A fresh draft of a UN climate deal released Wednesday offers wide-ranging options to raise funding for poorer countries, signalling that tough negotiations remain at the COP29 talks in Baku.
AmiMoJo writes: The climate-damaging vapors left behind by jet planes could be easily tackled, aviation experts say, with a new study suggesting they could be eliminated for a few pounds per flight. Jet condensation trails, or contrails, have spawned wild conspiracy theories alleging mind control and the spreading of disease, but scientists say the real problem is their warming effect.
"They create an artificial layer of clouds, which traps the heat from the Earth that's trying to escape to outer space," said Carlos Lopez de la Osa, from the Transport & Environment campaign group, which has carried out a new study on the solutions to contrails. "The scale of the warming that's associated with them is roughly having a similar impact to that of aviation carbon emissions."
Tweaking the flight paths of a handful of aircraft could reduce contrail warming by more than half by 2040, at a cost of less than $5.1 per flight. Geography and a flight's latitude have a strong influence on whether a contrail is warming. Time of day also influences the climate effects of contrails. Those formed by evening and night flights have the largest warming contribution. Seasonality is also important -- the most warming contrails tend to occur in winter. "Planes are already flying around thunderstorms and turbulence areas," Mr Lopez de la Osa said. "We will need to add one more constraint to flight planning, which is avoiding areas of contrail formation."
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A CIA official has been charged in connection with a leak of classified US intelligence documents about Israel's plans for a retaliatory strike on Iran, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Donald Trump, who has recently been elected for a second term as President of the United States, has told House Republicans that he might consider a constitution-breaking third term in office.
Street vendors at a vegetable market in Delhi's Najafgarh will have to display their names on carts in a move the local councillor and the market association claimed was aimed at preventing "illegal" Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants from selling pro
US President-elect Donald Trump thanked President Joe Biden for pledging a smooth transfer of power as the victorious Republican made a historic return visit to the White House on Wednesday.
Mark Rainey: Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn't been used in over forty years!
I've had some tricky debugging issues in the past, including finding compiler bugs and debugging code with no debugger that had been burnt into prom packs for terminals, however I have huge admiration for the engineers maintaining the operation of Voyager 1.
Recently they sent a command to the craft that caused it to shut off its main radio transmitter, seemingly in an effort to preserve power and protect from faults. This prompted it to switch over to the backup radio transmitter, that is lower power. Now they have regained communication they are trying to determine the cause on hardware that is nearly 50 years old. Any communication takes days. When you think you have a difficult issue to debug, spare a thought for this team.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Donald Trump has tasked Elon Musk with setting up a panel to streamline the US government. Although the president-elect has said little about how this group would operate, Musk has previously set an ambitious goal of cutting $2 trillion of spending.
Bonhomie was on display at an event in Darbhanga on Wednesday when Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar bent down to touch the feet of Narendra Modi, only to be stopped by the Prime Minister, who shook his hands instead.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Officials inside the Secret Service clashed over whether they needed a warrant to use location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones, with some arguing that citizens have agreed to be tracked with such data by accepting app terms of service, despite those apps often not saying their data may end up with the authorities, according to hundreds of pages of internal Secret Service emails obtained by 404 Media.
The emails provide deeper insight into the agency's use of Locate X, a powerful surveillance capability that allows law enforcement officials to follow a phone, and person's, precise movements over time at the click of a mouse. In 2023, a government oversight body found that the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement all used their access to such location data illegally. The Secret Service told 404 Media in an email last week it is no longer using the tool. "If USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is using Locate X, that is most concerning to us," one of the internal emails said. 404 Media obtained them and other documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Secret Service.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
