Flutterby™! : Avoid red-eyes, for the planet!

Plane Contrails Have a Surprising Effect on Global Warming

New research out of the UK has found two silver linings in the cloudy conundrum. The first is that just 2.2 percent of flights create 80 percent of contrail-related warming. According to a January paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, the troublemakers are mostly flights that take off in the late afternoon and early evening, whose contrails live mostly during the night—when they still trap some heat but can’t deflect any sunshine (which can balance out their impact). “The effects at night are purely warming,” says Marc Stettler, the lead author on the paper, Mitigating the Climate Forcing of Aircraft Contrails by Small-Scale Diversions and Technology Adoption.