• COASTER1921@lemmy.ml
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    1 hour ago

    The sad thing is that there is a huge amount that could be done for global warming with some basic legislation around contrails. Clouds that high in the atmosphere are quite bad in terms of greenhouse effect. By avoiding flying through areas that they’d be generated there’s a surprisingly large environmental benefit for minimal cost. A good explainer: https://youtu.be/QoOVqQ5sa08

  • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    With all the conspiracy theories proven true lately I Am perfectly ready to believe that the chemtrails are some evil plot, but can we at least like test them first?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      10 Years After SCOTUS Gutted Voting Rights Act, Alabama Turnout Gap Is Worse

      Apart from 2018, the white-Black turnout gap increased each year from 2012 through 2022. During last year’s election, the white-Black gap was 9 points — triple the size of the gap only a decade ago. Put differently, some 90,000 more Black voters would have participated in Alabama last year if Black turnout had reached parity with white turnout. The white-nonwhite turnout gap remained at 13 percentage points, the same as in 2020 — translating to roughly 150,000 ballots uncast by people of color.

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Hell yeah, brother. People have elevated the presumed sanctity of their beliefs, no matter how stupid, to be the most sacred of liberties. Even over life and health.

  • nomecks@lemmy.wtf
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    9 hours ago

    Google calculated that planes could avoid the air conditions that cause vapor trails, but it would cost around 2% extra fuel. That means it’s a hard no from any airline.

  • TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 hours ago

    What?!? So how would the government control the sheeple then eh? What’s next, the moon projection will be turned off? Lizard people life matters!

  • Rimu@piefed.social
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    13 hours ago

    How do you think the conspiracy nuts will react if this bill becomes law and then there are just as many contrails in the sky as before?

    • Tigeroovy@lemmy.ca
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      13 hours ago

      It would be pretty funny if that makes those people snap and they end up being the ones to drag Trump and his cronies into the street and tear him apart like zombies.

      Though they’d likely all just be shot to death while trying, which I guess maybe win-win?

        • Tigeroovy@lemmy.ca
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          10 hours ago

          Well a key trait of all right wingers is stabbing each other in the back when it benefits themselves directly so they’d just claim they were woke trans terrorists after they shot the lot of them.

          • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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            10 hours ago

            sorry. maybe should have but a /s tag on that.

            Trump would totally have them shot if he felt he’d thought he’d make a quick buck.

        • ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip
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          7 hours ago

          Gonna call BS on that short. Clouds cool the atmosphere because they reflect incoming visible light. Clouds also absorb infrared light, causing a greenhouse effect, but they also do that when they’re not condensed into clouds. Their infrared absorption depends primarily on their composition, which doesn’t change. Contrails are basically equivalent to cloud seeding, which is a method of cooling the atmosphere by increasing cloud cover.

          • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            This isn’t someone guessing, man. He’s citing research on the topic.

            Essentially, these clouds are 50% opacity to visible light, but nearly 100% in infrared. So they block some incoming light, but reflect almost all infrared from the surface. It’s a net warming effect at these altitudes.

          • ylph@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            Current scientific consensus is that contrails are a net contributor to warming (they trap more heat from escaping the atmosphere than they prevent from entering overall) - but it’s a complex phenomena that’s difficult to model, so studies vary a lot in estimating the magnitude of this effect - from being a fraction of airplane CO2 emissions, to being several time that.

    • Siethron@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Depends on your definition of “chemical”. Technically all trails are chem trails, including hiking trails.

    • Red_October@piefed.world
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      15 hours ago

      until they decide enforcement means no contrails at all and suddenly they’ve found a new and exciting way to economically ruin the country.

        • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          Contrails are mostly water vapour that’s condensed due to the hot exhaust of airplane engines.

          They are certainly not completely avoidable, they are likely inescapable without sacrificing significant fuel efficiencies (eg: all methods stealth fighters use to suppress or mask their exhaust heat signature)… which would negate any benefits to global warming.

          P. s. I’m not going to watch a YouTube video that could be a few paragraphs of textual explanation, because it’ll no doubt be eight times longer than it needs to be for the benefit of more ad money or promotion in the almighty algorithm.

          • tomi000@lemmy.world
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            11 hours ago

            Pretty sad that your comment gets so much attention while dismissing a huge breakthrough in research.

            • 4am@lemmy.zip
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              10 hours ago

              Maybe we shouldn’t have to SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON to have a discussion on the internet, or sit through an ad read for Brilliant or whatever

              • tomi000@lemmy.world
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                9 hours ago

                And maybe people dismiss comments that dont get liked and assume the answer that gets liked is “more correct”. Yes I wish it would work without the likes systemy but in reality 90% of the internet is AI slop and misinformation.

                • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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                  7 hours ago

                  In his defense, the comment didn’t say shit about breakthrough research, it said “watch this”.

                  Say what you want to say and people won’t dismiss it. Link to something random and who knows.

            • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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              7 hours ago

              Its not a huge breakthrough in research, mate - its a feasibility study. Its claims are promising, but until its tested in the real world it’s just interesting, not a breakthrough.

              Upvotes don’t mean much, they don’t change the ranking of comments like on worse social media like Facebook or Reddit. Don’t worry about them. I’ve seen very useful and valuable comments downvoted to heck and vice-versa.

              • tomi000@lemmy.world
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                6 hours ago

                Its been tested by now, Ive looked into it a little. Seems like 90% of the time contrails form inside clouds and there is no benefit in avoiding them there. So simply avoiding contrails altogether is not recommended, but avoiding the ones forming in a clear sky would be pretty easy and extremely efficient warming-wise.

                Upvotes matter in the sense that comments with negative upvotes get dismissed more easily without thinking about them. Less people would watch a video from a comment with -5 votes than one with +100.

          • VibeSurgeon@piefed.social
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            12 hours ago

            I’m not going to watch a YouTube video that could be a few paragraphs of textual explanation, because it’ll no doubt be eight times longer than it needs to be for the benefit of more ad money or promotion in the almighty algorithm.

            The linked one is a short video with a duration of 02:37. There’s no padding in this one. Naturally, you can’t actually get all of the nuances of the full-duration video, which also can’t cover the full nuances of the study itself that it’s based on (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/ad310c).

            Pop science videos making studies accessible to the general public are good, actually. I recommend that you stop being dismissive of them. Had you actually put in the time, you wouldn’t have posted things that are in direct contradiction with the latest science on the subject, spreading misinformation in the process.

            • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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              10 hours ago

              I’ve got no interest in watching even 2.5 minute YouTube videos when I can read the text of the same content in 45 seconds. Instructional videos can be great and valuable, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. There are a wealth of crap pop science videos on YouTube that misrepresent studies.

              The study is interesting, but it’s a feasibility study data utilizing a theoretical models - there are a lot of assumptions here. If they or other researchers go on to perform trials using their proposed flight adjustments to the autopilot software and validate it works, great! Until then, it’s very far from settled science. Here is another recent study that proposes the main problem is incompletely-burned fuel which causes soot particles that sustain the contrails in the atmosphere for much longer than contrails from low-soot contrails, which quickly diaperse. This is an emerging field of study with few published studies and varying ideas on how to resolve issues.

              Maybe if people want to share emerging scientific information that’s important to them on a written forum they should put in the time to look to more valuable text sources, instead of dropping YouTube links with overconfident assertions that will put off people from watching them, eg, “contrails are completely avoidable”.

          • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyz
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            14 hours ago

            That YouTube Short seems to be a valid one. It’s by someone who (according to his own words) has a PhD in atmospheric physics. Basically, he says that contrails causes global warming by preventing heat from escaping from Earth, and that contrails are mostly only formed when a plane flies through a cold humid patch. By simply re-routing planes around these cold patches, the contrails could be reduced.

            • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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              13 hours ago

              By simply re-routing planes around these cold patches, the contrails could be reduced.

              And routes now are generally chosen to be the most fuel-efficient, subject to regulatory constraints such as avoiding overflight of areas of high population density. So any alternate path will be longer and burn more fuel.

              • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyz
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                12 hours ago

                According to this one study [1] that focused on Japanese airspace, 2.2% of the flights causes 80% of all contrail energy forcing (EF).

                A small-scale strategy of selectively diverting 1.7% of the fleet could reduce the contrail EF by up to 59.3% [52.4, 65.6%], with only a 0.014% [0.010, 0.017%] increase in total fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. A low-risk strategy of diverting flights only if there is no fuel penalty, thereby avoiding additional long-lived CO2 emissions, would reduce contrail EF by 20.0% [17.4, 23.0%].

                The re-routing can simply be achieved by changing the flight elevation by 2000 feet one or the other direction.

                [1] Teoh, Roger et al. “Mitigating the Climate Forcing of Aircraft Contrails by Small-Scale Diversions and Technology Adoption.” Environmental science & technology vol. 54,5 (2020): 2941-2950. doi:10.1021/acs.est.9b05608

                • 4grams@awful.systems
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                  5 hours ago

                  My legit question is then, is the impact on the average temperature by reducing the visible trails greater or less than the impact of adding the emissions from the extra fuel spent.

                  My gut tells me no, those number seem small, but small numbers often lie, and impacts to the chemical makeup of the atmosphere is an ongoing change whereas a trail of condensation is a short lived phenomenon.

                  This is not an argument either way, it seems like a legitimate question to me. It’s also not the question that “chemtrails” conspiracy theorists would ask.

            • Chozo@fedia.io
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              14 hours ago

              Wouldn’t rerouting be more fuel-intensive in most scenarios, though? I feel like burning more fuel to make fewer clouds isn’t the right play.

              • VibeSurgeon@piefed.social
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                12 hours ago

                It would require a slight increase in fuel consumption, traded off with a large decrease in heating caused by the water vapour.

                Seriously, you should watch the video, it covers all of this stuff.

              • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyz
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                14 hours ago

                According to him, the contrails have very potent effect on global warming. Apparently, contrails from just one year’s flights has almost the same effect as all the CO2 emitted by all flights ever. Re-routing extends the flight by only so much, so the added CO2 emission has negligible effect.

            • evidences@lemmy.world
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              13 hours ago

              I’m not saying this is wrong because I don’t know shit but when ships crossing the Atlantic were forced to switch to low sulfur fuel a few years ago the North Atlantic rose in temp a few degrees. Turned out the sulfur in the exhaust was causes clouds to form in the atmosphere and was shading the ocean and masking global warming in that region. Pretty much the opposite effect of what you’re saying this dude is claiming.

              • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyz
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                13 hours ago

                Speaking with my limited knowledge, there apparently are cooling contrails and warming contrails, but the warming ones are more common. I don’t know why or when the contrails are cooling or warming.

        • tomi000@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          This is a very important piece of info that people who care about reducing flight emissions should know.