For all the worries over global warming, there's one quick, though impractical, way to turn down the heat: ground all the jets. That's one conclusion to be drawn from a new NASA study linking the world's rising temperatures to the proliferation of wispy cirrus clouds that can form as a result of trails of condensation left by airliners. A team headed by Patrick Minnis, a senior scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., analyzed 25 years of cirrus-cloud counts and 20 years of temperature records and found that cloud cover increased most where jet traffic was heaviest, including flight...
Why High-Flying Planes Make Us Less Cool
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