Contrails Map (opens in new tab)

People who believe in chemtrails need to prove that the it’s being done, is being done at industrial scale (not just a few one off experiments), and that this is harmful to human health or the environment.

Ocean fertilization to soak up CO2 has been extensively studied and in that case there are documented experiments, but we are not doing it at scale… mostly because nobody wants to pay for it and because we are not 100% sure the CO2 will actually be sequestered. There’s also some concern about side effects on ocean ecosystems.

A lot of things get studied.

Of course the real conspiracy I keep hearing is that this is some kind of mind control thing. Why? Even if that were possible, why bother when you can mesmerize humans at scale with mindless slop scrollers like TikTok and program them like a zombie army. Much cheaper and done 100% in the open.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoOVqQ5sa08

It’s totally ok to be skeptical of the claims. I can’t make a judgement on them as I know even less than you might. But that’s not a reason to doubt that human’s environment impact matters and that maybe part of the solution is for those of us with access to 2day delivery for everything and cheap flights live a teeny bit more like those who don’t.

As a bonus consideration it might be better if they were made of soot, it would be ugly but water vapor is a tremendous greenhouse gas, several times as potent as CO2, soot blocking the sun might have more of a neutral effect, And related, we worked hard to get sulfur out of our fuels but sulfur dioxide turns out to be a negative greenhouse gas, it has a net cooling effect, I am not saying we should deliberately add sulfur back in, the downsides are too great, but it is an interesting bit of irony.

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

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

First, how much do contrails matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess the map is posted today due to this recent video (worth a watch): https://youtu.be/QoOVqQ5sa08?si=sGK9Q9tUoFOW1QZg

We're in the process of refactoring the models that support these visualizations, so we hope to make it more performant in the near future. Hopefully end of this year.

EDIT: Though it's pretty cool on a powerful desktop. Maybe could benefit from performance optimization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect

But even with that the amount of warming this continuous effect creates is quite small and negligible compared to greenhouse gas warming and isn’t really worth talking about.