🔥 Which metaphor helps people envision contrails? ✈️ ☁️
Plus, our new video series about airline contrail excuses is almost here 🎦
To raise awareness, we recently asked the contrails community on LinkedIn:
“What’s the best metaphor to describe contrails—the artificial clouds that heat the planet?”
Here’s how you voted:
🔥 Heat traps (54%)
Contrails act like invisible blankets, trapping warmth and accelerating climate change. If we look up and think of each contrail as a heat trap that stops the planet from cooling down, that could be effective.
😨 Scars in the sky (25%)
Contrails leave behind trails like scars: unwanted, human-inflicted wounds on an otherwise natural sky. It is something we want to eliminate or conceal. Scars don’t belong in the sky. On a clear blue day, contrails mar the beauty of the sky, and these scars can serve as a reminder of their climate impact.
🛫 Plane exhaust (17%)
Just like the exhaust from gas-powered cars on a cold day, contrails are the visible "exhaust" of planes. Aircraft leave behind both invisible CO2 and visible contrails, which contribute to warming in a way we should no longer ignore.
👻 Ghost clouds (4%)
Contrails haunt the sky. They are not like natural clouds but can change shape, spread out, and turn into climate-warming clouds. We can’t see them at night, but that is when their heating effect is at its highest. After a while, they vanish like ghosts and leave behind a hotter planet. It's pretty scary.
Thanks for all your votes! Does “heat traps” make sense as a metaphor for contrails, or can we come up with something even better?
🎥 Video series coming soon: 10 excuses airlines use to justify why they don’t take action on contrails.
In the coming days, we will be launching a 10-part video series featuring aviation sustainability expert Dr. Paul Hodgson. Together, we will examine some of the most common reasons airlines cite for avoiding action on contrail warming — and why these excuses don’t always hold water.
Each video will be short (2–3 minutes), direct, and designed for sharing. We’ll tackle excuses like:
“It’s too early - the science is uncertain,”
“Contrails prediction models are wrong half the time,” and
“Adding more fuel and CO2 is unacceptable.”
Expect myth-busting, clarity, and some punchy metaphors. Here’s a taster:
Make sure you follow Blue Lines on LinkedIn to get the video in your feed.
Go to Blue Lines’ educational website to explore contrails in depth.
(As regular readers of the Blue Lines newsletter know, contrails are the thin white streaks that airplanes sometimes leave behind in the sky, created from water vapor and engine soot. Some of these condensation trails can spread out and form high-altitude ice clouds (cirrus), which reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space while also trapping outgoing energy in the atmosphere, leading to a net warming of our planet equivalent to 1-2% of human-induced global warming. However, studies and trials indicate that it is relatively simple to avoid most warming contrails by flying around areas in the atmosphere that are prone to contrails. This climate solution—often referred to as contrail management or contrail avoidance—is what Blue Lines advocates for and hopes to see implemented globally.)
See you soon.
Joachim Majholm,
Blue Lines