AI to help planes avoid climate-warming 'sky graffiti'

notarget137 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, let's use a computationally heavy task that contributes to burning coal and gas releasing CO2 into the atmosphere to reduce a slight fraction in emission so we could pat ourselves on the back.

	▲	Cribbin 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It is not a “slight” reduction in emissions, it’s absolutely huge! About half of the aviation industry’s total impact on global warming is due to contrails! This is 1-2% of all human caused warming across all industries. (Though slight caveat for any nit-pickers. The warming isn’t related to emissions. The contrails essentially create a blanket that traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere - the BBC article linked mentions this) Source: https://youtu.be/QoOVqQ5sa08 (Or check the sources in the linked video)

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aaron_m04 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or we could fly less.

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brookst 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ok, say we somehow cut air travel by 50% overnight. Seems unlikely, but we did it.

Would you advocate to not pursue this approach to mitigating the remaining 50%?

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blondie9x 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Check out other comment. It could actually end up causing more warming in the long term depending on the net change in fuel use or extra maintenance on plane etc.

	▲	dabinat 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Isn’t that the purpose of running a study? To establish that a theory works and could be beneficial at scale?
	▲	teiferer 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The required changes are typically minimal. A little bit of altitude up or down, a minimal detour. Also mentioned in other comments (and in the article).

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blondie9x 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This exactly.

	▲	immmmmm 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. I read somewhere that 90% of human never took a plane.

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blondie9x 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you shift a route to avoid making contrails and end up on a longer or more turbulent route what is the net benefit to the climate? For example if a plane ends up using more fuel on a longer route to avoid a cold area where contrails could be made or ends up on a route with more headwinds or turbulence.

Is this a bit of green washing?

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citrin_ru 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's an optimization problem which could be solved if impact of contrails could be estimated. Making a long detour unlikely is good choice but if a small route / altitude changes could help - why not?

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dd8601fn 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s not deep insight stuff. I promise you these people are more keenly aware of what constitutes an undesirable solution than that.

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brookst 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

From TFA:

> Rather than dramatically changing the route of a flight, the trial will mostly involve changing an aircraft's altitude by around 2,000ft.

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blondie9x 12 hours ago | parent [-]

What if there are more headwinds at that height which require increased fuel use?

	▲	bfc1890 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you have any experience with the majority of airlines, you can be sure they are not planning to spend any significant amount of extra fuel on this problem. I am not a pilot, but I assume once you are at cruising altitude, small altitude changes are a rounding error

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talon8635 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is not what I was envisioning for major AI breakthroughs

It can hack into companies and exploit anything, but beyond that, forget the medical breakthroughs and real climate solutions, we’re tackling “sky graffiti”. Here I was, an ignorant dolt, unawares that we even had a major “sky graffiti” problem.