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Empty Skies Proved that Airports Cause Pollution, say Researchers
Scientists have used the no-flying period caused by the ash cloud to show for the first time that airports are themselves significant causes of pollution. Although long suspected, the fact that mass take-offs and landings are large pollution sources could never be proved before, because aircraft pollution could not be measured as separate from the pollution caused by vehicles operating near by.
An analysis of the first three days of the unprecedented closure of UK airspace, at Heathrow and Gatwick, shows that there is a definite air pollution caused by air traffic in the vicinity of airport hubs. (Photo: Reuters) But an analysis of the first three days of the unprecedented closure of UK airspace, at Heathrow and Gatwick, shows that there is a definite air pollution caused by air traffic in the vicinity of airport hubs.
Pollution near both airports dropped significantly during the first three days of the shutdown. During last Thursday, Friday and Saturday, levels of two major pollutants, NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) and NOx (the generic term for oxides of nitrogen, taken together) fell virtually to zero.
Such nitrogen pollutants can exacerbate breathing difficulties in older people and those suffering from cardiac conditions, and can react with sunlight to form an even more damaging pollutant, ozone, which causes the sort of "urban smogs" seen in Los Angeles. NOx and NO2 are particularly associated with jet aircraft, as they are produced by the high-temperature mix of aviation with fuel.
The new analysis has been produced by Ben Barratt and Gary Fuller of the Environmental Research Group at King's College, London. The group said yesterday: "This period of unprecedented closure during unexceptional weather conditions has allowed us to demonstrate that the airports have a clear measurable effect on NO2 concentrations, and that this effect disappeared entirely during the period of closure, leading to a temporary but significant fall in pollutant concentrations adjacent to the airport perimeters."
"We have always been fairly confident that there was this 'airport effect' but we have never been able to show it," Dr Barratt commented. "The closure gave us the opportunity to look at it, and there is a very strong indication that it is the case."
The researchers are also going to study the pollution effects of the fall in airport motor traffic during the shutdown. Ed Dearnley, of Environmental Protection UK, which specialises in air quality campaigning, said yesterday: "This has been an excellent opportunity to find out exactly what the environmental impact of airports really is."
24 Comments so far
Show AllAnother one,
They are just now finding out how much the airlines pollute,
these are same ones sending ....never mind...my sides are
hurting this morning from all the news.
you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out for yourself...............
and as i said on another thread, a pity another volcano doesn't erupt and keep these polluting aircraft from the skies.........................
Actually, there is another one and it is threatening to erupt ~ you go, Mother Earth!
On any clear, calm day I can always see the Big Brown Snake that defines our local flight path.
I rode my bicycle around SeaTac International one day...
going along the south side, particularly, including the tunnel under the runway, the cloud of pollutants was so thick that it was difficult to breathe enough oxygen...
it was very odd...disconcerting...
for a while, I lived directly under the flight path a couple of miles south...mostly, I've lived westward, therefore, usually upwind...
the building of the third runway required the relocation of a number of dwellings and businesses...and brought noise and pollution to a new group of folks...
one day...
Boeing's lobbyists will continue to fight against high speed rail, assuring that the skies stay polluted...including noise pollution wrought by aircraft.
Maybe it is time for people to give up flying and return to riding trains and buses for land travels and return to ships for sea travels. May all of your volcanic ash clouds be Icelandic...
truly Rocket Science
Shouldn't be hard to figure, if an aircraft uses engines weighing in at about 6 tons each and these aircraft weigh in at totals of 300,000+pounds(includes the engines weight) and use 2, 3 or 4 engines each to generate the thrust to leave the ground then because of the inefficiency of these engines that does not properly burn the fuel totally and the waste from what is burned, then, yeah, it is a very nasty bit of technology which in reality means it is NOT a real technological wonder but just another way of burning, wasting and polluting the earth for the benefit of a few greedy people.
But look at the bright side, people can get to where they want to go faster which puts them in with the 'jet set' and with the new carbon sink of 7,000,000,000 people, increasing by the minute or second, sucking all those engine residue into their lungs, that in itself would have a pretty good effect in 'cleaning' the air, may not be healthy but what heck, we're all gonna die anyway.
Didn't they already notice and prove this during the empty skies after 9/11/2001? I remember reading something about this 8-9 years ago.
shanaza, they determined that the earth's temperature dropped something like 2 - 4 degrees when all that air traffic was grounded after the 9/11 fiasco. but that fact was NOT mentioned much because of course the airlines are more important than people... but golly gee whiz there is NO global warming being caused by human activity, is there?
Contrails increase the earth's albedo, cooling the planet, especially during the daytime. This cooling effect would be absent without the presence of contrails.
Grounding of commercial aircraft from September 11-14, 2001, led to a noticeable *increase* in temperature range anomalies, as measured by daily temperature range, not a drop.
Please show some data to support your claim(s).
Given simple math and comparison of surface areas, any cooling effect from contrails would be have to be fairly negligible in the overall, not likely significant. BUT, you would have to consider that heat reflected, if indeed significant, would also decrease evaporation of surface water, slow down cloud formation and decrease cloud dissipation.
Further, if this effect were significant as you have implied, then 1) global warming is worse than we think because sooo much heat is being reflected, and two, we could cool the planet easily by constructing reflector arrays.
Average temperatures across the North American continent fell 1 degree in the aftermath of 9/11.
Now the article's author states that air pollution couldn't be measured as separate from ground sources. This is simply not true. The temperatures went up.
Now a one degree increase might not sound like much. Hellfire and brimstone may not issue forth due to a one degree rise. No need to panic.
The point with air pollution from airports and air traffic is that it thereby RESTRAINS the otherwise MORE RAPID temperature rises associated with an absence of aircraft-caused pollution. In other words, by gumming up the skies, we're a little bit cooler. We are however messing with the climate, even if an artificial decrease in temperatures helps.
Some geo- and mega-engineering projects discussed in the Nation magazine talked of spewing huge amount of greenhouse gasses, to cloud and cool the planet. The construction of coal power plants in China is offered as one potential way out of global warming. (I liken these kinds of schemes to the altered atmosphere in the Harrison Ford movie Bladerunner.)
A thin layer of air pollution might mean less heat, which is good, right? Well actually the heavier NOx and NO2, like coal plant emissions, actually increases water molecule condensation--the same process as creating water vapor clouds. Condensing more, the heavier water/pollution molecules lead more often to rain, which has been known to disrupt monsoonal patterns, delivering rain to unforeseen places as result of artificial tinkering with atmospheric conditions.
Is more pollution really a long-term solution? No, as it contributes to heating. The thicker the clouds, the less heat will escape, meaning the contrails (and their dark twin, chemtrails) can actually increase heating over the longer-term. Volcanic clouds do also reduce temperatures, and could reduce the need for an immediate solution to warming, which would be less obvious due to rising level of pollution (except of course as offset by the drop in air traffic.) Then there are all the health and safety issues caused by nitrous particles and heavy metals, plus CO2, especially from coal-burning.
Compared to toying with air pollution to limit global warming, volcanoes get my vote. Volcanic activity is the suspected cause of many sharp variations in seasonal temperature through recorded history-- with volcanic ash and gas clouds dropping averages, sometimes radically, in mere days. Coupled with variations in solar output and the orbital relation of earth to sun, any season can be a historic surprise.
A RAY OF SUNSHINE
For the optimists among us, who believe in civilization as rational and progressive evolution, it is more likely pollution factors will be studied when there is general support behind pollution control (aka public policy).
Public policy evolution almost always conditions and prepares all other discourse. And it so happens public policy is also the single most responsive point to popular, grassroots protest and agitation for reform. Since that first Earth Day, we seem to have come full circle.
The recent Icelandic eruptions found atmospheric scientists ready and waiting to monitor the once-in-a-decade(?) phenomenon of widespread volcanic ash over Europe. Precisely because of that general agreement on global warming, scientific policies, personnel and facilities were already in place to gather data, and scientists now pursue definitive studies on aircraft pollution.
Had Iceland belched a similar cloud even 50 years ago, it would have been dismissed as a nuisance, endured, ignored and finally forgotten-- no lessons learned on any account.
Would someone please explain the difference between con trails and chem trails?
The Question Is On The Tablet: "Would someone please explain the difference between con trails and chem trails?"
I always love these seemingly simple requests.
Con trails would be the same as condensation trails and have been an artifact of jet travel since the early days of the industry. I remember as a child growing up in the American Midwest in the 1950s and 1960s that we'd stare up at the sky in summer and marvel at the "signatures of progress" across the sky. In my part of the world, we'd see an occasional con trail and we'd note that generally speaking these contrails lasted for as long as a minute, possibly, behind the emitting jet airplane. This is the baseline understanding that many of us approaching seventh decade on the planet will have. The important point is that the contrails, which we knew back the 1950s to be freezing water vapor and a product of combustion almost invariably dissipated before a plane had transected about 20 degrees of the arc of our vision. In other words, the contrails seemingly always became invisible about 50 to 100 miles behind the plane and the sky returned to its normal blue condition.
Fast forward to the 2000s and many people are witnessing an entirely different sort of phenomenon where exhaust gas trails from jet airplanes traveling at their normal flight levels of 20,000 to 36,000 feet above terrain are leaving trails that are evident for tens of minutes and stretching entirely across the sky from horizon to horizon (120 to 170 degrees of arc), often with multiple parallel lines and often above metropolitan areas in crisscrossing patterning leaving the entire sky clouded with "something".
Those who are more perceptive than others notice that what we've got today is a shifting baseline scenario where what was totally unheard of, unseen and anomalous in the skies in the 1950s and 1960s is now the new norm. And what that new norm or new level of pollution is up above our heads is never significantly discussed by our government or our corporatized media.
Leading to the conspiracist cult that deals with "chem trails". Generally I've found people who discuss chem trails to have several similar characteristics. They are first of all curious about the world they live in. Secondly, they are of an "artistic" rather than a "militaristic/national security state" mindset. I've never known a Tea Party person who loves our engagement in Afghanistan to raise a eyebrow about the poisonous rain of chemical evil dousing us from above due to the maniacal interventions and experiments of an Evil Empire's Advanced Research Projects Administration. That's only the Lefties who talk like that.
So ChemTrails come in many flavors. Multiple governments have not only experimented with but have also successfully deployed chemtrails to induce rainfall. Look up silver iodide and you'll find much on this topic. The Chinese government (God bless these godless Commies for greater transparency than the Obama Administration) have recently announced that they've been flying successful chemtrail flights in the upper basin of the Yangtze River in order to induce the skies to open up and drop rain on drought afflicted areas. Of course they deny that this has anything to do with the recent earthquake in the Yangtze headwaters region, and any sane person would agree. Though not to the extent of agreeing that messing with Mother Nature by artificially imposing our will on the atmosphere is a good idea.
So, let me conclude by saying that the contrail vs. chemtrail debate is fraught.
Old geezers like me understand the hidden perceptual dangers of sliding baselines. People born today may never know that the chartreuse and lavender skies they may marvel at in 2040 are a human created toxic soup of multi-purpose chemical alterations of our very unique and fragile biosphere.
All we can hope for is that there are more Rachel Carsons than Dr. Strangeloves in our future. On present evidence, that would be a most statistically improbable charity for our future.
Happy Earth Day+1, Everyone. If you are still capable of breathing.
Contrails are condensed water vapor and evaporate quickly. The length of a contrail stays fairly constant as the oldest part evaporates at a steady rate. Contrails are never very long and last only a short time.
Chemtrails, on the other hand, are not water vapor and do not evaporate. They grow in length as the chemicals in the chemtrail are released into the atmosphere and last a long time. Chemtrails are often seen criss-crossing the sky in patterns of parallel lines.
A few more pieces to the puzzle:
Large planes burn about 10,000 pounds of fuel (kerosene) per hour, most of it between the ground and 25,000 feet (5 miles). That has not happened in previous climate cycles.
That’s 1500 gallons/hour X # of planes in the air all day. Millions of gallons. And lots of heat.
Of course, humans make a huge effect on climate.
Consider that from a hill or tall building on a clear day, you can see 10 miles. The runways at an int’l airport are 10,000’ long (2 miles). Half the mass of the atmosphere is below 18,000'. Most weather occurs below 25,000'.
The sky is not all that big, even though it looks endless from the ground. Our margins are very thin.
What cruel irony it would be if we could only save ourselves (civilization) by giving up this plum of techno-ego-econo indulgence of flight through the air.
Dear Ray Duray ( Ray OF Ray) and Glad the inhaler ( yes, your name made me laugh!) Thank you both for the explanations. I have been seeing criss- cross white trails of "something" all over Southern Ca. The streaks seem to stay in the air forever, and then seem to form skinny peculiar clouds, which don't look anything like the pictures in a book re: what cloud shapes and colors mean!
Why do they criss-cross, and what is in them which makes them stay for so long? I was trying to figure out if they were, as Ray, suggested , a form of cloud seeding. This is hard to figure out, as this is an El Nino year, but it does seem odd that after these cross hatches appear in clear blue skies that, BIG rain storms come.
This began happening around the same time as the big fires out here too. Some of the early fire reports said that fireman were quoted as saying that the fires didn't behave normally. If something is cross hatched in the sky, would it come to the ground in a more or less cross hatched way, or would upper air winds disperse them?
It was also very unnerving to see a hilll burn completely and then catch on fire 2-3 hours later. How could trees become burning torches, go out for a few hours, and then blaze over again? I am getting very "Twilight Zone" about this. Thanks for any more help you might have. I really don't know where to look for answers.
Check this out. It is a simulation of air traffic worldwide over 24 hours. (It takes a minute to load and start moving.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XBwjQsOEeg
The US is so dense with airplanes. It should be obvious that railroads in the US would cut way down on pollution. Why is air travel cheaper than train travel along the eastern corridor between Boston and DC? Policy decisions, obviously, not physics. And when you factor in the airport hassles, it is probably quicker to take the train for shorter trips.
We do not have enough routes. They remain essentially the same as they were 100 years ago. Because of the automobile and oil industries, we have neglected upgrading the quality and quantity of rail routes. There is no way to get from NY to Nashville, for example, without going through Chicago. There is no way to get from SF to coastal N. California by train. Etc. Etc. Our rail system is very sketchy. Our high speed routes are almost non-existent, tentative and experimental.
And to top it off, most subway cars in NY are purchased from France or Canada. We should be retooling Detroit to make trains. Detroit was retooled in the blink of an eye when we needed tanks etc. for WW II. Are we completely unable at this point to do anything but shuffle cash?
Joe
Planes and nascar rock, trains are dull unless it is involved in a wreck.
The ash cloud did have a silver lining after all, eh?