alt Hacker NewsIt does not state that half of aircraft pollution is from contrails. It says half of the climate impact of aviation is from contrails. Soot can have other effects and cause pollution in other ways such as reducing air quality but I suspect that is very minimal compared to other industries.
The guide presented by the map gives a very good explanation on how contrail formation can be mitigating by altering the course of flights to reduce the formation in areas where it will have the most impact. This is based on a recent study that showed contrail avoidance could be one of the most cost-effective methods of reducing warming that we know of.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/ad310c
Simon Clark did a good video on this recently:
>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.