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  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    by talon8635
  • Or we could fly less.
    by aaron_m04
  • This exactly.
    by blondie9x
  • 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%?

    by brookst
  • 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?

    by blondie9x
  • 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.

    by brookst
  • That’s not deep insight stuff. I promise you these people are more keenly aware of what constitutes an undesirable solution than that.
    by dd8601fn
  • 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?
    by citrin_ru
  • 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.
    by notarget137
  • 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)

    by Cribbin