Skip to main content

Hate air travel? Then you should really hate climate change

If you deplane from a transoceanic flight thinking that you couldn’t possibly handle another minute aboard the aircraft, we’ve got bad news for you. Thanks to climate change, air travel is taking longer, getting more expensive, and polluting more, contributing to a vicious cycle that will likely magnify all these negative effects as time goes on. According to scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Wisconsin Madison, shifts in the jet stream — a name given to the high-altitude winds that blow from west to east — are making planning efficient flight routes more and more difficult as things in the air get more unpredictable.

In their study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers examined the flight times of four major airlines on routes that took them between Honolulu and Los Angeles, Seattle-Tacoma, and San Francisco from 1995 to 2013. Ultimately, they concluded that fluctuations caused by two ocean-atmosphere phenomena, the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation, were responsible for nearly 90 percent of travel time variance. In total, 133 additional hours were added per year, averaging out to about a minute per flight.

Recommended Videos

While this may not seem like much, the major takeaway from the research is that the aviation industry is impacting weather patterns, which may lead to further and more dangerous implications as time goes on. Kristopher Karnauskas, the study’s author and a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, told Time magazine of these effects, “…you have the potential for pretty huge changes in fuel expense across the world. I’m not saying that climate change is going to cause the global flights to be longer, they might even be shorter. But if you change the amount of time that planes are in the air and how much fuel is burned on annual basis by the aviation industry, that’s a feedback.”

Wind speeds fluctuated by around 40 miles per hour, and so while Karnauskas and his team only looked at a few routes taken by a few airlines, he noted, “… multiply those couple of minutes by each flight per day, by each carrier, by each route, and that residual adds up quickly. We’re talking millions of dollars in changes in fuel costs.”

Of course, more research is still needed to fully understand the implications of these findings, but suffice it to say that the effects of global warming are becoming ever more far reaching, and ever more concerning.
Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Google Gemini’s best AI tricks finally land on Microsoft Copilot
Copilot app for Mac

Microsoft’s Copilot had a rather splashy AI upgrade fest at the company’s recent event. Microsoft made a total of nine product announcements, which include the agentic trick called Actions, Memory, Vision, Pages, Shopping, and Copilot Search. 

A healthy few have already appeared on rival AI products such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside much smaller players like Perplexity and browser-maker Opera. However, two products that have found some vocal fan-following with Gemini and ChatGPT have finally landed on the Copilot platform. 

Read more
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more