A new study allays fears that rerouting flights to avoid forming climate-warming contrails could result in inadvertently making climate warming worse.
A new study allays fears that rerouting flights to avoid forming climate-warming contrails could result in inadvertently making climate warming worse.
Researchers from Sorbonne Universite and the University of Reading found that for most flights that form contrails in the North Atlantic, the climate benefit of avoiding the contrail outweighs the extra carbon dioxide emitted from flying a different route.
Contrail avoidance requires comparing the climate impacts of carbon dioxide and contrails, called CO2 equivalence. Different methods have been proposed, and the choice of which has been largely political. Scientists feared that some choices could be misleading, making avoidance seem beneficial for climate when it is in fact damaging.
The study, published today (Sunday, 15 September) in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, finds that for a large majority of North Atlantic flights, contrail avoidance would benefit climate regardless of the choice of CO2 equivalence.
Read more at University of Reading
Photo Credit: Timbertopper via Pixabay
