Future Flights of Fancy

Perhaps off the menu?

Just a quick one today, the main message is at the end.

Sad news about flying just published in Nature. The picture below - from that article - shows that the warming effect from contrails may be even larger than that from the fossil fuels burnt.

In fact only about a third of the induced heating from aviation is due to carbon dioxide. So, to seriously mitigate climate change, any move away from fossil fuels will have to be accompanied by changes in flight paths.

Mercifully, that total of 100 milliwatts per square metre represents only about 3 percent of the the total contribution from all sources, which is more than 3 watts per square metre.

Note that the sulphates emitted from the jet exhausts have a slight cooling effect. That’s the idea of the climate intervention I railed over a few weeks back, except that it works much better at higher altitudes where they don’t get rained out. The much drier air at those higher altitudes also inhibits the formation of those pesky contrails.

On another subject …

Substack have just announced a new web-based reader interface, substack.com. Like their smartphone app, it’s a nice way to see your favourite writers and an archive of their posts in one place. As a writer, the thing I like most about it is that it gives me a chance to correct any mistakes in the original mail-out versions. You may have noticed that I have a slight propensity for typos. Any revisions are automatically updated on both.