Cheapest Technology to Fight Global Warming

They impact aviation emissions on a large scale...

…they warm the earth, beware of the insidious contrail.

Those white streaks across the sky behind airplanes are called “contrails” short for CONdensation TRAILS. While contrails may seem harmless, they trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, contributing to global warming. In fact, last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that contrails represent about 35% of the aviation industry’s contribution to global warming. Aviation in turn contributes to 3.5% of human caused climate change. 

By avoiding flying through “ice supersaturated regions” of the atmosphere that results in long-lasting contrails, we can solve this problem cheaply. Researchers trained machine learning software models to predict where contrail-conducive regions would occur in the future using data from the US government’s GOES-16 weather satellites along with other weather indicators.

Studies from Imperial College London showed that diverting just 1.7% of flights could reduce the climate damage of contrails by as much as 59%, and there is potential to reduce 1% of the entire world’s global emissions. Reducing contrails is the world’s cheapest way to fight global warming costing less than 10 dollars per ton of carbon.

Though this technology has already been tested in practice, commercial deployment and scaling up may be a challenge. The additional maneuvering required to avoid specific regions of the atmosphere has shown to increase fuel usage by 2% but is still worthwhile.

The adoption of this technology by all airlines will be inevitable in a matter of years. This technique has the potential to make immense contributions to our current struggle against climate change and global warming. At a low cost this can help us achieve our goal to reach zero emissions by 2050.