Eliminating contrails from flying could be incredibly cheap
Something I didn't realise until recently was that half of the warming impact of the world's flights comes from non-CO2 related activity.
Hannah Ritchie, writing for her excellent newsletter Sustainability by Numbers:
...Aviation also contributes to global warming through its non-CO2 effects. Those are mostly “contrails”, which I’ll explain in more detail soon. Getting rid of those could be incredibly cheap. So cheap that it’s difficult to understand why we don’t just go ahead and fix it.
Something I didn't realise until recently was that half of the warming impact of the world's flights comes from non-CO2 related activity. Specifically, contrails from a tiny proportion of these flights are causing a lot of the radiative forcing (fancy scientific speak for heating up the world).
The good news is that while we work on decarbonising aviation (a difficult problem that will take decades, I'd hazard), contrails are bloody easy to solve. Hannah Ritchie explains that contrails form in low pressure cool zones of the atmosphere. It's really easy to divert around them and not emit any contrails whatsoever.
The diversions are tiny most of the time, and on average will cost about $0.05USD per traveller to make a massive difference.
Hannah Ritchie explains this with remarkable precision and grace. Especially the insanity behind such a cheap and immediate change being basically shelved, waiting for anyone in charge to realise the impact.
Eliminating a few percent of the world’s warming is a big deal when the costs are so small. It seems insane to me that such a cheap solution is sitting there, completely untapped.
