Aircraft vapour trails 'could cause global warming'

Breaking News ^ | 29/04/2004

[presidio9]

Cloud-like white trails left by aircraft may be playing a significant role in global warming, a scientist said today.

The exhaust plumes contain carbon dioxide and chemicals which can lead to the production of ozone – which creates smog.

At the same time, the vapour trails, in the right conditions, can form feathery cirrus clouds which warm the surface of the Earth’s by trapping heat.

Patrick Minnis, of the USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, studied how the average temperature of the US increased by one degree from 1975 to 1994.

While acknowledging that it was difficult to tell exactly how much of the warming was due to vapour trails, he said their contribution was “significant”.

Dr Minnis found that as air traffic in the US rose by more than 500% from 1970 to 1995, the number of cirrus clouds in the sky also increased.

Until now scientists have been unable to say whether they increased for natural reasons or because of aircraft.

According to the Minnis study the conditions needed to create natural cirrus clouds did not become more common from the 1970s to the 1990s.

He concluded, therefore, that aeroplane vapour trails – also known as contrails – which are clouds of ice crystals mixed with exhaust gases, must be responsible.

Andrew Carleton, a climate expert at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the study, said: “It suggests we may be having a double whammy here.

He told the USA Today newspaper: “It’s not good news for the Earth when you’ve got greenhouse gas increases and you’ve got ... contrails (that) seem to warm the surface of the Earth.”

[OXENinFLA]

SOMEONE CALL ART BELL!!!!

[presidio9]

ping

[dfwgator]

Somebody ought to tell John Kerry before he has his hairdresser fly in again.

[Rokke]

Everyone knows the vapor trails are really a government program to cover the world in mind numbing chemicals so that we'll all accept the new world order. Or at least that's what I read on the internet somewhere.

[Monty22]

I have to admit, the days after 9/11 were some of the clearest skies I've ever seen, due to no air traffic.

I hate planes anyway, and would like to see them gone. But I have no doubt they affect the climate one way or another..

[onedoug]

Everyone knows global warming is caused by the wings of butterflies.

[HEY4QDEMS]

The key word is "could".

I guess smelly socks could cause Global Warming also.

[CaptRon]

While acknowledging that it was difficult to tell exactly how much of the warming was due to vapour trails, he said their contribution was “significant”.

An alternative theory is that the hot air generated by the global warming theorists is contributing to global warming.

While acknowledging that it was difficult to tell exactly how much of the warming was due to global warning theorists, their contribution is “significant”.

[presidio9]

I think global warming is caused by the sun. Global Warming Theory is caused by socialist who want to redistribute the world's wealth to developing nations.

[jmc813]

I hate planes anyway, and would like to see them gone.

?

[BurbankKarl]

I thought we were back to the ice age?

[Elpasser]

I am so sick and tired of this global warming crap. It is readily swallowed hook, line and sinker by the media.

The operative words in this press release, "may cause," is meaningless. The opposite is equally true: it "may NOT cause ..."

It is extraordinary that such pure speculation is immediately embraced as "science" by the media.

[catpuppy]

Here they go again. Twenty-five years ago it was "the coming ice age" and "global cooling" caused in part by--you guessed it--contrails!

[cardinal4]

Everyone knows global warming is caused by the wings of butterflies.

No it isnt. Its caused by the Imperial Military Industrial complex in collusion with the Bush administration at the behest of the Zionist Occupation Government. Who is funded by NPR..

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Our late, departed Golden Retriever, Prior Lake Jake did all he could, while he lived, to contribute to Global Warming.

[BurbankKarl]

Frightening Quotes from Environmentalists (Attack Of The Socialist-Luddites)

The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.

—Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth”
concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!

—Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).

Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…. Capitalism is destroying the earth.

—Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.

—David Foreman, Earth First!

Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed.

—Pentti Linkola

If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.

—Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth–Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22

The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world.

—John Shuttleworth

What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

—Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.

—Economist editorial

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.

—David Foreman, Earth First!

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.

—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS

—Earth First! Newsletter

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.

—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.

—Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.”

—Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995

Poverty For “Those People”

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.

—Carl Amery

Every time you turn on an electric light, you are making another brainless baby.

—Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.

—Lamont Cole

If there is going to be electricity, I would like it to be decentralized, small, solar-powered.

—Gar Smith, editor of the Earth Island Institute’s online magazine The Edge

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don’t suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them.

—Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.

—Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.

—Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (1968)

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

—Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

—Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.

—Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.

—Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it.

—Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.

—Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling”, 1976

If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.

—Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

[Fierce Allegiance]

They keep presenting this junk science as news when everybody knows it was made up HERE at the Bush Conspiracy Generator

[HEY4QDEMS]

WOW!!!!....Your dog wore socks?

[Mark17]

Or at least that's what I read on the internet somewhere.

LOL, well, if it was on the Internet, it must be true. Not.

[SpottedBeaver]

Actually, the contrails have nothing to do with global warming. They have everything to do with mind control and the sapping of our precious body fluids.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

He always seemed to have an excess of post-digestive gas and would give it up freely.

[catpuppy]

Great post, BK. I wonder if these folks have considered that should their wishes come true, there will be no one to fetch their lattes?

[Calvin Locke]

SOMEONE CALL ART BELL!!!!

Art already thinks vapor trails are "chem trails".

"Somebody" (Lockheed, Alcoa or the like) has a patent on adding aluminum to jet fuel, which supposedly reflects the
Sun's rays and alleviates some of the global warming.

I think he was also claiming the idea goes back to Edward Teller.

The "chem trails" are also used for nefarious purposes too...

[Denver Ditdat]

The exhaust plumes contain carbon dioxide and chemicals which can lead to the production of ozone

Since the enviros are also worried about ozone depletion over Antarctica the solution is obvious - require every flight to take the southern polar route. Ozone is generated, the hole is filled, Gaia will smile upon us, and we can all burst into a chorus of I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing.

[tongue-tied]

True. And you know about wind, right? Wind is caused by all o' them trees swaying back and forth. Check it out for yoursel; if the trees don't sway I can guarantee you won't get any wind.

Pseudo-scientist rant off

[FourPeas]

Dr Minnis found that as air traffic in the US rose by more than 500% from 1970 to 1995, the number of cirrus clouds in the sky also increased.

Until now scientists have been unable to say whether they increased for natural reasons or because of aircraft.

According to the Minnis study the conditions needed to create natural cirrus clouds did not become more common from the 1970s to the 1990s.

He concluded, therefore, that aeroplane vapour trails – also known as contrails – which are clouds of ice crystals mixed with exhaust gases, must be responsible.

For the love of Pete. Well, at least it's a good example of how NOT to do science.

[azhenfud]

They don't lend themselves very well to the reality of Westerns either.

IIRC, there was an episode of "The Big Valley" sometime abt. 1968 where "Buck", "Heath", and "Victoria" were standing at a fence with a long, faint contrail crossing behind them in the distant sky.

[HEY4QDEMS]

Every time my father in-law does that, I beat our dog.

[threat matrix]

THE CHEMTRAILS ARE CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING! (lol)

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Pick up a copy of "The Cooling," by Lowell Ponte, 1976. Its out of print but Amazon has 30 used copies available at $3.75. It makes for a good laff and would make a great gift to a Liberal friend.

[SpyGuy]

The exhaust plumes contain carbon dioxide and chemicals which can lead to the production of ozone – which creates smog.

First the greenies complain about the destruction of ozone, forcing a ban of all CFCs, despite the fact that doing so resulted in great losses to the economy, potential losses to human life (e.g., halon-based aircraft fire suppression systems), and losses to the environment itself (replacement refrigerants, for example, are less efficient thus requiring more energy use).

Now they are complaining about the creation of ozone.

Well, which is it? You can't have it both ways.

[John H K]

Sorry, it's perfectly valid science. They did a study of the days after 9/11, based on archived sat pics, and the cirrus cover was much, much lower than the current "normal."

It's blatantly obvious to anyone who spends any amount of looking at the sky that contrails cause cirrus clouds.

[joesnuffy]

no no no not aluminum - barium

[John H K]

Yes, you CAN have it both ways.

Ozone in the stratosphere is good.

Ozone in the troposphere (everything lower than the stratosphere) is bad.

Not complicated, pretty well understood by science.

[Redcloak]

A beef and bean burrito is a more likely cause of global warming.

[azhenfud]

"It's blatantly obvious to anyone who spends any amount of looking at the sky that contrails cause cirrus clouds."

And how about the planes that don't leave contrails? Do they cause clear skies?? ;-)

[clamper1797]

I would have guessed that most of the global warming was caused by the hot air belched out by junk scientists

[dfwgator]

So what? Man is part of the environment, deal with it!

[SpyGuy]

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems. —John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Oh, that's a particularly good one. I woner how the Leftists would feel if that statement was "tweaked" slightly:

I suspect that attempting to eradicate AIDS is wrong. It plays an important part in balancing ecosystems.

[capt. norm]

How many jet aircraft contrails would it take to equal the output of one Mt Pinatubo eruption?

I don't think enough jet planes exist to match it.

I realize that they have to keep comingup with scary scenarios to dribble out to the media in order to keep their grant/funding from the liberal enviro-whackos, but they are really grasping at straws now.

[DustyMoment]

Aircraft vapour trails 'could cause global warming'

Oh give me a freakin' BREAK!!!! I thought it was caused by cows farting . . . or pork skins . . . or (fill in the blank).

More than 30 years since the Global Warming Theory was first proposed (and has since been recanted by the NASA scientist who initially suggested the GW Theory), alleged environmental "scientists" still don't know what causes it. Have they ever considered that it could be caused by the . . . um, SUN!!??

This is why you shouldn't let your kids fry their brains on drugs or put them on Ritalin. IDIOTS!!!!

[dfwgator]

Aircraft vapour trails 'could cause global warming'

And monkeys could fly out of my butt.

[capt. norm]

I hope you were joking.

First of all cirrus clouds are made up of ice crystals and they form at the edge of jet streams (the natural ones) when moisture (not carbon dioxide or ozone) freezes.

Carbon dioxide and ozone both freeze at temperatures sevral magnitudes colder than the temperature at the cirrus levels.

Cirrus forms where the air is cold enough for ice to form and not an inch lower.

[Arthalion]

Yup, I hate to agree with the environuts, but anyone who spends any time outside at all should be familiar with this. There have been days that I've walked outside and literally seen cirrus clouds stretching horizon to horizon as the contrails from passing jetliners have widened from the winds and run together (the area I live in lies beneath the flight paths of four international airports). If anyone here is going to tell me that man-made clouds up to a hundred miles wide DON'T affect the weather, I'm going to tell them they're nuts.

[Calvin Locke]

no no no not aluminum

I distinctly remember Bell commenting on the higher profits of the Alocoa.

Barium

Ugh. Strawberry flavored chalk....

[John H K]

You seem to be victim of the FR sydrome, common on science threads, of people babbling about things they know nothing about.

Contrails routinely form persistent cirrus clouds under the right atmospheric conditions.

There are atmospheric conditions, of course, where you don't even get a contrail, much less a persistent one that spreads out into a cirrus cloud.

At times you'll have waves where an aircraft flying level will have a "dashed line" contrail" as it moves into and out of areas favorable for forming one.

However, in many situations aircraft form persistent cirrus in areas that would otherwise be cloud free.

[Dr._Joseph_Warren]

[Petronski]

If I had my way, your collection of quotes would be added to ALL environ-Mental threads.

[Petronski]

If I had my way, your collection of quotes would be added to ALL environ-Mental threads.