One question: Since contrails and water vapour stay far less time in the atmosphere than CO2, why should they have such large impact? Isn’t one of the most serious aspect of the climate system’s CO2 poisoning that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years?
If you have the time, this is a great article on this subject: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/eliminating-contrails or this one https://notebook.contrails.org/comparing-contrails-and-co2/
Most of the warming from CO2 emissions is not due to the emissions this year, but the cumulative effect (which persists) over the past 80 years. But for contrails, the warming impact is only really from those created very recently as you mentioned, see this graph:
https://notebook.contrails.org/content/images/2025/08/2019_rf.svg
Contrails contribute roughly 2% to the world’s effective radiative forcing; tackling them would reduce that by a similar amount
We would only need to have 5% planes slightly redirected to avoid producing the most harmful contrails, which tackles around 80% of contrail climate warming avoided, and it would only cost on average $1 of avoiding warming equivalent to one tonne of CO₂
Reducing contrails does not mean we don’t also need to tackle CO2 emissions from aviation. Ultimately that is the persistent driver of long-term temperature change. What tackling contrails now would do is slightly reduce the rate of warming. It is not an excuse or a substitute for finding a way to decarbonise jet fuel.
Is there an actual calculator already using this model?
Wonder how this contradicts the global dimming studies done during 9/11 when all flights over the US were grounded and things became warmer in the absence of contrails.
Things like this formula are great, and useful for gathering data on how bad a jet might be, but at the same time, this article is doing one of those classic media gambits: Blame the small-income individual.
Some parts of the world are only easily accessible by aircraft. Likewise, flying commercial is much more efficient than Taylor Swift’s private jet zipping all over, and much more efficient than driving. This isn’t the 1980s when people rode commuter flights between two cities by airplane for work every day.
Bob the individual can do nothing to change climate with regards to aircraft, that plane they might buy a ticket on, or not, will still be flying, to ship the cargo in the cargo hold, mail, and other things. Passengers are actually the last-place item on most flights from a revenue generator perspective.
Making private jets more cost-prohibitive is a good first step. They are exploding in popularity as the world literally burns. On land where land transportation is more viable, nations like the US should embrace trains instead of air. Also, in the US, flying is quickly becoming too expensive for a majority of the population, which means more people will revert to driving thousands of miles, which means net sum pollution will go up.
How much carbon one seat of hundreds on one plane of tens of thousands takes is inconsequential at this stage, there are much bigger pollution areas to be focusing on.
Less than 2% of aviation emissions come from private air travel. Even if you ban those altogether, it wont mean much globally. People have to stop flying regularly, whether the rich stop too or not.
I dont know how you figure that flying is more efficient than driving. Do you mean time-efficient? That should be obvious, but regarding emissions flying is around twice as bad as driving a car alone, around 10 times worse than driving with 4 people in a car.
Its not about blame, its about what options we have for stoppingclimate change. And unlike most other emissions, for aviation the responsibility actually lies with the consumers, the government cant realistically ban flights for good.
Also that ‘if I dont fly on this plane, someone else would’ argument, I hope you realise that its nonsense if you think about it for a second.
I dont know how you figure that flying is more efficient than driving.
Basic physics. Moving hundreds of people in one machine is almost always more efficient than hundreds of people moving in one machine per person.
https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
Then, where you take a petrol car or fly depends on the distance. Flying has a higher carbon footprint for journeys less than 1000 kilometers than a medium-sized car. For longer journeys, flying would actually have a slightly lower carbon footprint per kilometer than driving alone over the same distance.
In the context of the US, which is giant compared to driving across an EU nation, there’d be no reason to fly a distance less than 621 miles (1000km mentioned above) for the most part, neither from a time or distance perspective, about 8-9 hours driving at expressway speeds. The country is huge. Whenever I’ve flown, for example, it is at least 1200 miles (1900km) or more.
Also that ‘if I dont fly on this plane, someone else would’ argument, I hope you realise that its nonsense if you think about it for a second.
No, it isn’t, I didn’t say “someone else will.” I said the plane is going to fly whether you’re in that seat or not, as they’re used heavily for cargo transport. Airlines don’t just cancel major flight routes just because you’re not sitting on the plane, short-term anyway. Longer-term they would reduce flights if there’s consistent lack of passengers/cargo. So long-term it would have a more substantial impact, but if someone is mulling over a trip to see their family and fretting over carbon footprint of one person, that airplane will be traveling to that destination with or without that person being onboard.
The US is a great example of how not to do things, to be clear. Take that 1200 mile trip as an example. Train will take longer than car because Amtrak is so dysfunctional, if you can even get Amtrak to plot a route, or if they even have stops where you want. Car will pollute more than airplane, and take more time than airplane, and you have to plot hotel stays and refueling points, and possibly have enough drivers if you’re going to switch off drivers, if your car can even handle such a long trip. So airplane, it often is.
Basic physics
You seem to be gravely mistaken about how physics work and shouldnt act smug about stuff you dont understand. Flying a machine that weighs around 1t per passenger at 10km in the air is not more efficient than rolling on the ground, just because there are more people on the machine. Means of transportation have immense differences in efficiency, thats why ships are even more efficient than cars or trains.
The website you linked doesnt give real world values, which becomes obvious by this passage:
It’s the emission factors companies use to quantify and report their emissions.
Measuring avition emissions has never been easy and lobbyists have taken great advantage of that. Those are the absolute minimum values that could be proven beyond doubt, many years ago when studies around aviation emissions were just in the beginning. Actual emissions are way higher, which should have been obvious to you too if you had read the article instead of parotting capitist propaganda.
Please read up on the matter or at least stop suggesting that flying could be more efficient than driving, because flying is by faaaaaar the worst method of transportation you could choose.
