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Study: Jet Exhaust Affects Weather
An anonymous submitter writes: "Warp 10 speeds may affect... Ooops, wrong story.. Apparently, jets are affecting the weather and contributing to about a 3 degree daily temperature variation. Even a single degree variation in overall temperature (climate) is significant, but I'm not certain how significant is 3 degrees in local temperatures." We mentioned this before - there was a Wired story - but now their work has been published in Nature and the AP has picked up the story.
All the concrete in the airports have been doing this for years. Ever hear of urban heat islands?
"Even a single degree variation in overall temperature (climate) is significant, but I'm not certain how significant is 3 degrees in local temperatures."
I read once (can't find it now) about how many more gallons of water are used depending on temperature. It was amazing how the amount used went up per degree increase.
As the Road to Tycho is for intellectual property reform advocates, so should this be for those interested in the environment.
Commondreams.org has written a fictional address; conservatives and non-believers will call it propaganda, but then, as the weather patterns continue to change and the news stories about environmental catastrophes keep coming, they may have some trouble making the charge stick...
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ok i probably can't spell Dendracronology but
There have been studies of tree rings (Dendracronology) thousands of years old, the width of the tree ring tells you about the climate at the time it was growing.
So we have measured global tempretures back a few thousand years at least.
Then there's the ICE cores that can also tell you about global climate, they too go back thousands of years.
So you can say that in the past 50-100 years the climate has changed a stastically signifacant amount when compaired to the past 3-4 thousand years
failing that....
Rock strata can tell you somthing about climate going back 10's or hundreds of thousands of years.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Nevermind that you can make it damn near fool-proof and crash resistant (like nuclear warheads that'll withstand impacts the rest of the airframe won't), environmentalist propaganda would paint pictures of meltdowns in the sky and the scattering of nuclear material everywhere.
Oh please. Even if the reactor is made 100% safe so that a skyscraper impact spreads no radiation, how do you prevent the plane from being hijacked and flown to an "axis of evil" nation that wants to get its hands on the plutonium? A nuclear plane could fly around the world many times without refueling, so this is an issue even for domestic flights. A nuclear-powered commuter flight from Boston to New York would easily be in range of North Korea. How are you going to guarantee that this won't be a problem? With computer-enforcement of no-fly zones? Or by arming pilots?
The tight export controls on a nuclear plane would be just one of the many headaches that an aerospace manufacturer would face, and while those caused by "tree-hugger" sensibilities are among them, there are many others. Ideology aside, safety and nonproliferation are serious problems that need to be addressed in any project of this nature. Nuclear planes are not cost-effective to manufacture. And unlike nuclear submarines, they do not solve any compelling problem that is left unaddressed by their conventional counterpart. Even the military, which comissioned the manufacture of nuclear submarines during the Cold War and was not as affected by "environmental propaganda", never did the same for the nuclear airplane.
The US was at a stand still thoes three days. Auto trafic was much lower as was industrial output (as well as industrial pollution) was down for those three days.
Maybe they didn't measures what they thought they were.