch them, we would be seeing a lot of other effects. Such as attacks on weapon production sites deep into Russia[2].
But yes, a lot of those attacks are probably unsuccessful. With my qualifications as armchair general, I would be surprised if more than 10% of them was successful.
You don't need to identify the A320 from 15 pixels. Once you see a 15 pixel signature that changes between subsequent frames you point the one extra camera on a movable mount with a 600mm lens on it at it. Now you get a few hundred pixels.
If it were all that simple would you not expect at least one of China, Taiwan, Iran, Israel, Ukraine, Russia to deploy such a technology? To me this recently popular idea that you can just point a load of cameras at the sky to beat stealth is disproved by the lack of such installations. These are fairly motivated actors.
> To me this recently popular idea that you can just point a load of cameras at the sky to beat stealth is disproved by the lack of such installations.
Russia has a 10x advantage over Ukraine in aviation, yet it only uses it to lob guided bombs from safely beyond the Russian border. The anti-air defense far outmatches the stealth of Russian airplanes.
They are not the stealthiest, sure. But there are reasons to think that NATO planes are not going to fare much better.
Super resolution is a thing but I think they mean to just take the differences and track based on the motions in that data directly. Any deltas which appear to move in a certain way are likely to be aircraft, especially if the same deltas show up on a 2nd camera, even if they aren't clear enough to directly identify. Basically the motion vector estimation step of video encode but tuned really tight and ignoring motions that don't look like aircraft motions.
I'm not sure this is really all that perfect/foolproof though, especially with 8k visible light cameras. For one, clouds can be quite the problem (even at non-visible wavelengths). Atmospheric turbulence can also be annoying and the air can be plain hazy depending on the day - both limit detection accuracy at a given range. When night comes the detection ability is greatly hampered even with additional wavelengths (and IR has lower resolution anyways).
It worked well enough in a weekend project many years back to use computer vision (the craze at the time) and compare to an ADS-B make by using a 4k 1 FPS image feed in a weekend project to mess with computer vision a decade back. I definitely see it as a valid addition to a detection system... but I would stop short of writing a "Military Dumbfounded at This One Simple Trick" article about it.
Plus, the invisibility of a thing does not stop the conspiracy loons from building conspiracies around it. 5G RF is invisible, yet still being used by the government to control our brains. For chemtrails, the conspiracy is just going to turn into: "They're spraying invisible chemicals all over us to turn us into communists." There's no end to it.
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 heritage foundation.
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).
They can't abide pretend child endangerment happening in pizza basements, but point out the Catholic church or Trump perving on Miss Teen USA contestants in their dressing room and they don't seem to care.
To be fair, most gasses and even aerosols are effectively invisible to the naked eye. Not to mention viruses, prions, bacteria, spores.. some of which affect behavior (rabies, mad cow disease, and the famed cordyceps for ants).
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.
"Without those clouds the alien mind control rays from space will get you more often. You think it's deja vu don't you? Better get your tinfoil hat prepped."
Likewise. In fact, I was under the opposite impression because of the benefit that sulfur enriched shipping exhaust had for our climate [0]. It looks like these clouds are thinner and don't have the same impact as that, though. While I felt that the featured article linked to their favorite site aggressively (four links to contrails.org), it looks like the google site is legitimate [1]. I couldn't find a recent [2] paper on NoAA about contrails, but presumably others have studied it.
> In fact, I was under the opposite impression because of the benefit that sulfur enriched shipping exhaust had for our climate.
It isn't quite accurate to state that ship tracks have/had a "benefit" on our climate. Their existence creates a transient decrease in OLR and increase in albedo. If anything, they simply masked some GHG-induced warming that had a much longer half-time, and cleaning up ship emissions has "unmasked" some of that hidden warming. But, again, the warming was already committed.
The article mentions that some flights produce a net cooling effect. I wonder if it could be cost effective to divert flights toward contrail formation when it's predicted that they'll produce cooling (I also wonder what the actual circumstances are when they produce cooling--low surface temperatures, maybe?).
N2O (laughing gas) is not combustible, but autodecomposes into a mixture composed of 1 part oxygen gas and 2 parts nitrogen gas, which happens to be the approximate composition of the atmosphere.
In theory we could design and use N2O engines and airplanes etc, and their exhaust could be a gas that is nearly equivalent to atmospheric composition.
One important issue is making sure all the N2O has decomposed because it is a very potent GHG.
Would N2 and O2 create contrails? in what sense is it distinct from atmosphere?
Someone can break out their chemistry references, but I think N₂O is probably not workable as a fuel (or at best, not very good). It forms naturally in internal combustion engines, from air, at the temperature and pressures found in engines, given O₂ and N₂. If something has the habit of forming in an engine, I don’t think you could use it as fuel, but my thermodynamics is a bit too rusty to do any kind of ELI5 and I could just be wrong here. At the very least, it would be difficult to use or inefficient.
It decomposes into N₂ and O₂ at normal atmospheric temperatures and pressures, outside an engine.
You're probably thinking of NO2, which is indeed a pollutant that results from overly hot combustion in air. N2O is in fact used in engines, but it is not the fuel -- rather it is a supplementary oxidizer, which allows you to burn more fuel and therefore produce more power than you could if you only had the oxygen from air. At any rate, that means using N2O won't be a solution to the aircraft fuel problem -- you'd still need a combustible fuel for it to oxidize.
Given 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.
Aren't the impacts perpetual if we're creating new contrails every single day?
Taken from another comment, this seems pretty clear:
> Contrail cirrus may be air traffic's largest radiative forcing component, larger than all CO2 accumulated from aviation, and could triple from a 2006 baseline to 160–180 mW/m2 by 2050 without intervention.
Not sure how you haven't noticed, but climate change is already affecting precipitation and drought patterns, it exacerbates heatwaves, cold snaps, and flooding, it affects harvests, disrupts ecosystems etc. etc. Reducing warming is an urgent matter.
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.
I'm so confused. This article is explaining that eliminating contrails would have a significant effect on warming.
But contrails are just the tiniest, tiniest fraction of the sky somewhere and only last over a given area for a few minutes generally. Like, sure, if you live next to a busy airport maybe you see them more often, but that's balanced out by the 99.9% of sky not next to a busy airport. Plus the many days that they just don't show up at all, because they depend on certain weather conditions.
I mean, this just doesn't pass the smell test.
But Wikipedia has an entire section [1] full of citations. But then... it sounds like maybe a lot of them aren't credible or suggest that it's not a problem? E.g.:
> However, follow-up studies found that a natural change in cloud cover can more than explain these findings. The authors of a 2008 study wrote, "The variations in high cloud cover, including contrails and contrail-induced cirrus clouds, contribute weakly to the changes in the diurnal temperature range, which is governed primarily by lower altitude clouds, winds, and humidity."
> Then, the global response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic led to a reduction in global air traffic of nearly 70% relative to 2019. Thus, it provided an extended opportunity to study the impact of contrails on regional and global temperature. Multiple studies found "no significant response of diurnal surface air temperature range" as the result of contrail changes, and either "no net significant global ERF" (effective radiative forcing) or a very small warming effect.
So it sounds like this theoretical contrail warming problem possibly doesn't exist? I find it strange the article doesn't even acknowledge any discussion over whether it's actually a problem in the first place.
> But contrails are just the tiniest
> tiniest fraction of the sky somewhere
Initially yes, but as a contrail diffuses it acts like a seed for wider cirrus cloud formation.
During COVID lockdown, researchers at Universität Leipzig found that the reduction of air travel correspondingly reduced cirrus formation by 9% in the area studied.
Check out satellite images and look at the clouds closely. Or, better still, try and predict rain just from the images. Chances are that you will be predicting a lot more rain or 'overcast days' than what you will get.
I am based in the UK and there are clear flight paths, for example, the big airport is west of London (Heathrow) and a lot of planes fly west to the 'New World'. A typical route will be over the Bristol Channel, which is over water rather than land. If you look at the satellite imagery in the different wavelengths then you will see the whole Bristol Channel 'clouded' with what can only be contrails.
If you are old enough then you might be able to remember 9/11 and the skies in the aftermath, when no planes were flying for quite a few days. The pandemic gave us a glimpse of this too, however, we were shutting down a lot else then.
To summarise, we are pissing in the pool big time with this aviation lark. I appreciate that you can't see it, but I don't think anyone that is heavily car dependent actually will. It is a 'wood for the trees' thing, and, if you are always around cars, trucks and planes, you are in the pool of piss and just not seeing it or smelling it.
You can see this filth if you get out of town, climb a hill and look back. If it is a clear day with a big sky and no wind, then you should be able to see the filthy air above the town, and that isn't from people riding bicycles.
What we have done with cars is to make them more efficient. Nobody is rolling coal any more, well, maybe in South Carolina, but everything was 'rolling coal' with added lead until relatively recent times. There might not be clumps of soot the size of snowflakes in the air, what happens now is that the car dependent person has a vehicle that burns the same amount of fuel as before, but the particle sizes that come out the back are extremely small, so small that you can't see them. But you can see them if you happen to be using a satellite to do so, or if you do get ten miles out of town on a clear day, and look at it properly.
I live in Scotland where we have had an interesting history with air quality. We have a network of paths that are made from former railway lines and canals that take you a long way from cars. There are stretches where you are riding through nothing but flowers for mile after mile. You can also unlock extra adventure levels to find networks of roads that don't exist on Google Maps that are closed to cars but definitely open to bicycles. However, eventually, some big road will need to be crossed or there will be a road running parallel to the trail. Then the magic ends.
What amazes me is how you can get used to the wonderful smells of the truly clean air to then be utterly appalled at how toxic the air is anywhere within a mile of a car. But, inside a car,the air always smells good, right? It is not as if you get tired from carbon monoxide poisoning on longer journeys, is it?
So, does any of this matter? Not if you are young with no health problems. Just suck in the air wherever there is an abundance of vehicles. You will never know what good air is or why it matters. Besides, we all need cars and trucks to get food on our tables, so there is no escaping and it would be hypocritical to do so.
Or you can opt out, to never fly and never drive. I chose this as a challenge and, so far, no regrets. I haven't been on a plane for three decades yet I seem to know more about the world than most frequent fliers. As for not getting into a car, there are occasions such as funerals where I will get a lift, and yes, I do get the occasional item delivered to my door, but everything else? Bicycle, or electric train, powered by wind farms. It seems to me that you can only really assess the problem if you aren't part of it.
Regarding contrails, they have been a conspiracy theorist talking point for as long as the internet has been around. What is pernicious about conspiracy stories is that there is always a small grain of truth in there. All of these hydrocarbons we burn - all of them - are toxic to life and cancer causing. Conspiracy theorists have egged the pudding on this, but who wins from this? Well, it means that anyone with a preference for genuinely clean air, buzzing with bees and wonderful smells from plants, can be branded a crazy person because they must be, right?
But there's no physics which can remove heat from a thermal engine, other than shifting the heat to the outside.
(Science fiction books would use "heat sinks" in their war space ships to try to hide the heat for a short while, but would eventually have to dump the heat somewhere. As heat sinks are basically just a huge mass.. not an option for airplanes.)
Somehow telling airlines to fly what might
be quite a bit longer, in order to avoid
all the different contrail potenial spot,
that will use even more fuel
migth nto be a popoular sell?
Due to the current war airplanes from Northern Europe to Asia are already re-routed, increasing travel time from Helsinki to Japan, for example, from previously some 9.5 hours to up to 13.5 hours.
There 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 substances like silver iodide to encourage rainfall [1]
I completely empathize with people confused by this. They aren't all just a bunch of conspiracy nuts, many just don’t know how to identify what they’re seeing or how these technologies actually work. I don’t mock them, I try to educate.
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.
> 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.
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.
It’s not a 1% increase in fuel costs. It’s 1% of 3% (for 80% mitigation) to 17% (for total mitigation). That’s a 0.03% to 0.17% increase in fuel costs.
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.
So 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.
Greenhouse gases only interact with specific wavelengths of light. A lot of sunlight comes in as visible or ultraviolet light, mostly passing through those gases. It hits the surface of the Earth and is absorbed and then re-emitted as infrared light, and a lot of that is just the right wavelength for greenhouse gases to interfere. Here's a good article about the physics of this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-quantum-mechanics-of-gree...
Basic greenhouse effect: Visible light (and ultraviolet light) comes in relatively unhindered. Gets absorbed by the earth and heats it up. The heat is emitted as infrared radiation. This gets absorbed by CO2 (and equivalents) and reemitted in a random direction. Takes a long time to reach space by chance, so the energy stays in the atmosphere for a while.
The radiation on the way in has a different frequency than on the way out. For example, there is UV included in sunlight. But black body heat at Earth's temperature radiates in infrared. Clouds are very opaque to infrared, and more (though not completely) transparent to UV.
This is the actual answer. The clouds aren't differentially reflecting sunlight into and out of the atmosphere, they are reflecting the black body radiation emitted by the earth.
Single particles of radiation coming from the sun have higher energy than single particles radiating from the earth. Even though the total energy entering and leaving earth is at a near equilibrium.
My mental model is that a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun has much more penetrative power than that same bullet once it has ricocheted off a concrete wall.
Because it comes in at a different frequency versus when it goes out. Light, including UV and visible light, hits the ground, then the ground gets warm and radiates in the IR, which can be blocked by clouds.
"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.
> 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, its 2005 value was estimated at 12 mW/m2, based on the reanalysis data, climate models, and radiative transfer codes; with an uncertainty range of 5 to 26 mW/m2, and with a low level of scientific understanding. [...] Contrail cirrus may be air traffic's largest radiative forcing component, larger than all CO2 accumulated from aviation, and could triple from a 2006 baseline to 160–180 mW/m2 by 2050 without intervention.
What I can say is that even in a place with moderate air traffic, you get to see lots of contrails crisscrossing the sky on some days; in places near busy airports I hear that a sizable fraction of all cloud cover is due to lingering contrails.
> Contrail cirrus may be air traffic's largest radiative forcing component, larger than all CO2 accumulated from aviation, and could triple from a 2006 baseline to 160–180 mW/m2 by 2050 without intervention.
Okay, but how does this compare to the forcing of the overall anthropogenic CO2 accumulation?
> For carbon dioxide, the 50% increase (C/C0 = 1.5) realized as of year 2020 since 1750 corresponds to a cumulative radiative forcing change (delta F) of +2.17 W/m2
> 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.
> Researchers believe that the ice clouds created by contrails have contributed more to the rise in global temperatures in recent years than all the CO2 released into the atmosphere since the beginning of aviation. The annual increase in air traffic and flight routes at ever higher altitudes are particularly contributing to the formation of ice clouds. At high altitudes, contrails can combine with icy cirrus clouds and thus remain in the sky for up to 18 hours.
Contrails observably suppress the Diurnal Temperature Range (i.e. they make it cooler during the day).
How could this be observed you might ask? It turns out there was a study done immediately after the grounding of airplanes during the September 11th, 2001 events to take advantage of this unique incidence of effectively halting all air transportation for a few days [0]
Some of us are doing things to eliminate contrails in other ways, like not using air travel. Some of us are hermits that never leave the house. Can't be more green than that. Some of us that do wander out of the house even do so without using a car and avoid that bit of pollution.
Some of us also don't have to worry about pulling a muscle reaching around trying to pat ourselves on the back while trying to humble brag. No shame involved either.
I understand why you're reminded of chemtrails, but it is not crazy or conspiratorial to look at these giant lines in the sky and think "those things must be doing something". You can't then make the leap to "it's intentional and it's a biological weapon to control my mind and I don't need any evidence to believe this", but you can take the next step of looking into decades of research on the topic and deciding if the conclusions make sense to you.
Where I'm from, contrails are so small and irrelevant compared to the giant cumulonimbus clouds that form in the high heat and humidity. It's like tears in the rain in comparison.
I don't know what to tell you, they are not irrelevant even if they visually look irrelevant from where you are. Small things can have a big impact, CO2 is only ~0.04% of the atmosphere (compared to the ideal level of ~0.03%) and it's causing us major problems.
Right there is local climate too that has different effects.
Imagine a large city in an area that is always cloudy versus one in a sunny desert. They are both the same size, but the one in the desert is going to have an absolutely massive amount of evening heat release due to the urban heatsink effect.
> 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 easily have cut the other way.
A bit like how wind turbines look huge and numerous but are (as yet and for the foreseeable future) completely negligible on the scale of global wind power.
In fact plenty of times much closer to home, thinking "this very obvious thing must be having an effect" and failing to verify that it actually does has screwed me over repeatedly in everything from bug fixing to installing floorboards.
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.
The NASA image does make contrails look much larger than say from the ground, but even in the same image true cloud cover is clearly more complete than all of the contrails combined from the same image
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.
This is the terrible argument that leads so many countries to do nothing to reduce their emissions. Each country is a small portion of the total so they all do nothing.
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.
The claims they are making seem slightly at odds with the (I thought well-established) claims that jet emissions cause measurable global “dimming”: that is, that the pollutants reflect enough sunlight that it is accidentally retarding global warming, supporting the concern that necessarily cleaning up our air will briefly accelerate global warming itself. Are they? Or is it also a double whammy?
This was seen to be evident in global pan evaporation measurements after the essentially global flight travel bans in the few days after 9/11; I have often wondered whether the equivalent restrictions in the early days of the pandemic show it as clearly because the impacts on pollution were very striking.
Only contrails formed at night matter, daytime contrails reflect light and certainly should not be reduced, we should be increasing these with longer lasting chemicals for "$5", if you wish this can 'offset' the nighttime ones rather than this ridiculous proposition to re-rout traffic.
It would be fair to reduce nighttime contrails over cities in summer, this has real value for the expense. We already mess with this air traffic for less important reasons.
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".
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.
This is something the military, e.g. fighter jets worry about. The altitudes (in a given airspace) that form contrails are briefed as part of "tactical weather". You try to avoid them if able, because no matter how stealthy you are, you are lit up for all to see if you fly at those altitudes.
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 you're ever in DC, you should check out the ads in the metro stops near the Pentagon. Seeing those kinds of ads in real life is even more shocking.
I saw some photos of those ads on twitter a few years back about a certain manufacturer's engine being the correct choice for a specific in-development military plane.
It's weird seeing physical advertising be so targeted. Like, multiple physical ads to target less than a dozen people total.
It's a little broader than that, because these are general defense contractors who have their fingers in every pie. So it's seen by contracting officers, partners, potential employees, etc.
It's a bit like a Coke ad -- you do not need to be informed about Coke, but it creates an atmosphere of nebulous positive feelings. Still, kinda weird.
[The I-80 east has entered the chat]
I'm someone living far off in remote Sweden, could you explain with some examples?
The tech billboards in SF are also wild.
Walked into a weapons show a few decades ago that had a full scale Abrams tank + demo camera providing good 360 degree visibility.
It was odd because I was like yea this is obviously a good idea, but also I’m not the person you need to convince here so WTF.
How'd you find a weapons show? Which one? are these semi-open to the public? Sounds fascinating
I was walking around Arlington VA area and saw some signs of fighter jets and such that looked interesting, no idea of the show beyond that really.
I did have a pentagon badge at the time which let me in, not sure if it was necessary though.
It's designed to convince their customers which are other countries.
> If you're ever in DC, you should check out the ads in the metro stops near the Pentagon. Seeing those kinds of ads in real life is even more shocking.
"Vulgar" is the word I'd use. Like a child sneaking out of the house to play with gasoline and matches.
Our capital (if such a thing even remains relevant) will feel much more dignified when there's no incentive to hock machines of death in the public transit.
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.
B-2 is not dual use. There is no civilian use for it.
There could be. As in "Fight fire with fire!" For stopping out of control forest fires, by bombing large and wide trenches, to stop them there.
A malicious actor is probably not going to meet them at their place of business and do FBI background checks, in person DOD interviews, even polygraphs, to be able to really talk to them.
Avoiding con-trail creation has been a factor for military aviation since at least WWII; bomber pilots then were briefed on what altitudes to fly at to avoid them as well, but not because they were especially stealthy.
There's still some space between "not especially stealthy" and "drawing an enormous arrow in the sky pointing directly to you".
This seems pretty useless in an age with super cheap 8k cameras and novice ability to do a delta-recorded image.
Numbers don't add up.
If you take a 8K camera with a standard 50 mm lens, its angular resolution is about 20" / pixel.
A 50 mm lens has a FOV of about 40°. It covers a cone of about 0.38 strad. A full hemisphere has 2·pi = 6.28 strad, so we need at least 16.5 such cones to cover the whole area; actually we need likely 20-25 because of imperfect geometry and some safety margins at intersections. We can, of course, mount fewer and scan.
If we take a plane like A320 (larger than a typical fighter jet), and remove it 25 km from us, its angular size would be about about 5', or 300". Our A320 would be 15 pixels wide, assuming very good optics, and very clear skies. This is not much to determine what craft is approaching us. At the cruise speed of 800 km/h, or 220 m/s, the plane will reach us in 122 s, or less than 2 minutes. Not a lot of warning. A fighter jet making 500 m/s would be there in 50 s.
This is, of course, without any clouds. Even very light clouds or haze would conceal the aircraft at 25 km. To say nothing of the night time.
We could of course take in IR camera, but I don't remember 8K IR cameras being cheap, or even available. A stealth aircraft like B-2 does a lot to make its thermal signature very faint, including the exhaust.
Most camera sensors already detect in the IR range, you just need to remove the filter. I've done it, works great and pretty fun to convert some old webcams, robot vacuums lidar scanners look especially cool.
Blurry video is fine when using techniques like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-b51C82-UE
Clouds also don't save you (unless you have two thick layers to fly through) because this technique is even easier with satellites. Stealth effectively no longer exists for most nation-state level tech. The B-2 is a very cool plane but is unfortunately obsolete. Still great for when you want to put on more of a show than an attack.
"Clouds also don't save you (unless you have two thick layers to fly through) because this technique is even easier with satellites."
This is incorrect. A typical satellite will orbit once every 100 minutes or so (military spy satellites more often because they fly lower, but that only makes the next part even worse). To have any kind of resolution the swath it can scan is very narrow. It'll pass from horizon to horizon in some 10-14 minutes or so, if if passes reasonably overhead (which it'll do once, the next orbit it'll be far from overhead or not seen at all, depending on your latitude).
For a satellite to spot an airplane you need to be in luck. A coincidence. It's not something you can use for spotting airplanes. The harder you look (the more you increase resolution) the more narrow the swath gets. You can have more satellites. There's still no chance of actively detecting airplanes on a regular basis. And this doesn't even take into consideration that the data must be processed after having been dumped from the satellite. The satellite is by then elsewhere.
You could use a geostationary satellite, to monitor a good third of the planet at once. But then you're nearly 36000km above equator and you can't see any details. So, not that either.
Satellites are great for scanning the surface of the planet. And for that we're now at a stage where it's hard to hide anything, for very long at least. But moving airplanes is something entirely different.
(My job is about processing data from satellites).
Curious if you saw any difference in far IR vs near IR on cameras with removed filters. When I tried camera without filter or camera with IR filter (one that only lets IR through and look redish black to naked eye) attached I had nice b/w images of trees on long exposures or better pictures of tv remote leds. But if I make a picture of an iron or pan they look the same when either cold or hot. This is very different from thermal cameras I used where you can clearly see unevennes of the pan heat, dark image on tshirt being warmer on the sun, person at night etc. I can speculate that thermal exhaust falls into the second category.
Does a consumer-grade 8K camera sensor detect a 20°C difference in a few pixels? Cameras have to aggressively fight against thermal noise. Visible light is much more energetic than IR; detecting a faint IR signal with a sensor which is about as hot as the object it's looking at is hard. You need to cool the sensor down; old military aircraft even carried a tank of liquid nitrogen for that.
I mean, yes, you can take a low-noise sensor, add cooling, add a telescope lens so that you'd see the shape more readily, put a bunch of these telescopes on a rotating platform to scan the sky, etc. This is doable, but the thread started with an idea that it's doable with consumer-grade ("cheap") tech. I doubt that.
While at it, even if we assume that stealth does not exist for fast and heavy aircraft, it seems to effectively exist for slow, lighter-weight drones. Ukrainian drones, built from ultralight aircraft like Aeroprakt A-20, somehow penetrate 700 miles into Russian territory to burn refineries. With a cruise speed of 70 mph (sic), it should take them 10 hours to fly this distance. Were they detected efficiently, that would be enough time to scramble an interceptor a hundred times. Apparently this does not happen.
How many of those attacks were successful? Russia has fairly advanced radar that is quite capable of picking up a plane like that. I think the more likely explanation is that it was incorrectly deemed not a threat or a minor threat.
700 miles is far more than the standard range of the A-20 (210nm). Is it possible they launched it from well within Russia thereby making it much less likely to be considered a threat?
These attacks were so successful that Russia is having fuel shortages right now, and decreased its exports of oil products by about 10%. It is estimated that about 30% of Russia's refining capacity is disabled by now. (E.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czx020k4056o)
So no, these are not isolated incidents, this is a big hole in air defense, and Russia used to produce some competent air defense systems. They are just not geared towards the drones, much like Patriot air defense systems are not either.
Possible, just like Russel's teapot.
But there has been one very well published Ukrainian attack launched from Russian soil[1].
If Ukraine had could regularly smuggle several drone aircraft's and explosives into Russia and launch them, we would be seeing a lot of other effects. Such as attacks on weapon production sites deep into Russia[2].
But yes, a lot of those attacks are probably unsuccessful. With my qualifications as armchair general, I would be surprised if more than 10% of them was successful.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelabuga_drone_factory
You don't need to identify the A320 from 15 pixels. Once you see a 15 pixel signature that changes between subsequent frames you point the one extra camera on a movable mount with a 600mm lens on it at it. Now you get a few hundred pixels.
If it were all that simple would you not expect at least one of China, Taiwan, Iran, Israel, Ukraine, Russia to deploy such a technology? To me this recently popular idea that you can just point a load of cameras at the sky to beat stealth is disproved by the lack of such installations. These are fairly motivated actors.
> To me this recently popular idea that you can just point a load of cameras at the sky to beat stealth is disproved by the lack of such installations.
Russia has a 10x advantage over Ukraine in aviation, yet it only uses it to lob guided bombs from safely beyond the Russian border. The anti-air defense far outmatches the stealth of Russian airplanes.
They are not the stealthiest, sure. But there are reasons to think that NATO planes are not going to fare much better.
What do you mean by delta-recorded image?
The fixed resolution of an image sensor can be augmented by capturing multiple frames over time.
https://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2023/460/
Super resolution is a thing but I think they mean to just take the differences and track based on the motions in that data directly. Any deltas which appear to move in a certain way are likely to be aircraft, especially if the same deltas show up on a 2nd camera, even if they aren't clear enough to directly identify. Basically the motion vector estimation step of video encode but tuned really tight and ignoring motions that don't look like aircraft motions.
I'm not sure this is really all that perfect/foolproof though, especially with 8k visible light cameras. For one, clouds can be quite the problem (even at non-visible wavelengths). Atmospheric turbulence can also be annoying and the air can be plain hazy depending on the day - both limit detection accuracy at a given range. When night comes the detection ability is greatly hampered even with additional wavelengths (and IR has lower resolution anyways).
It worked well enough in a weekend project many years back to use computer vision (the craze at the time) and compare to an ADS-B make by using a 4k 1 FPS image feed in a weekend project to mess with computer vision a decade back. I definitely see it as a valid addition to a detection system... but I would stop short of writing a "Military Dumbfounded at This One Simple Trick" article about it.
Delta encoding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_encoding
Could you clarify this?
Its nice to see new tech being used to kill people for a change.
It'd be worth it just to shut the chemtrail nuts up.
You don’t understand conspiracy loon logic. By the very act of hiding the chemtrails you are demonstrating that you are doing something nefarious.
Plus, the invisibility of a thing does not stop the conspiracy loons from building conspiracies around it. 5G RF is invisible, yet still being used by the government to control our brains. For chemtrails, the conspiracy is just going to turn into: "They're spraying invisible chemicals all over us to turn us into communists." There's no end to it.
> 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 heritage foundation.
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).
They can't abide pretend child endangerment happening in pizza basements, but point out the Catholic church or Trump perving on Miss Teen USA contestants in their dressing room and they don't seem to care.
How do you know they arent already spraying invisible communist chemicals all the time? * Adjusts tinfoil hat *
All I’m saying is I haven’t seen any contrails since the government shutdown
Hrrm. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68839043
Furthermore https://duckduckgo.com/q=toxicologic+assessment+of+jet+fuel
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fume_event
Are the fumes less bad, when they don't leak into the cabin by bleed air, just blown away backwards?
The solution to pollution is dilution (in the atmosphere)? With the current amount of global air traffic, no matter if civilian, or military?
They’ll say it’s proof they invented invisible mind control agents.
You can’t reason (or evidence) someone out of a position that isn’t based on reason.
To be fair, most gasses and even aerosols are effectively invisible to the naked eye. Not to mention viruses, prions, bacteria, spores.. some of which affect behavior (rabies, mad cow disease, and the famed cordyceps for ants).
Yes, but I experienced those nuances are lost on people, who think smoke is just water vapor otherwise.
And if planes are making visible clouds one day and the other not, it is obviously because they are not spraying all the time, etc.
So no more clouds would not make people smarter, but it might actually reduce this particular conspiracy spread.
They will find next conspiracy theory to cling on, if any thing keeping them in currently relatively harmless spot is an advantage
I clicked comments to search for chemtrails, I was not disappointed.
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.
"The government conspired to reduce our cloud cover! Aaaaaa"
"Without those clouds the alien mind control rays from space will get you more often. You think it's deja vu don't you? Better get your tinfoil hat prepped."
I had no idea contrails actually caused that much warming, compared to the exhaust.
Likewise. In fact, I was under the opposite impression because of the benefit that sulfur enriched shipping exhaust had for our climate [0]. It looks like these clouds are thinner and don't have the same impact as that, though. While I felt that the featured article linked to their favorite site aggressively (four links to contrails.org), it looks like the google site is legitimate [1]. I couldn't find a recent [2] paper on NoAA about contrails, but presumably others have studied it.
[0] https://cpo.noaa.gov/the-unintended-consequences-of-reducing...
[1] https://sites.research.google/gr/contrails/
[2] https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2011/101_0714.html
> In fact, I was under the opposite impression because of the benefit that sulfur enriched shipping exhaust had for our climate.
It isn't quite accurate to state that ship tracks have/had a "benefit" on our climate. Their existence creates a transient decrease in OLR and increase in albedo. If anything, they simply masked some GHG-induced warming that had a much longer half-time, and cleaning up ship emissions has "unmasked" some of that hidden warming. But, again, the warming was already committed.
The benefit was that they cooled the climate.
The article mentions that some flights produce a net cooling effect. I wonder if it could be cost effective to divert flights toward contrail formation when it's predicted that they'll produce cooling (I also wonder what the actual circumstances are when they produce cooling--low surface temperatures, maybe?).
Perhaps also early morning flights where most of the contrail's lifespan will be in sun.
Very briefly mentioned in the article, but Google worked on this years earlier: https://sites.research.google/gr/contrails/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37060347
N2O (laughing gas) is not combustible, but autodecomposes into a mixture composed of 1 part oxygen gas and 2 parts nitrogen gas, which happens to be the approximate composition of the atmosphere.
In theory we could design and use N2O engines and airplanes etc, and their exhaust could be a gas that is nearly equivalent to atmospheric composition.
One important issue is making sure all the N2O has decomposed because it is a very potent GHG.
Would N2 and O2 create contrails? in what sense is it distinct from atmosphere?
Someone can break out their chemistry references, but I think N₂O is probably not workable as a fuel (or at best, not very good). It forms naturally in internal combustion engines, from air, at the temperature and pressures found in engines, given O₂ and N₂. If something has the habit of forming in an engine, I don’t think you could use it as fuel, but my thermodynamics is a bit too rusty to do any kind of ELI5 and I could just be wrong here. At the very least, it would be difficult to use or inefficient.
It decomposes into N₂ and O₂ at normal atmospheric temperatures and pressures, outside an engine.
You're probably thinking of NO2, which is indeed a pollutant that results from overly hot combustion in air. N2O is in fact used in engines, but it is not the fuel -- rather it is a supplementary oxidizer, which allows you to burn more fuel and therefore produce more power than you could if you only had the oxygen from air. At any rate, that means using N2O won't be a solution to the aircraft fuel problem -- you'd still need a combustible fuel for it to oxidize.
N2O formation enthalpy is just 82kJ/mol. For comparison, water is 240kJ/mol.
It doesn't sound so bad, but when translated into grams, it's 1.86kJ/g for N2O and 13.3kJ/g for water.
In other words, when burning a gram of hydrogen, you get about 120kJ of energy. When decomposing a gram of N2O, you barely get 2kJ.
Fume events would be more funny, then!
Given 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.
Aren't the impacts perpetual if we're creating new contrails every single day?
Taken from another comment, this seems pretty clear:
> Contrail cirrus may be air traffic's largest radiative forcing component, larger than all CO2 accumulated from aviation, and could triple from a 2006 baseline to 160–180 mW/m2 by 2050 without intervention.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail#Impacts_on_climate
The original article describes associated costs in time and fuel usage in the realm of 1% increase.
Not sure how you haven't noticed, but climate change is already affecting precipitation and drought patterns, it exacerbates heatwaves, cold snaps, and flooding, it affects harvests, disrupts ecosystems etc. etc. Reducing warming is an urgent matter.
Given the feedback loops associated with climate change, I'd expect early interventions to have a larger impact on the climate than later ones.
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.
It is already urgent.
It was urgent 40 years ago.
No. Addressing CO2 production was urgent then but the actual impacts of heat were not. They are now.
But the warming started already back then. Contrails contributed. So less contrails, less warming in the last 40 years.
I'm so confused. This article is explaining that eliminating contrails would have a significant effect on warming.
But contrails are just the tiniest, tiniest fraction of the sky somewhere and only last over a given area for a few minutes generally. Like, sure, if you live next to a busy airport maybe you see them more often, but that's balanced out by the 99.9% of sky not next to a busy airport. Plus the many days that they just don't show up at all, because they depend on certain weather conditions.
I mean, this just doesn't pass the smell test.
But Wikipedia has an entire section [1] full of citations. But then... it sounds like maybe a lot of them aren't credible or suggest that it's not a problem? E.g.:
> However, follow-up studies found that a natural change in cloud cover can more than explain these findings. The authors of a 2008 study wrote, "The variations in high cloud cover, including contrails and contrail-induced cirrus clouds, contribute weakly to the changes in the diurnal temperature range, which is governed primarily by lower altitude clouds, winds, and humidity."
> Then, the global response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic led to a reduction in global air traffic of nearly 70% relative to 2019. Thus, it provided an extended opportunity to study the impact of contrails on regional and global temperature. Multiple studies found "no significant response of diurnal surface air temperature range" as the result of contrail changes, and either "no net significant global ERF" (effective radiative forcing) or a very small warming effect.
So it sounds like this theoretical contrail warming problem possibly doesn't exist? I find it strange the article doesn't even acknowledge any discussion over whether it's actually a problem in the first place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail#Impacts_on_climate
> But contrails are just the tiniest > tiniest fraction of the sky somewhere
Initially yes, but as a contrail diffuses it acts like a seed for wider cirrus cloud formation.
During COVID lockdown, researchers at Universität Leipzig found that the reduction of air travel correspondingly reduced cirrus formation by 9% in the area studied.
Check out satellite images and look at the clouds closely. Or, better still, try and predict rain just from the images. Chances are that you will be predicting a lot more rain or 'overcast days' than what you will get.
I am based in the UK and there are clear flight paths, for example, the big airport is west of London (Heathrow) and a lot of planes fly west to the 'New World'. A typical route will be over the Bristol Channel, which is over water rather than land. If you look at the satellite imagery in the different wavelengths then you will see the whole Bristol Channel 'clouded' with what can only be contrails.
If you are old enough then you might be able to remember 9/11 and the skies in the aftermath, when no planes were flying for quite a few days. The pandemic gave us a glimpse of this too, however, we were shutting down a lot else then.
To summarise, we are pissing in the pool big time with this aviation lark. I appreciate that you can't see it, but I don't think anyone that is heavily car dependent actually will. It is a 'wood for the trees' thing, and, if you are always around cars, trucks and planes, you are in the pool of piss and just not seeing it or smelling it.
You can see this filth if you get out of town, climb a hill and look back. If it is a clear day with a big sky and no wind, then you should be able to see the filthy air above the town, and that isn't from people riding bicycles.
What we have done with cars is to make them more efficient. Nobody is rolling coal any more, well, maybe in South Carolina, but everything was 'rolling coal' with added lead until relatively recent times. There might not be clumps of soot the size of snowflakes in the air, what happens now is that the car dependent person has a vehicle that burns the same amount of fuel as before, but the particle sizes that come out the back are extremely small, so small that you can't see them. But you can see them if you happen to be using a satellite to do so, or if you do get ten miles out of town on a clear day, and look at it properly.
I live in Scotland where we have had an interesting history with air quality. We have a network of paths that are made from former railway lines and canals that take you a long way from cars. There are stretches where you are riding through nothing but flowers for mile after mile. You can also unlock extra adventure levels to find networks of roads that don't exist on Google Maps that are closed to cars but definitely open to bicycles. However, eventually, some big road will need to be crossed or there will be a road running parallel to the trail. Then the magic ends.
What amazes me is how you can get used to the wonderful smells of the truly clean air to then be utterly appalled at how toxic the air is anywhere within a mile of a car. But, inside a car,the air always smells good, right? It is not as if you get tired from carbon monoxide poisoning on longer journeys, is it?
So, does any of this matter? Not if you are young with no health problems. Just suck in the air wherever there is an abundance of vehicles. You will never know what good air is or why it matters. Besides, we all need cars and trucks to get food on our tables, so there is no escaping and it would be hypocritical to do so.
Or you can opt out, to never fly and never drive. I chose this as a challenge and, so far, no regrets. I haven't been on a plane for three decades yet I seem to know more about the world than most frequent fliers. As for not getting into a car, there are occasions such as funerals where I will get a lift, and yes, I do get the occasional item delivered to my door, but everything else? Bicycle, or electric train, powered by wind farms. It seems to me that you can only really assess the problem if you aren't part of it.
Regarding contrails, they have been a conspiracy theorist talking point for as long as the internet has been around. What is pernicious about conspiracy stories is that there is always a small grain of truth in there. All of these hydrocarbons we burn - all of them - are toxic to life and cancer causing. Conspiracy theorists have egged the pudding on this, but who wins from this? Well, it means that anyone with a preference for genuinely clean air, buzzing with bees and wonderful smells from plants, can be branded a crazy person because they must be, right?
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.
But there's no physics which can remove heat from a thermal engine, other than shifting the heat to the outside.
(Science fiction books would use "heat sinks" in their war space ships to try to hide the heat for a short while, but would eventually have to dump the heat somewhere. As heat sinks are basically just a huge mass.. not an option for airplanes.)
Somehow telling airlines to fly what might be quite a bit longer, in order to avoid all the different contrail potenial spot, that will use even more fuel migth nto be a popoular sell?
Due to the current war airplanes from Northern Europe to Asia are already re-routed, increasing travel time from Helsinki to Japan, for example, from previously some 9.5 hours to up to 13.5 hours.
from up thread, Google told American airlines exactly that https://sites.research.google/gr/contrails/
There 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 substances like silver iodide to encourage rainfall [1]
I completely empathize with people confused by this. They aren't all just a bunch of conspiracy nuts, many just don’t know how to identify what they’re seeing or how these technologies actually work. I don’t mock them, I try to educate.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
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
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.
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.
It’s not a 1% increase in fuel costs. It’s 1% of 3% (for 80% mitigation) to 17% (for total mitigation). That’s a 0.03% to 0.17% increase in fuel costs.
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.
The article addresses this in detail.
So 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.
If the incoming radiation can pass through, why can't it pass through on the way out?
Greenhouse gases only interact with specific wavelengths of light. A lot of sunlight comes in as visible or ultraviolet light, mostly passing through those gases. It hits the surface of the Earth and is absorbed and then re-emitted as infrared light, and a lot of that is just the right wavelength for greenhouse gases to interfere. Here's a good article about the physics of this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-quantum-mechanics-of-gree...
Basic greenhouse effect: Visible light (and ultraviolet light) comes in relatively unhindered. Gets absorbed by the earth and heats it up. The heat is emitted as infrared radiation. This gets absorbed by CO2 (and equivalents) and reemitted in a random direction. Takes a long time to reach space by chance, so the energy stays in the atmosphere for a while.
The radiation on the way in has a different frequency than on the way out. For example, there is UV included in sunlight. But black body heat at Earth's temperature radiates in infrared. Clouds are very opaque to infrared, and more (though not completely) transparent to UV.
This is the actual answer. The clouds aren't differentially reflecting sunlight into and out of the atmosphere, they are reflecting the black body radiation emitted by the earth.
Every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum that is not actively being generated, is decaying. At minimum the expanding universe saps frequency.
More directly,radiation (light,photons) is absorbed and re-emmited by matter but the re-emitted energy is always at a lower frequency.
This absorbed & re-emitted longer wavelength radiation is what can become trapped.
Single particles of radiation coming from the sun have higher energy than single particles radiating from the earth. Even though the total energy entering and leaving earth is at a near equilibrium.
My mental model is that a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun has much more penetrative power than that same bullet once it has ricocheted off a concrete wall.
Because it comes in at a different frequency versus when it goes out. Light, including UV and visible light, hits the ground, then the ground gets warm and radiates in the IR, which can be blocked by clouds.
"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, its 2005 value was estimated at 12 mW/m2, based on the reanalysis data, climate models, and radiative transfer codes; with an uncertainty range of 5 to 26 mW/m2, and with a low level of scientific understanding. [...] Contrail cirrus may be air traffic's largest radiative forcing component, larger than all CO2 accumulated from aviation, and could triple from a 2006 baseline to 160–180 mW/m2 by 2050 without intervention.
What I can say is that even in a place with moderate air traffic, you get to see lots of contrails crisscrossing the sky on some days; in places near busy airports I hear that a sizable fraction of all cloud cover is due to lingering contrails.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail#Impacts_on_climate
> Contrail cirrus may be air traffic's largest radiative forcing component, larger than all CO2 accumulated from aviation, and could triple from a 2006 baseline to 160–180 mW/m2 by 2050 without intervention.
Okay, but how does this compare to the forcing of the overall anthropogenic CO2 accumulation?
According to Wikipedia:
> For carbon dioxide, the 50% increase (C/C0 = 1.5) realized as of year 2020 since 1750 corresponds to a cumulative radiative forcing change (delta F) of +2.17 W/m2
> 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.
Do you ever see this kind of sky https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/kondensstreifen-... ? That's over Frankfurt, Germany's busiest airport. Also from the 2020 article (v. G. tr.):
> Researchers believe that the ice clouds created by contrails have contributed more to the rise in global temperatures in recent years than all the CO2 released into the atmosphere since the beginning of aviation. The annual increase in air traffic and flight routes at ever higher altitudes are particularly contributing to the formation of ice clouds. At high altitudes, contrails can combine with icy cirrus clouds and thus remain in the sky for up to 18 hours.
For those curious about the image, but not curious enough for whatever nope not signing up modal:
https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/fe93cb37-2540-4fbb-a4...
Contrails observably suppress the Diurnal Temperature Range (i.e. they make it cooler during the day).
How could this be observed you might ask? It turns out there was a study done immediately after the grounding of airplanes during the September 11th, 2001 events to take advantage of this unique incidence of effectively halting all air transportation for a few days [0]
0. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/17/5/1520-04...
Well some of us are doing things to eliminate contrails ... (Shameless self promotion of my employer)
Some of us are doing things to eliminate contrails in other ways, like not using air travel. Some of us are hermits that never leave the house. Can't be more green than that. Some of us that do wander out of the house even do so without using a car and avoid that bit of pollution.
Some of us also don't have to worry about pulling a muscle reaching around trying to pat ourselves on the back while trying to humble brag. No shame involved either.
It links to this post which has a little more technical explanation: https://notebook.contrails.org/comparing-contrails-and-co2/
And also this paper which is a very in-depth technical explanation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223102...
I understand why you're reminded of chemtrails, but it is not crazy or conspiratorial to look at these giant lines in the sky and think "those things must be doing something". You can't then make the leap to "it's intentional and it's a biological weapon to control my mind and I don't need any evidence to believe this", but you can take the next step of looking into decades of research on the topic and deciding if the conclusions make sense to you.
Where I'm from, contrails are so small and irrelevant compared to the giant cumulonimbus clouds that form in the high heat and humidity. It's like tears in the rain in comparison.
I don't know what to tell you, they are not irrelevant even if they visually look irrelevant from where you are. Small things can have a big impact, CO2 is only ~0.04% of the atmosphere (compared to the ideal level of ~0.03%) and it's causing us major problems.
Right there is local climate too that has different effects.
Imagine a large city in an area that is always cloudy versus one in a sunny desert. They are both the same size, but the one in the desert is going to have an absolutely massive amount of evening heat release due to the urban heatsink effect.
> 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 easily have cut the other way.
A bit like how wind turbines look huge and numerous but are (as yet and for the foreseeable future) completely negligible on the scale of global wind power.
In fact plenty of times much closer to home, thinking "this very obvious thing must be having an effect" and failing to verify that it actually does has screwed me over repeatedly in everything from bug fixing to installing floorboards.
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.
There's some anecdata from 9/11
https://globalnews.ca/news/2934513/empty-skies-after-911-set...
The NASA image does make contrails look much larger than say from the ground, but even in the same image true cloud cover is clearly more complete than all of the contrails combined from the same image
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.
Thanks, that is quite signficant
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.
But then how would the government disperse mind-control chemicals over the public?
I can't imagine that contrails are a significant percentage of cloud cover.
Less than 1% globally, so you're right.
This is the terrible argument that leads so many countries to do nothing to reduce their emissions. Each country is a small portion of the total so they all do nothing.
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.
There are a lot of them.
The claims they are making seem slightly at odds with the (I thought well-established) claims that jet emissions cause measurable global “dimming”: that is, that the pollutants reflect enough sunlight that it is accidentally retarding global warming, supporting the concern that necessarily cleaning up our air will briefly accelerate global warming itself. Are they? Or is it also a double whammy?
This was seen to be evident in global pan evaporation measurements after the essentially global flight travel bans in the few days after 9/11; I have often wondered whether the equivalent restrictions in the early days of the pandemic show it as clearly because the impacts on pollution were very striking.
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Now they're hiding the chemtrails. It's even worse!
It’s funny to me that those people are all essentially a pessimistic flavor of homeopath (in the small quantities can have an effect sense).
> could be incredibly cheap
Outright lie.
Only contrails formed at night matter, daytime contrails reflect light and certainly should not be reduced, we should be increasing these with longer lasting chemicals for "$5", if you wish this can 'offset' the nighttime ones rather than this ridiculous proposition to re-rout traffic.
It would be fair to reduce nighttime contrails over cities in summer, this has real value for the expense. We already mess with this air traffic for less important reasons.
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".
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.
The article addresses this and contradicts you, with scientific papers.