Two links about "stratospheric aerosol injection" from mainstream sources.
"The Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) - a government backed body - is funding nearly £60m that could allow real-world experiments, including in the UK.
"As part of the Exploring Climate Cooling programme, projects in Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) will involve trying to thicken Arctic sea ice and make clouds more reflective."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/c5ygydeqq08o
So there are papers. There are studies on tons and tons of things. One of the things you learn really studying science is that there are always papers, and you really have to immerse yourself in a field to see what’s actually happening.
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.
It states that half of aircraft pollution is from contrails made of aircraft soot.
I’d like to see the literature and discovery of aircraft soot.
As an engineer who has built aircraft, I find this fascinating. I would like to measure my amount of soot. How does one go about measuring how much soot I have?
Obviously if my exhaust ports are black that’s bad but I’m genuinely curious about this as I’ve always assumed “black smoke bad, white smoke ok”. As for contrails, disturbing the atmosphere is going to cause some freezing (clouds) at that altitude, at that temperature. How do you suggest we mitigate that? Fly lower and burn more fuel? Fly less and tell people to take the train or that their package will arrive next week?
It does not state that half of aircraft pollution is from contrails. It says half of the climate impact of aviation is from contrails. Soot can have other effects and cause pollution in other ways such as reducing air quality but I suspect that is very minimal compared to other industries.
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.
Fly less. Is waiting a week for a package really that big of a deal? Is traveling less really that much to ask?
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.
but contrails are not made of soot, where I define soot as dark unburned carbon, contrails actual are made of water. There is also a highly likely chance I am being to literal and the word choice of soot was a bit of poetic license on the part of the author.
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.
> As for contrails, disturbing the atmosphere is going to cause some freezing (clouds) at that altitude, at that temperature. How do you suggest we mitigate that? Fly lower and burn more fuel? Fly less and tell people to take the train or that their package will arrive next week?
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.
Are there other sites that can suggest how much of an issue it is, and how much flight plan tweaking could improve this.
Remember kids a 1° C rise in temperature can mean 7% more water vapour in the air, and with water vapour being a greenhouse gas itself this can cause heating and holding yet more water.
They definitely increase the cloud cover where I live. Very noticeable, you can often see which clouds were created by them... And that's without the conspiratorial stuff.
The team behind this is world-class. Among other things, they have developed a python library that could be used to model contrails in your own projects.
I would however recommend testing it on a slower internet connection and a lower end device. Because I was spending 90% of my time in the "loading data" phases, and once the intro was done, the thing ran at one frame per second and I was not able to use it. (I have 5G and I bought my phone last year.)
Thanks for the feedback! We have done all the performance optimization we can in its current manifestation.
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.
Hi all - very grateful to see this posted here. I'm the director of this project and would be happy to answer questions.
We are seeking a high level full stack engineer to join the team to work on infrastructure for this and other efforts. Please reach out if interested - info@contrails.org
Water vapour absorbs the thermal radiation (heat trying to escape earth) better than it absorbs sunlight (heat trying to enter earth). Therefore, the more water vapour in the atmosphere, the stronger the greenhouse effect.
They don’t cause net warming, it’s transient. If we stopped flying tomorrow it would go away quickly. But we keep flying.
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.
I have no doubt that nuclear testing has affected the environment far more than is being let on. These experiments by their nature were classified. Who's to say they weren't a factor in helping create the ozone hole?
Below is a comprehensive list of geoengineering-related patents, compiled to the best of my knowledge. Based on the language and scope of several of these patents, their stated purposes do not appear to be inherently human-friendly in any form as the language escalates from weather influence to planetary irradiation, artificial plasmas, relativistic particles, atmospheric weapons-scale energy systems, and even the generation of destructive weather events.
1. System and Method for Irradiation of Planet Surface Areas
2. Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere, and/or Magnetosphere
3. Broadcast Dissemination of Trace Quantities of Biologically Active Chemicals
4. Method and Apparatus for Creating an Artificial Electron Cyclotron Heating Region of Plasma
5. Method and Apparatus for Triggering a Substantial Change in Earth Characteristics and Measuring Earth Changes
6. Planetary Weather Modification System
The fact that someone has filed a patent doesn't mean that they have a workable idea, only that they can formulate and illustrate said idea and that it doesn't overlap with something that already exists.
From the "about" it seems that the data is from atmospheric models based on flight paths. However, it would be cool if the data could be inferred from satellite sensing.
Remember that there are more flights during the day than during the night. When you posted this it was late afternoon in Europe, noon on the East Coast US and early morning on the West Coast. And of course it was night in Asia.
That's right! The project started at Orca Sciences back in 2021. We moved to Breakthrough Energy in 2023, and will be spinning out into our own standalone non-profit soon.
Would be great for shiptracks, too— which used to mitigate 1/3 of the warming impact of maritime shipping — until the 2022 clean fuel standards were implemented.
nephihaha|2 months ago
"The Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) - a government backed body - is funding nearly £60m that could allow real-world experiments, including in the UK.
"As part of the Exploring Climate Cooling programme, projects in Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) will involve trying to thicken Arctic sea ice and make clouds more reflective." https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/c5ygydeqq08o
Paper on how "Low-Altitude High-Latitude Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Is Feasible With Existing Aircraft" https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024EF00...
api|2 months ago
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.
reactordev|2 months ago
I’d like to see the literature and discovery of aircraft soot.
As an engineer who has built aircraft, I find this fascinating. I would like to measure my amount of soot. How does one go about measuring how much soot I have?
Obviously if my exhaust ports are black that’s bad but I’m genuinely curious about this as I’ve always assumed “black smoke bad, white smoke ok”. As for contrails, disturbing the atmosphere is going to cause some freezing (clouds) at that altitude, at that temperature. How do you suggest we mitigate that? Fly lower and burn more fuel? Fly less and tell people to take the train or that their package will arrive next week?
spuz|2 months ago
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
roxolotl|2 months ago
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.
somat|2 months ago
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.
ant6n|2 months ago
tzs|2 months ago
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.
zeristor|2 months ago
Are there other sites that can suggest how much of an issue it is, and how much flight plan tweaking could improve this.
Remember kids a 1° C rise in temperature can mean 7% more water vapour in the air, and with water vapour being a greenhouse gas itself this can cause heating and holding yet more water.
victorbjorklund|2 months ago
I guess the map is posted today due to this recent video (worth a watch): https://youtu.be/QoOVqQ5sa08?si=sGK9Q9tUoFOW1QZg
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
Sieyk|2 months ago
nephihaha|2 months ago
msuniverse2026|2 months ago
[deleted]
p-a_58213|2 months ago
https://py.contrails.org
andai|2 months ago
I would however recommend testing it on a slower internet connection and a lower end device. Because I was spending 90% of my time in the "loading data" phases, and once the intro was done, the thing ran at one frame per second and I was not able to use it. (I have 5G and I bought my phone last year.)
mlshapiro|2 months ago
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.
HPsquared|2 months ago
EDIT: Though it's pretty cool on a powerful desktop. Maybe could benefit from performance optimization.
mlshapiro|2 months ago
We are seeking a high level full stack engineer to join the team to work on infrastructure for this and other efforts. Please reach out if interested - info@contrails.org
1970-01-01|2 months ago
extropy|2 months ago
Why nuclear blasts - that also introduce lots of particles in atmosphere cause a cooling effect - "nuclear winter"?
maltelau|2 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
rottencupcakes|2 months ago
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.
ekunazanu|2 months ago
complex_pi|2 months ago
nephihaha|2 months ago
pupdogg|2 months ago
https://gist.github.com/pupdogg/4e796ed1bb0d24338a3f6523e404...
Examples:
Arn_Thor|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
rajnathani|2 months ago
sublinear|2 months ago
If the future of aviation is similar flight densities everywhere then people might actually begin to care about this topic.
prennert|2 months ago
nanoecosystems|2 months ago
Including aspects like water pollution and health risks would add significant value to this already impressive initiative.
Thank you for sharing!
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
pfdietz|2 months ago
https://www.orcasciences.com/
mlshapiro|2 months ago
dr_dshiv|2 months ago
janpmz|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]