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Airplanes May Affect Weather Patterns
blankmange writes "Wired is carrying an interesting piece: '...for three days starting last Sept. 11, meteorological researchers were presented with just such an opportunity when the FAA grounded commercial flights nationwide for three days following the terrorist air attacks. And now it has emerged that the American climate was indeed noticeably different during those three days without air travel.' Seems that what we do on the planet may have more effect than we may ever know."
Granted Air travel probably has some effect on he environment but do we really have an alternative?
I recall a similar debate about Supersonic passenger planes with the idea that jet engines especially supersonic jets damage the troposphere with the result that the Concorde flies on limited routes (Not that it stops the military from making hundreds of supersonic jet flights every day)
Even if we thought maybe the commuter flights could be replaced with high sped trains what about long distance flights? I recently flew from Cyprus to Toronto and God how I wished they had a faster plane. With a 10 hour stopover at Frankfurt and trips to and from the airport I was travelling for over 30 hrs! (In coach !!!)
Faced with that most people dont give a damn if the aircrafts damage the atmosphere as long as they get them there FAST!
Coming back to the trains option though it works very well in Europe and Japan ; I dont know how well it would work in the States where people are used to doing things there own way and not handing over control. I say this because with trains it really is not economical to have competition- trains are feasible if u have only one set of tracks in a route and everyone uses it. In order to avoid a monopoly it would have to be run by the Fed Govt. and I dont know how many people will like that.
Just a few thoughts....
**Life is too short to be serious**
Scientists have been pretty busy with studying the effect vulcano-eruptions have on the climate. Couldn't it be possible all the dust and smoke of the WTC, Pentagon and crashed plane have a similar effect to a lesser extent?
You do not exist. Go away.
Correlation != Causality
Just because two events occur at the same time doesn't mean one is the cause of the other.
OTOH, I imagine that the air traffic, in, say, the US varies quite a bit from day-to-day. For example, the day before Tgiving is berzerk, and there's probably some days where noone travels. Anyway, one way to get more data on this theory would be to correlate, over a long time, the cloud (or whatever) variables with the number of planes in the air. Do this every day for about a year, and see what you get.
One thing to note is that although these three days are not much data, it's actually very strong, in the sense that nothing flew those days. So it's the strongest data you could get over any three-day period. I'm sure we'll see more stuff coming out soon.
Come on, give it up, that's