Aviation and global climate change in the 21st century

By David S. Lee, D. Fahey, Piers M. Forster, Peter J. Newton, R. Wit, Ling L. Lim, Bethan Owen, R. Sausen. Atmospheric Environment, 2009

1,092 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aviation emissions contribute to the radiative forcing (RF) of climate. Of importance are emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), aerosols and their precursors (soot and sulphate), and increased cloudiness in the form of persistent linear contrails and induced-cirrus cloudiness. The recent Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) quantified aviation's RF contribution for 2005 based upon 2000 operations data. Aviation has grown strongly over the past years, despite world-changing events in the early 2000s; the average annual passenger traffic growth rate was 5.3% yr−1 between 2000 and 2007, resulting in an increase of passenger traffic of 38%. Presented here are updated values of aviation RF for 2005 based upon new operations data that show an increase in traffic of 22.5%, fuel use of 8.4% and total aviation RF of 14% (excluding induced-cirrus enhancement) over the period 2000–2005. The lack of physical process models and adequate observational data for aviation-induced cirrus effects limit confidence in quantifying their RF contribution. Total aviation RF (excluding induced cirrus) in 2005 was ∼55 mW m−2 (23–87 mW m−2, 90% likelihood range), which was 3.5% (range 1.3–10%, 90% likelihood range) of total anthropogenic forcing. Including estimates for aviation-induced cirrus RF increases the total aviation RF in 2005–78 mW m−2 (38–139 mW m−2, 90% likelihood range), which represents 4.9% of total anthropogenic forcing (2–14%, 90% likelihood range). Future scenarios of aviation emissions for 2050 that are consistent with IPCC SRES A1 and B2 scenario assumptions have been presented that show an increase of fuel usage by factors of 2.7–3.9 over 2000. Simplified calculations of total aviation RF in 2050 indicate increases by factors of 3.0–4.0 over the 2000 value, representing 4–4.7% of total RF (excluding induced cirrus). An examination of a range of future technological options shows that substantive reductions in aviation fuel usage are possible only with the introduction of radical technologies. Incorporation of aviation into an emissions trading system offers the potential for overall (i.e., beyond the aviation sector) CO2 emissions reductions. Proposals exist for introduction of such a system at a European level, but no agreement has been reached at a global level.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c66e95a6df905cfed8f6f8d100c6d22631ad1d0f

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Citations in the corpus

Can tourism deliver its “aspirational” greenhouse gas emission reduction targets? (2010, methodology): “…in this analysis of the tourism sector, and also by several studies focused on broader aviation emissions (e.g. Bows, Anderson, & Peeters, 2009; Lee et al., 2009; Peeters & Dubois, 2009) that found aviation is occupying a growing share of the global sustainable emission budget, a framework for…”
All adrift: aviation, shipping, and climate change policy (2015, methodology): “Throughgrossdomesticproduct (GDP) growth rates and assumptions around technology and operational change, they determine future levels of emissions (Eyring, Kohler, Lauer, & Lemper, 2005; Lee et al., 2009; Owen & Lee, 2010).”
Policy learning and policy failure in sustainable tourism governance: from first- and second-order to third-order change? (2011, background): “Even the most optimistic emission reduction scenarios presented by scientists do not expect emission reductions beyond 2% per annum by 2030 (e.g. Lee et al., 2009).”
ML-CIRRUS : The airborne experiment on natural cirrus and contrail cirrus with the high-altitude long-range research aircraft HALO (2017, methodology): “The microphysical properties of the probed, aged contrail cirrus still differ from natural cirrus, confirming that a signature of high particle number densities remains throughout the contrail cirrus life cycle, as suggested by model studies (Lewellen 2014; Schumann et al. 2015).”
A report on the Paris Climate Change Agreement and its implications for tourism: why we will always have Paris (2016, background): “The technological and social challenges of achieving deep emission reductions from air travel have been discussed at length elsewhere (Lee et al., 2009; Peeters, 2013; Scott, G€ ossling et al., 2016; Scott, Hall et al., 2016; Sustainable Aviation, 2008).”
Critical Issues in Air Transport and Tourism (2013, background): “In this scenario, airlines would be incentivised to reduce compliance costs through available technologies (of which ‘radical’ types may be necessary, as noted by Lee et al. 2009) and through operational efficiencies (Sgouridis et al. 2011).”
Aerosol–climate interactions in the Norwegian Earth System Model – NorESM1-M (2012, methodology): “…primary OM (POM) and BC from fossil-fuel and biofuel combustion and biomass burning, taken from the IPCC AR5 data sets (Lamarque et al., 2010; Smith et al., 2011; Van der Werf et al., 2006; Schultz et al., 2008; Mieville et al., 2010; Buhaug et al., 2009; Eyring et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2009).”
Radiative Forcing and Climate Change (2015, methodology): “The mid-range estimate for this RF of 30 mW m -2 (see Figure 1) has been revised upwards to 40 mW m -2 for 2011, in IPCC’s recent assessment (Boucher et al., 2013) making it the largest single aviation-40 induced RF.”