How to curb the climate heating by contrails
"Rerouting a fraction of flights may reduce the sooty clouds’ environmental impact" High-flying jets often create long white lines across the sky. Called contrails, those narrow clouds can vanish within minutes or last for days. Like other clouds, long-lasting contrails can trap heat in the atmosphere. Scientists have found in the last year or two that these contrails can boost the warming of Earth’s atmosphere. But it may be fairly simple to lower that contribution: Just make a few planes fly higher throughout much of their route. Engineers in England recently studied flights and contrails in a high-traffic part of the sky above Japan. Along the way, they turned up a surprising pattern. About 80 percent of the warming from contrails came from just 2 percent of the flights. “The fact that it’s such a small [number] of flights means we think it’s a feasible solution,” says engineer Marc Stettler. He led the study and works at Imperial College London. Sending just...
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