Want to salve your conscience and offset your holiday carbon emissions? You might want to rethink that trip to the tropics. A typical flight there has a greater impact on global warming than a flight in temperate latitudes.
As well as producing carbon dioxide and contrails, planes also produce nitrogen oxide, which triggers both the creation of the warming gas ozone, and the destruction of another greenhouse gas, methane (Journal of Geophysical Research, ).
In mid-latitudes, these ozone and methane reactions cancel each other out and you get zero net warming from nitrogen oxide emissions, says Keith Shine…
