Climate Change Out of the Blue (Tin Foil Hat alert)

[NashVegas]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63365,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

Those wispy streams of vapor that follow jetliners across the sky may not be as innocuous as they appear.

A new NASA study claims man-made cirrus clouds formed by commercial jet engine exhaust may be responsible for the increased surface temperatures detected in the United States between 1975 and 1994.

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Humidity in the air determines how long contrails remain in the atmosphere. Persistent trails sometimes form large patches of fibrous clouds indistinguishable from natural cirrus, cirrocumulus or cirrostratus clouds, according to Malcolm Walker, of England's Royal Meteorological Society.

Contrails that persist for an extended period of time are most likely to affect the climate. Minnis has estimated that a contrail that begins as a thin gossamer line across the sky can spread to cover more than 20,000 square kilometers in just a few hours.

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