Aviation

Assembled from 16 blocks · 3 evidence · 11 related

1. Story
2. Around two to three per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and a considerably larger share of the warming effect, because aviation does something no other sector does: it injects water vapour, nitrogen oxides and particles into the upper troposphere, where the resulting contrail cirrus traps outgoing radiation. Lee and colleagues estimated in 2021 that aviation's total effective radiative forcing was of order three and a half per cent of the anthropogenic total for the period they assessed, with the non-carbon-dioxide contributions — contrail cirrus foremost — larger than the carbon dioxide contribution itself and far more uncertain. That asymmetry is peculiar to aviation and it cuts both ways: it makes the sector worse than its carbon accounting suggests, and it opens an avoidance route that no other sector has, since contrails form in thin ice-supersaturated layers that a small number of flights could in principle be routed around. The reason the sector is hard is separately physical, and is treated under energy density. Aviation is also the sector where demand growth has most consistently outrun efficiency gains: airframe and engine fuel burn per passenger-kilometre has improved steadily for decades and total fuel use has risen anyway. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Aviation
5. Gravimetric energy density as a transport constraint
6. Connections
7. The electrified share of final energy
8. Gravimetric energy density as a transport constraint
9. Sustainable aviation fuel
10. The European Union sustainable aviation fuel blending obligation begins
11. Lithium-ion battery storage
12. Aviation
13. Evidence
14. Supports the finding that aviation's total effective radiative forcing substantially exceeds its carbon dioxide forcing alone, with contrail cirrus the largest single non-carbon-dioxide term and also the most uncertain. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the forcing share is therefore stated as a magnitude of order three and a half per cent of the anthropogenic total, without the confidence interval, which is the most important number in the paper and must be supplied by a curator.
15. Supports the sectoral emission structure used throughout this pack, the treatment of industry process emissions as distinct from energy emissions, the assessment of technology cost declines in solar, wind and storage, and the identification of aviation, shipping and heavy industry as hard-to-abate. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; no chapter, table or page number is cited because none could be confirmed, and every sectoral share attributed here is given as a range rather than a figure.
16. The reference source for world energy balances, final energy consumption by carrier, generation mix, technology cost trends and scenario pathways used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: no edition was retrieved in this session — iea.org was refused by the network egress proxy — so every figure attributed to this series is stated as a magnitude with the specific gap named on the citing record, and no current-year quantity should be presented to a reader without confirmation against a named edition.