With the ebb of extreme weather like El Nino, intensely hot summers and increasingly frigid winters, it’s no surprise that climate change is making everyone’s struggle against the elements an expensive one. But scientists say wind patterns altered by climate change is causing longer flight times, extra fuel consumption, and consequently an greater rate of CO2 emissions.
HOW THIS HAPPENED
When jets burn fuel, they release carbon dioxide, causing the atmosphere to warm enough to generate stronger headwinds. Of course, this means tail winds also increase, but the net effect, related to round trips are increasing. Naturally, fuel is also increasing in price.
This was confirmed by a team of US scientists, who say the cumulative effect of longer flight times reputed to be caused by climate variation must have added millions of dollars to airline company’s expenses, and possibly one billion gallons of extra fuel.
The associate scientist in geology and geo physics at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the US, named Kristopher Karnauskas, said that they had analyzed flight times and daily wind speeds at cruising altitudes for four different airlines on three separate routes for the past 20 years.
The chosen flight paths exist between Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. Kristopher Karnauskas and his team found that eastbound flights were generally faster than westbound flights for all operating airlines, the latter of which had an added cost of about one minute per round trip.
small additional costs add up
Specifically, this means that eastbound flights may be 10 minutes shorter, westbound ones 11 longer. But couldn’t all of this be better explained by naturally occurring cycles created by ocean temperatures?
El Niño, for example, is an atmospheric pocket of heat that appears periodically in the pacific. It is known to bring fires and droughts to the Indonesian rainforests, it floods California, and it upsets fisheries near Peru.
Throughout the twenty years of this study, though, the four airlines under consideration made 250,000 flights using the three routes mentioned above. Each flight’s tiny additional cost was added to reveal an aggregate loss that was quite substantial.
Rise in wind speeds leads to much longer round trips
Accounting for a predicted rise in wind speed, the team of scientists predict that we could have an additional 5.5 hours per round trip, per carrier on each similar route. For our wallets, this is equivalent to an extra 480,000 gallons of jet fuel used, and 4.6 kg of CO2 emitted, every year. This is certainly a significant amount that can contribute to climate change.
Dr. Karnauskas elucidates: “The wind really fluctuates by about 40 mph, so multiply those couple of minutes by each flight per day, by each carrier, by each route, and that residual adds up quickly…[w]e’re talking millions of dollars in fuel costs.”
